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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