from the first world to the end of the world and back

From memory (at) blank.org Thu May 17 10:53:28 2001
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 10:13:01 GMT
From: "Nathan J. Mehl, Road Worrier" <memory (at) blank.org>
To: memory (at) blank.org
Subject: The Worst Fruit in the World, and other Bangkok Adventures


Another day, another internet cafe, another dose of imodium...

Bangkok has been, so far, a blast.  On the whole, my impression of this
city so far is that it's like Shanghai, but with most of the truly
aggravating bits filed off.  All of the linguistically incomprehensible
adventure, little or none of the backhanded hostility!  Woohoo!

Thailand has the interesting distinction, pretty much alone of the
indochinese countries, of never having been a colony of any foreign power. 
Vietnam kept the Chinese and the French tied up, the Japanese were here
only briefly during WW2, and the Americans...uh, yeah, Vietnam again.  The
centuries before that mostly consisted of the Siamese armies kicking ass in
Burma and Cambodia, without much interference from the Chinese or the
Japanese, but plenty of trade from all comers.

So there's a refreshing lack of post-colonial baggage for the western
tourist here so far.  There's no lingering suspicion that this is somehow
All Your Fault, and unlike, say, the Shanghainese, nobody really goes out
of their way to remind you that you're an alien every 15.3 seconds. 
Farangs (foreigners) seem to be mostly regarded with benign indifference
(unless they do something obviously stupid), and I'm here to testify that
benign indifference is the bee's knees.

Anyways.  Enough editorializing.

We rolled in on tuesday afternoon, still recovering from the shock of
Cambodia, and unbelieveably happy to be in a city.  ANY city.  We were met
by our tour guide, Nancy, and driven to hotel number one, the Siam City.

Driving in Bangkok is an experience that I don't think I ever want to try
at the wheel.  The gridlock levels are actually a bit worse than
Shanghai's, and while the drivers aren't quite as suicidally reckless,
there are a lot more motorbikes and 3-wheelers, and they all seem to regard
the center lane marker as an advisory thing.  Oh yes, and it's a left-side
driving system.  Fun fun fun...

Tuesday was probably my least glorious moment as a traveller so far: tired
out from the travel and jetlag, and more than a little dyspeptic from the
airplane food, I lay down in the hotel room to take a "nap" while Miranda
went foraging for street food, and basically didn't wake up again until
wednesday.

Wednesday: back into the tour bus!  I'm beginning to have mixed feelings
about the whole "guided tour" arrangement.  On the one hand, I will never
complain (especially in SE Asia) about being whisked around in air
conditioned comfort, and it's nice to have a local guide who can
contextualize the things we're seeing.  On the other, it tends to make an
obviously very dynamic city seem kinda...canned, and it really prevents you
from putting much of a mental map of the area together.

Anyhow, our first stop was the Jim Thompson house, which is the former
residence of the American entrapreneur credited with reviving the Thai silk
industry after WW2.  (It was apparently actually on the verge of dying out
then, and nowadays forms a handy chunk of the Thai GDP.)  Thompson built
his house out of 5 traditional teakwood Thai houses that he had carted in
from the Thai countryside, each one representative of a different style of
traditional Thai architecture.  Thompson himself disappeared under
mysterious circumstances in Malaysia several decades ago, and the house has
been converted into a museum for his collection of classical Thai art,
which is extensive and impressive.

After that, I tagged along while Miranda went on hotel inspections.  The
upside of this is that I now have some very specific ideas of what I want
my bathroom to look like when I build my dream house (...in my next
lifetime.)  The downside of this is that while there are probably less
boring things to do than look at one hotel room after another for several
hours, watching paint peel is probably not among them.  Oh well, I'm sure
that's pretty much how 99.994% of the general population feels about the
things I do for a living...

Hotel duty over, we took a brief tour of a local gemstone and jewelry
factory, which included complimentary soda, seveal thousand milling Korean
and American tourists, and one of the most inadvertantly hilarious 5-minute
educational short films I've ever seen in my life.  The jewelry was all
nice enough, I suppose, but I find it hard to resist the urge to start
screaming things like "It's CARBON!  The SIXTH MOST COMMON FORM OF MATTER
IN THE UNIVERSE, YOU FOOLS!" in such places.  Call me when they make
buckyball gems...

The afternoon was "at liberty", meaning we had to haul our own asses
around, so we consulted the Lonely Planet guidebook and headed into
Chinatown to see the markets and the Wat Mangkon Kamalawat, allegedly the
most popular Buddhist temple in Bangkok.  We're not 100% sure we found the
right temple: we had the name written down in Thai to give to the taxi
driver, but had a mildly humiliating breakdown towards the end of the trip
when it turned out that we didn't have any bills small enough for him to
make change from, and ended up driving around for 15 minutes trying to find
a convenience store (7-Elevens, thank god, are relatively thick on the
ground here.), so we ended up being dropped off "near" the temple and left
to trying to find it on our own...  In any case, the temple was gorgeous,
with five or so different shrines scattered throughout a mix of indoor and
outdoor areas.

We spent a bit more of the evening picking through Chinatown, and then
returned to the hotel to have dinner with Miranda's local agency contacts,
who turned out to be a pair of extremely talkative women.  Especially Lucy,
who owns the local agency ("Destinations Plus"); by the end of the meal we
had ascertained her opinion on, to name a few subjects, schoolchildren (out
of control), the Japanese (weird), the Italians (disorganized but
entertaining), Americans (racist), Tom Cruise (probably gay), Kevin Costner
(past his prime, bald), George W. Bush (stupid, needs a makeover), and Bill
Clinton (endlessly entertaining).  Lucy basically kept up both ends of the
conversation on her own, which was a blessing since Miranda and I were both
falling-down exhausted by that point.  After the meal, she took us to see
two more hotel rooms (AAAAAAAAAAAA), and then we were released to collapse
in bed.

Side observation: in America, hotel food (excepting certain restaurants
which just happen to be attached to hotels) is basically synonomous with
"bland food", especially when it comes to buffets.  This is not necessarily
so elsewhere: the various Thai curries and salads in the hotel buffet
contained enough red peppers to make my eyes water.  Hooray!

For today's adventure, we woke up at the crack of dawn to move all of our
things to...another hotel!  We're now in the Shangri La, which is
apparently a 5-star hotel.  Our room isn't that much different (things seem
to only get out-of-control elegant in the executive suites in these
places), but we do now have a great view of the river.  After we'd moved
our stuff in, we met Nancy in the lobby and headed out for our tour of the
Thai Royal Palace.

The Royal Palace is a bit hard to describe, especially if you've never been
to Asia.  Imagine five or six of the most beautiful Buddhist temples you've
ever seen, each in a slightly different architectual style (Thai, Khmer,
Chinese, Thai-Italian...), all dropped down right next to each other. 
Okay, now just for kicks, cover one or two of them ENTIRELY in gold leaf. 
Cover a few more in ceremics, and the remainder in glass tiles.  For the
finale, insert a Buddha made of solid jade into the largest one, a 5-story
monstrosity with ceiling beams made each out of whole teak trees, and paint
the entire interior walls with the story of the Buddha's enlightenment, a
la the Sistine Chapel.  

I'm really not doing this any justice.

Basically, just about each successive Thai king has added a building to the
complex, starting from Rama I and on down to the present day, and each
building is, in its own way, a masterpiece.  I took a billion photos, of
course.

After we finished gluing our jaws back onto our faces, we took a short walk
down the street and jumped on a boat for a tour of Bangkok's remaining
canals.  Unfortunatly, the majority of the canals are now paved over, but
there are still quite a few sections of the city where all of the houses
back-end onto waterways, and it gave you a small taste of what the city
must have looked like 50 or 75 years ago...very much an Asian Venice.

Along the canal tour was a brief stop at the Temple of the Dawn, which
Nancy warned us (this, mind you, after the Royal Palace), was "the most
beautiful temple in Bangkok."  This turned out to be a pretty fair
description: the Temple of the Dawn is stunning, and I'm not sure I can
adequately describe it.  It's a main peak surrounded by four spires, one at
each corner.  But each spire is formed of a series of vertically
crenellated folds, and every available bit of surface is covered with
mosiacs formed out of Chinese ceramics, gilt and glass.  Pictures
forthcoming, of course.

That brings us up to more or less now: we spent the previous hour or two
poking through Pantip Mall, which is Bangkok's single largest aggregation
of electronics and hi-tech stores, plus more pirated VCDs, DVDs and mp3
compilations than you can shake a dead RIAA lawyer at.  Sadly, my quest for
DVDs of any of David Lynch's films has so far met with total failure, but I
did pick up s few discs in the name of 31337 d00dz everywhere.  (Injoke,
don't ask.)

While at the mall, we stopped in the local version of a food court, which
was actually quite tasty, with one terrifying exception...

Miranda came back to our seat with a number of things on her plate,
including a fruit concoction that looked kind of like pureed greenish mango
over rice.   She had a few spoonfuls and said "I think this might be
durian...it's not bad, want to try it?"

Tactical error number one: not running away immediately once the name of
durian was invoked.  

Figuring that since she'd had a few bites and was neither gagging nor
clutching her throat it was probably safe, I put a very very small bit (not
even a quarter of a teaspoon) on a spoon and put it in my mouth.  That was
tactical error number two.

You would probably expect that nothing which people refer to as a "fruit"
could smell and taste like rotting meat.  A reasonable expectation, but I
am sad to report and incorrect one.  This stuff tasted and smelled
like...well, actually it smelled EXACTLY like the meat section of the town
market in Cambodia.  Possibly even worse, since at least in the market I
could (and did) hold my breath, whereas here the offending odor was IN MY
MOUTH.  I'm sure you're thinking "it can't possibly be that bad." 
Actually, it was worse.

Wanting to get rid of this stuff as quickly as possible, I made my third,
final, and worst tactical error: I swallowed.  That wasn't a problem in and
of itself, but about 30 seconds later, with the aid of the soda I had
washed it down with, I burped.  And suddenly the horror was back in full
force, along with the sinking realization that it was going to keep coming
back every few seconds for the next half an hour.  If I could have opted
for an on-the-spot execution, I would have.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Miranda insists that it wasn't that bad: she
described the taste as "creamy, a bit like raisins and onions" and insists
that it tastes not at all like rotting meat.  She even mostly finished it. 
I am not 100% convinced even now that she wasn't having me on, but I can't
imagine anybody voluntarily eating that much durian even for the sake of a
very good joke.  She maintains even now, sitting next to me, that it tastes
good.  I love her regardless, but I would advise approaching any strange
fruits you find here in Thailand with EXTREME CAUTION.

On a happier note, we tried mangosteens earlier in the day, and they were
wonderful, like a combination of lychee and tangerines.  We both agree on
that one.

And that's it for now.  Time to settle up the bill and go.  Tonight: little
India and Patpong.  Tomorrow: we fly to Chiang Mai.

Beware the Fruit of Death,

-Nathan