A Little More Bangkok

I started my Southeast Asia experience in Bangkok and originally planned on being there for a full week. After three days, though, I was exhausted and anxious to move on. I had a much better experience this time.

The area in the capital near Khao San road is packed with tourists and therefore packed with people aggressively selling overpriced stuff to tourists. It's unpleasant to walk down the street there and there's essentially no public transit. This time I followed the BTS Sky Train and stayed near a different station each night. I got a completely different sense of how locals actually live in the city.

My friend Daranee said she lived near the Udomsuk station, but when I went to meet up with her I realized she's actually an hour's walk away from the station. I couldn't imagine how that was convenient until I rode with her on one of the buses that connect the rest of town to the train stations. These buses are privately operated and run along each major street perpendicular to the train route. They're built a lot like a tuktuk: it's a small pickup truck with some seats on either side of the truck bed and a metal roof with grab rails on top. They frequently fill up to absurd capacities. I never saw anyone decide the bus was full and wait for another. They just keep piling in somehow.

Once I figured out the transit system, I had fun exploring the variety of neighborhoods in the city. There are impressive business districts with large public parks that are much cleaner than the tourist areas. There are also a number of interesting ethnic enclaves. I already knew about Chinatown, but there's also Korea Town and Soi Arab. Since I relied on tuktuks on my last trip, I didn't get to see anything I didn't already know about. Tuktuks are destination oriented. They're bewildered by the idea of exploring.

Tuktuk drivers and taxi drivers here are also bewildered by maps. Southeast Asia isn't going to win any awards for taxi driver talent, but the drivers in Bangkok are particularly incompetent. I'll show them a location on a map and they'll repeatedly zoom in microscopically close then zoom out to see the curvature of the earth, and glean nothing from the exercise. Even if you give them a nearby major landmark, they're absolutely stumped about whether your destination is around the corner or in another galaxy. Most of the time you need to turn on the step-by-step navigation and surrender your phone. Even with navigation, they'll make confused laps around wherever you want to go until it's too frustrating to allow them to continue. I haven't had a single Bangkok taxi bring me to my intended destination.

Mueang Boran (The Ancient City)

It was a national holiday and Daranee had a whole day off (there's no such thing as a weekend in this part of the world) so we took the train to The Ancient City, a theme park and museum in the shape of Thailand with replicas of the country's most famous monuments.

There was a peaceful botanical garden with beautiful parasites on the trees.

There was a pagoda on a lake that perfectly matched the color of my shirt and shorts (although the picture didn't come out).

We toured the Pavilion of The Enlightened. (Apparently they let anyone in.)

We walked through the Sala of 80 Yogi. (But I only took pictures of the comically lewd poses.)

And Daranee went for a swim at the floating market.

But the attraction that led me down a deep rabbit hole was the Museum of Ghosts. To me it just looked like a haunted house, but there are signs in Thai that explain each exhibit and the ghost stories they represent. Daranee ran away from one tall and skinny monster with a protruding belly and explained that it's the "hungry ghost" that you turn into if you scold your parents. When I shrugged, she laughed and asked "You don't believe?" I came to understand that the fear involved wasn't just the primal fight or flight response that I get in a haunted house; these were representations of ghost stories intertwined with religion. This exhibit was less like "The Ring", where the creative telling of the story creates the fear, and more like "The Exorcist," where the audience's deepest religious fears are weaponized against them. Perfectly sane people were so terrorized by The Exorcist that some needed therapy to unpack the feelings it triggered, yet when I rented it and watched it as a kid, I mostly laughed. I'm a total wimp when it comes to horror, yet Satan was such an improbable villain to me that I found the whole premise corny. It's all about the context of early programming.

The hungry ghost, "pret," is worth unpacking. Pret has a few unique details in Thai folklore, but there are other pretas all over Southeast Asia and across the Indian subcontinent. Pretas are even acknowledged in the Vedas, which gives a sense of how old this story is. Children in these cultures are taught that if you live a life of unchecked greed, you'll reincarnate as a ghost with an insatiable appetite for something degrading, such as feces or rotting flesh. Pretas are commonly characterized with thin necks and enormous bellies, symbolizing the eternal and insatiable hunger they feel. Sometimes I can relate to the pretas.

The more I interact with people in Southeast Asia, the more I feel warmed by the possibility of people living in an honest and unselfish way. The night before I left Bangkok I was preparing myself for the next morning and realized I had received too much change from the 7-11 clerk earlier that evening. I thought about the number of times street vendors had chased me down when I forgot to take my change and I realized I should go back to return the money. I caused a bit of confusion when I said I "owed" them 20 baht (they seemed to think I was repaying a loan and didn't know how to process that kind of transaction) but once they understood what I was trying to do, they accepted the money with quiet dignity. I'd expect US cashiers to either be annoyed or moved to tears, but the Thai 7-11 employees seemed to gratefully agree that I was doing what any normal person would do if they accidentally received something that didn't belong to them.

Next stop: Koh Phangan. I arrived early enough that I expect to get enrolled in the meditation retreat at Wat Khao Tham on time. This will probably be my last blog post until late December. No news is good news.