Ok, sit down, grab a cold drink, and put on your reading glasses since this is long. I tried to do this in Bangkok but I was timed out of my Internet connection. So here it goes in random order...
The best part was definitely the food. Some of it was like napalm in my mouth, and I loved it. Nothing like burning fish sauce to welcome you to the country. I shocked the business partners by eating these and chilies, which is something that some of the business partners could not do. By simply eating hot stuff I gained myself a ton of street cred.
The sex industry there is huge. There are whole streets devoted to it. Some of it is thought of as the creepy Western dude coming there but maybe even more is Japanese dudes. The area across from my hotel was totally devoted to "massage" places. Any place with dark windows and Japanese on the outside was a cover, not that one really needs a cover there. On top of that in any area where people are at night there are dudes offering you trips to see "pretty woman." But speaking of massages, the legit ones are amazing, $10 for an hour is unreal. Even if they get uncomfortably close to the kibbles and bits but on the upside you get to wear traditional Thai clothes and get free tea.
One sad thing I saw near a nightlife area was the two mixed white-Thai children. Their mother was obviously a prostitute as they were in tattered clothes and were very dirty. It was sad to think that their mother had to work as a hooker to support them and that the father(s) of her kids may not have even known they had a kid in Thailand.
Elephants, I saw two within 30min of arriving. They walk the roads with handlers, who often hit them with hammer type objects, apparently as motivation. They troll the nightlife areas and take money to let people feed them tiny bits of food. Of course, this is not nearly enough for them to survive so I have no idea where they get the rest of their food from.
The crazy thing is that there are so many foreigners there. I mean seriously you cannot get on a subway without seeing at least 2 other foreigners. Many foreigners do go to Thailand for the ladies, who I found are indeed quite pretty. The thing many foreigners don't realize is that they are most likely to enter relationships with gold-diggers or the desperate ones (as once a Thai woman has divorced no Thai man will marry her, leaving only the foreigners).
Thai's also love the king and its a crime to insult him. They wear yellow every Monday since the king was born on a Monday and they wear pink every Tuesday since the king wore pink when he was recently hospitalized. For that matter, each day has it's own unique color, it's just that those two are special.
The craziest to me was the amount of Middle Eastern/Arab people there. I went to the Nana district, the Arab district, and had a hookah at a Pakistani restaurant (just down from the Jamaican bar, go figure). I was at a table with some white dude who was with a Thai hooker but I said nothing to either of them. I had a whole hookah to myself for an hour and a half and I was pretty woozy when I left. I had a conversation with my waiter it went like this: "Where are you from?" "Pakistan" "Where about in Pakistan" --some place I never heard of-- "Where is that, I've never heard of it" "You know Islamabad, very close" "
Ok, I see" "Very close to Taliban" "Oh, now I know." The picture below is from my seat in the restaurant.
There are three sexes in Thailand, the third being
katoey or transsexual. They are normal and accepted parts of society. Some look pretty convincing except being tall and muscular and having man hands, others are basically dudes with long hair and makeup. They were much easier to pick out of crowds than I thought.
I was also pretty pissed that night I went to Nana. I may not be the most religious person. But I saw these two guys, or one in particular, they were these street preachers. One was just belting out about how we are sinners and need to accept Jesus, I mean this dude was just yelling this out at the top of his lungs and people were stopping to see what the hell it was. I was seriously embarrassed. He was in a Buddhist country in the Arab section of town, if I was Arab or Buddhist I would never convert after seeing him.
I felt bad not knowing the language. I kept feeling like I should speak Chinese to people. Then I was super happy when I found some Chinese dudes in an elevator to talk with and shocked them when they found that I could understand them. Even though I could not speak the language all it took was a smile and nod or the traditional
wai (
http://wikitravel.org/en/Image:RonaldMcDonald_Wai.JPG) and people were cool, for the most part everyone was nice.
My last day I lost about $15 bucks. I know I'm a sucker, but I have an excuse. I met this cool older dude who spoke English and claimed to be a teacher. He was nice and took me to China town, then paid for a cab and gave me a guided tour of the largest sitting Buddha in the world, then paid for lunch and beers and took me on a river tour of the old Bangkok along the canals. On the way back he claimed the boat ride was expensive and he needed money, I, stupidly, handed some over. Well, I got a sweet half day out of the trip but I'll never see that money like he promised, the bastard. Oh well.
After I met him I visited the Wat Pho, very touristy but still cool, and took the pictures below of the reclining Buddha and an up-close of a stupa.
I was able to get a single entry Chinese visa while there. I wanted to get a multiple entry visa or if that failed a double entry but both those were ruled out. The government put in a new
pre-Olympics regulation saying they were no longer issuing these. This shows how jittery they are getting and not wanted to let human rights activists in, or post-grad businessmen like myself. Either way I'll be in
Xiamen within a week. Then maybe back to Bangkok and onward to Laos and Cambodia in the next two months.
Overall impressions of Bangkok, Thailand. Modern but traditional. Crawling with foreigners from all walks of life and all corners of the world. I could see myself living there. The people were pretty cool. The food was awesome. The sex industry is enormous there.
I will say as hot as Taiwan is it's nice to be back. Then again there's another typhoon on the way. I'm a little sad I haven't been able to watch much of
Obama this week. Maybe that's why I'm up until 2am watching his speech.
Well I made it through the night. I was scared a few times since being on the top floor of the building I heard everything loud and clear. That meant all of the dripping noises constantly had me worried that there were leaks. There were a few tiny ones around my air conditioner but other than that it was fine. I'm still waiting for the typhoon to pass though. The picture is some of the rain about 10AM on the top of my building.
