Mixed emotions about Bangkok
For the most part, people in Bangkok are fairly nice. I love how most people greet here by bringing their hands together, palm to palm, under their chin and bow with "sawahdee kaa" (or khrap for men). I think it is such a beautiful greeting that I may adopt it when I return to North America. It exudes respect and grace. Even the Ronald McDonald statues at the McDonald’s restaurants in Thailand are in the greeting pose. It’s awesome!
So up until now, I’ve had little problems with food and my stomach’s been able to take care of anything that I’ve consumed. But there must be something about the food here because my stomach never seems to feel 100%, or even 90% for that matter. I attribute this to a menagerie of factors:
- too much orange Fanta
- the food is too spicy
- drinking too many young coconuts
- dirty food
I think it’s probably a mixture of the first three because I think if it was the street food, I’d probably be a lot more sick.
Anyway, last night, we went to MBK for some shopping. It’s a big mall with lots of vendors and stores and it’s basically a mix of fake and real stuff. It’s also roughly divided by the type of products that are sold. So cell phone items are grouped together on one floor and in one concentrated area. Furniture is on another floor. Fake shit is on another, and so on. It’s gotten to the point now where I am kinda sick and tired of looking at this stuff cause I cannot buy anything anymore. It’s either because I can’t fit anything here or because I can’t afford to buy stuff anymore cause I’m dangerously close to the luggage weight limit. I was hoping to stash some stuff into Henry’s luggage, but he went gangbusters on the home items like pillows, pillow cases, coasters, placemats, and closet organizers. The stuff is awfully nice and cheap here and it kinda pains me when I cannot buy any of it. Items that are $2-3 here would probably cost $10-20 back in North America. It sucks! So, if any of you plan on coming here in the next few months, let me know and perhaps you can bring back some stuff for me. My tip to you is don’t pack a full luggage and leave plenty of extra space for new stuff.
Last night, we went to Padpong. It’s basically the redlight district of Bangkok. This is where you can go into an establishment to watch the girls do weird things. Padpong is basically a street full of bars and street vendors. It is totally sketchy and it feels unsafe and lewd. Inside the bars, they have girls dancing on stage and they stop every once in a while to show the world what freaks they really are. For example, they can shoot darts out of their twats and burst balloons, of they can empty a bottle of beer into their cooch and fill the bottle back up. So you get the idea. They do screwed up ‘talented’ things and are basically freak shows for foreigners. It’s kinda amazing to watch, and on the other hand, it’s very degrading too. Anyway, we were led into one place called, I joke you not, Super Pussy. What a classy place. We ordered a beer each and the sketchy beers came to us semi-warm. I wonder if they re-used the liquid that the girls used in their show (see above). If so, I nicknamed it ‘funnel beer’. I sure hope it was not funnel beer that we were drinking cause that would be more than nasty. Anyway, we sat down and saw a couple of the girl’s tricks when some boss lady told us that we had to pay an additional 300 baht (about $9 Cdn) to watch the show. Originally, we were informed that there was no cover and that all we had to do was order a beer. So we thought they were trying to extort money from us and we left the bar abruptly. For a second, I thought we were going to rumble in the bar and I thought I would have to start throwing aside bouncers. I’m glad it didn’t get to that point and I’m even more glad that they didn’t follow us downstairs. Later on, we found out that the $300 baht was normal procedure. Hahaha! Oh well. I think I saw enough anyway. I’m most disappointed that I never saw the darts or pingpong show, but I guess I’ll have to be content that I even went in.
Earlier today, we went to yet another outdoor market. I think I’m the only one that came out of that place empty handed. It was pretty sketchy there too. The place was dirty and filled with hundreds of store stalls. I believe the temperature was about 38 degrees at the outdoor market. It wasn’t too bad a place, but it wasn’t fantastic either. We headed back and shortly after a few afternoon cocktails (happy hour), we went to dinner. I had a dinner buffet that had everything. It was the priciest meal I had this past 3 weeks and was the equivalent of about $36 Cdn. Oh well, it was worth it. The salmon was awesome.
Ack. I’m so tired and I’m barely able to stay awake to keep going. I slept so much in all of our cab rides today too. Bugger! Overall, I think the city of Bangkok is beautiful. It’s more or less developed into a nice big city, but the commute and travel of it is a huge turnoff and I’m sure that some stores lose a lot of business because most of the places are difficult to get to. It doesn’t help that the cabbies suck ass too.
ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz I’m heading to bed because I’m dying here. I can barely think or function properly anymore. So with that said, good night.
Anthony
