Bangkok

Strange things

Floating markets

Patpong

History lessons #1

History lessons #2

History lessons #3

History lessons #4

Tribe

One of the strange things about Bangkok is arriving by plane. We did this because we spent two weeks in France for the Christmas and New Years. It took us a few days to get over it.

Getting into a great white tube in Paris and getting off a few hours later in a place like Bangkok is a trip worthy of Timothy Leary but free of chemicals.

In the winter, it is 30°C more than Paris.

The first thing you see is the modernity of the place, with it’s highways and sky trains and forests full of shining buildings reaching for the sky. You feel kind of silly when you realise that you thought that Paris and Europe were the nucleus of technology and state of the art living. The centre of the world in other words. Well, all right, there are the New Worlds, like North America and Australia which are modern, but they’re far away. Here in Bangkok, and as we later saw in Malaysia, a whole world lives, moves, shines and promises to shine even brighter.

The great arteries, the ‘Thanons’, are full of people and blocked by traffic. They all have names like Rama 4 or Rama 9, after the different Kings of Siam (remember that great film with Yul Brenner???) and are lined with luxurious shopping centres and office packed sky scrapers in which the Thais work day and night perfecting their economic explosion.

And then the Soi run off these great streets as if they were trying to escape. These little roads are troubling. You think you can take one and find yourself a little further down on a parallel street after having turned right and then left, or is it right and then right again…? But it never works. High walls protect the houses and you can forget about sidewalks since the pedestrian only has the right to walk around if he leaves the cars alone. In the mean time, the Soi is turning at a right angle and instead of there being a first street on the right there is, damned! an alleyway going to the left. I’ll take the next, no, not the next turn off to the right, but where the hell has Rama 36 got to? And in the end you’ve just got to admit that you’re lost.

Before achieving this level of enlightenment, you realise that large gardens are growing being the walls and that traditional abandoned houses are being lost in the urban jungle. Megalomaniac palaces, wooden shacks, and apartment blocks line up in the quarters or along the river.

Many canals run through the city. Quite a few of them have been blocked up to build roads. Homes on piles with little rainbow shaped bridges all built out of wood. Bougainvilliers and tropical flowers block narrow passage ways where a man in a sarong takes a nap. Passageways and even alleyways turn in labyrinthian circles before ending up, sooner or later, by leading to a Thanon.

Everywhere you look you see little food stands stuck between walls or set up on the sidewalks. For 20 Bhats, or 80 American cents, you can have an unforgettable noodle soup. You’ve got to choose between a variety of noodles – thin ones, large ones, crackly yellow ones – which are then lowered into a cauldron with meat balls or fish, slices of roast pork, al dente vegetables, which all cook together in a chicken broth. After having sprinkled the whole business with fish sauce, sugar and chilli juice you’ve got to negotiate with chop-sticks and a spoon. Delicious.

In the evenings, markets are improvised and you can eat a thousand and one Thai dishes: marinated meat kebabs with rich red sweet sauces or orange flavoured with nuts, mussel omelettes in a sticky batter, spicy papaya salads, sautéed noodles, grilled cockroaches and larvae…the woks are rigorously stirred, the ingredients rain down, jets of fire enflame the night and smoke spreads over the entire area. Sometimes a spice or a secret blend of strange sauces creates a smoke which is so bitter that an entire street will start to sneeze, Thais and tourists caught up in the same convulsion.



Marie-Do