Bangkok, Thailand (Part 1 of 2)
People with signs, mad streets and a golden stupa under covers
The madness of Bangkok’s BKK airport should have been a warning.
N. had pre-arranged for a taxi ride to our hotel and directions mentioned that someone would be holding a sign with our name in the arrivals lounge. How hard could that be?
We raced through immigration (fingerprints and photos), picked up our bags, and went through automatic doors to the arrivals lounge, only to stare agape: seas upon seas of signs with names, none of them ours. A quick scan led to the realization that the Sign People were everywhere in the arrivals hall, hundreds upon hundreds of signs with names of all nationalities — English, German, Chinese, Korean, American, Russian. Our email had not mentioned the gate or door where our magic sign would be. N. went to the left of Exit B; I went right and — miraculously! — found our name.
We settled into our hotel room in Chinatown after rejecting the first one offered to us — N. smelled smoke in the first one. (For someone who enjoys cooking, my senses of taste and smell are basically non-existent).
And so it was that we stepped outside after 8 pm to find dinner — to temperatures in the 100 degrees plus humidity. We were too tired and it was too hot to walk far, so we crossed the street and settled into the first stall we found — oyster omelette and tom yum soup with beer and coconut water. The thought crossed my mind that cooking might not even be necessary — in this heat, ingredients on a plate could just cook themselves. We turned a corner from the food stall and found a cart selling ice cream — coconut with black sticky rice and chestnut puree. Things were tasty, new and charming…
… until we turned a corner and arrived at Yaowarat Road. Had we died and gone to tourist hell? After all, all those names on the airport signs were actual people, and they all had come to Bangkok. Apparently to Bangkok’s Chinatown.
It was a broad avenue filled with restaurants on both sides and stalls in front of the restaurants — grilled meat on skewers, seafood, bird’s nest specialties; fruit stalls, chestnut stalls, milk tea stalls; eggy pancakes covered in condensed milk and chocolate syrup. The heat, the crowds, the frenzy, the smells — all the classic elements of a city conquered by tourists and tourist-catering businesses. And we were just as guilty as everyone else we saw that night.
It was a bit upsetting to see several restaurants advertise shark’s fin soup. The novel Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson describes a scene in which fishermen catch sharks, slice off their fins, and throw them back into the water — where without their fins they die painful deaths, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
Another discovery: in Southeast Asia, money exchange offices give their highest exchange rates for $50 or $100 bills. So if you walk into a money exchange with smaller bills, they will “tax” you for failing to bring Benjamin Franklin along on your vacation.
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Our introduction to Bangkok was through a walking tour of the Talat Noi neighborhood with Luc (originally from Quebec) who has lived in Thailand for 15 years. Given his experience in this country, I have no idea why he chose to schedule his tour during the hottest part of the day — at 1 pm. A bigger mystery: why did I voluntarily sign us up for this?!?
We met him at a cafe close to the train station; the cafe owner had the perfect personality for his chosen profession: he bantered with everyone, make jokes, and even pretend-asked that I give him a kiss; I laughingly refused.
Considering that Luc had billed his Talat Noi tour as a “photography tour”, he was weirdly on-the-move about it, giving N. almost no time to snap photos. We meandered through small alleys, he pointed at this or that feature, and then we kept on walking as if we were on a tight schedule. N. just gave up listening to whatever Luc was saying, and instead lingered behind everyone, snapping away. Things that I remember Luc mentioning:
as a non-Thai citizen, he’s not allowed to mention the Thai king, but he liked to live dangerously, so he did anyway: the old king had been beloved, never set foot outside the country, served for more than seventy years. The current king had grown up in Munich, had had multiple wives, no one stood up in his honor in theaters when the national anthem played before movies. (Luc mentioned he felt less fearful of being overheard and reported to Thai authorities when he gave his tours in Spanish, since few Thais spoke the language.)
Talat Noi was the old neighborhood of ethnically Chinese, who originally settled by the river to trade with the local population
it was best to avoid tuktuks — the local train/subway system was cheap and cool and, along with the water taxis, could take one anywhere in the city
While the group continued on to the last stop on the tour, we abandoned them during a quick bathroom break in a large air-conditioned mall — why would we leave such cool surroundings so soon?
After a long break in the AC, we took a taxi to a restaurant whose specialty was pad thai — and I was disappointed; it was not any better than what we had at home. (And Dear Offspring, I thought “Sticky Rice” made it better!)
The one mildly interesting thing about the pad thai place was that it was a couple of doors down from the Crab Omelette Lady with Goggles With a Michelin star. There was no way I was going to spend six hours in this heat (or no heat) lining up to eat a dish just because it was a popular thing on the internet. Also, N. would never have agreed for such a silly thing. (She had a couple of signs by her burner: #1 “All sittings are full for the day”; #2, “No photos!”).
After the OK pad thai, we timed a golden hour visit to Wat Saket, but only upon arrival did we see that the golden stupa was covered by scaffolding — so there would be no pictures of that golden stupa. We went up all the same, but the hot and humid air that blanketed the skies with a thick layer of haze made the view seem as heavy and humid as we felt. And N.’s camera lens kept fogging up.
We had dinner at another Michelin-starred stall whose specialty was bowls of fried noodles with chicken. The noodles had been fried to a crisp into small pancakes and were topped by fried chicken — all probably fried in the same vat of oil. The whole thing was oily and dense, without any of the relief or balance provided by something spicy or sour. We realized it was past time for us to give up on the internet hype and just go with our instincts. Even the places that had stellar reviews never turned out to be as good as the raves.
Late at night, we hopped on a taxi, drove again to the Bangkok airport, and picked up our aunts who would be joining us on this trip. At least they wouldn’t have to deal with the Sign People!
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