Suddenly I feel almost normal again. Gone are the curious stares. Gone are the questions that I was almost getting used to getting. Suddenly, I can sit in a bus without anyone taking more than a superficial look at me. The streets have more or less functioning side walks, and although they are still filled to the brim with traffic, the air is a little better. I have left Sri Lanka and India behind, I am in Thailand now.
What a difference! The food. Oh, the food! I like rice and curry, but after nearly two months of it, the Thai street food is a godsend. The afternoon I arrived in the city, my Couch Surf host takes me out to eat on the street near his house. We cross the pedestrian bridge over the six lane arterial road, and walk towards the big Tesco Lotus supermarket complex. The streets are lined with food stalls. Unlike the other places I've been to, these actually all sell different things to eat. We try noodles with duck, noodle soup with some undefined dumplings and some kind of rolled noodle-fish-vegetable contraption that looks a lot like sushi. It all costs next to nothing and tastes delicious. Admittedly, because of the copious amounts of fatty pork and poultry in most dishes, it's not all very healthy. Neither is Thailand the easiest country for vegetarians, but hey, I'm an omnivore, so that's okay.
Walking around Bangkok (and driving around in all the cool types of public transport: Sky trains, motor taxi's; pick-up trucks, metro's) it strikes me that this city somehow makes me feel of being in Japan or Korea, a little bit. A lady on the super chilled sky train wearing a face mask as if she just stepped out of the operating room; kids wearing black and white school uniforms; shops selling seaweed snacks; a twenty-year-old girl, her straight black hair in a ponytail and wearing a short skirt, somehow looking very Hello-Kitty like.
But of course, this isn't Japan just yet, and we are still smack in the middle of South East Asia. It's affordable, with lots of small markets selling everything imaginable and then some more. Traffic is crazy, although the decreasing craziness trend I noticed going from India to Sri Lanka seems to hold. The more touristy parts of the city are full of tourists (no surprise there), but Bangkok is a city with many layers. Step away from the central temples, down two or three streets, and if you didn't know better, you could think you were in a much smaller provincial town somewhere, with quieter streets, local shops and people chatting with their neighbours.
The public transport boat departs from the pier next to the sky train station. A old lady is feeding bread to the fish, the water teeming with fins and tails, all of them struggling to get to the food. On land, some ticket sellers look sad that I opt, not for the tourist boat tickets, but for the normal public boat. The riversides are a diverse spectacle, with huge white hotel high rises vying for space with government buildings. Here and there a patch of small houses, precariousy balancing over the water, have somehow withstood relentless pressure, capitalism not yet succeeding in usurping this valuable land.
And temples. To your left, the towering spires of the Temple of Dawn. To your right, countless more Buddhist temple roofs in the vast Phra Kaeo complex and the neighbouring compound where one of the worlds biggest reclining Buddha's is having a lay down.
One of the other layers of the city is that most people come here to have a good time, and that every one does this in his own way. I went for a drink with my host and a friend of his, on Khoa San Road, Backpacker Central. We ended up with the omnipresent bucket, a Thai institution with unknown quantities of unidentified alcohol. The only thing I had to do the next day was catch the night train to the north, and luckily nighttrains don't tend to leave early in the morning.
What a difference! The food. Oh, the food! I like rice and curry, but after nearly two months of it, the Thai street food is a godsend. The afternoon I arrived in the city, my Couch Surf host takes me out to eat on the street near his house. We cross the pedestrian bridge over the six lane arterial road, and walk towards the big Tesco Lotus supermarket complex. The streets are lined with food stalls. Unlike the other places I've been to, these actually all sell different things to eat. We try noodles with duck, noodle soup with some undefined dumplings and some kind of rolled noodle-fish-vegetable contraption that looks a lot like sushi. It all costs next to nothing and tastes delicious. Admittedly, because of the copious amounts of fatty pork and poultry in most dishes, it's not all very healthy. Neither is Thailand the easiest country for vegetarians, but hey, I'm an omnivore, so that's okay.
Walking around Bangkok (and driving around in all the cool types of public transport: Sky trains, motor taxi's; pick-up trucks, metro's) it strikes me that this city somehow makes me feel of being in Japan or Korea, a little bit. A lady on the super chilled sky train wearing a face mask as if she just stepped out of the operating room; kids wearing black and white school uniforms; shops selling seaweed snacks; a twenty-year-old girl, her straight black hair in a ponytail and wearing a short skirt, somehow looking very Hello-Kitty like.
But of course, this isn't Japan just yet, and we are still smack in the middle of South East Asia. It's affordable, with lots of small markets selling everything imaginable and then some more. Traffic is crazy, although the decreasing craziness trend I noticed going from India to Sri Lanka seems to hold. The more touristy parts of the city are full of tourists (no surprise there), but Bangkok is a city with many layers. Step away from the central temples, down two or three streets, and if you didn't know better, you could think you were in a much smaller provincial town somewhere, with quieter streets, local shops and people chatting with their neighbours.
The public transport boat departs from the pier next to the sky train station. A old lady is feeding bread to the fish, the water teeming with fins and tails, all of them struggling to get to the food. On land, some ticket sellers look sad that I opt, not for the tourist boat tickets, but for the normal public boat. The riversides are a diverse spectacle, with huge white hotel high rises vying for space with government buildings. Here and there a patch of small houses, precariousy balancing over the water, have somehow withstood relentless pressure, capitalism not yet succeeding in usurping this valuable land.
And temples. To your left, the towering spires of the Temple of Dawn. To your right, countless more Buddhist temple roofs in the vast Phra Kaeo complex and the neighbouring compound where one of the worlds biggest reclining Buddha's is having a lay down.
One of the other layers of the city is that most people come here to have a good time, and that every one does this in his own way. I went for a drink with my host and a friend of his, on Khoa San Road, Backpacker Central. We ended up with the omnipresent bucket, a Thai institution with unknown quantities of unidentified alcohol. The only thing I had to do the next day was catch the night train to the north, and luckily nighttrains don't tend to leave early in the morning.
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