Reconsidering Bangkok

When I was in Southeast Asia in 2010 Bangkok was the place I liked least of all.  I was delighted when we could get out and see other parts of Thailand.  Granted, I still had fun because there were individual fun activities and I was with Paul and Abby but that had nothing to do with the city and everything to do with them.

After this weekend, I have totally reconsidered Bangkok.  In fact, it is now definitely on the list of cities where I would enjoy living long-term.

I think the following factors were important in shaping my opinion of Bangkok:

1) The Heat:

The last time I was in Bangkok was February 2010.  I remember the heat being absolutely oppressive to the point where I would need to stop activities and go into air conditioned spaces.  At the time, it was still freezing in Korea (as I discovered while running through the snow to the airport bus stop near my house in shorts and flip-flops while fascinated Koreans looked on).  Coming from such a cold place, I had not had any time to adjust to the heat.

This time, the heat wasn’t bothering me at all.  I asked the staff at my hostel whether this was the cooler season and they looked at me like I was a crazy person.  This is the hotter season by far.

The difference is mainly in the fact that I’ve been living in Phnom Penh for 3 weeks.  The first couple of days in Phnom Penh the heat was unbearable.  The first 2 weeks I could barely eat 2 meals a day and even that was because I knew I should eat something and would force a bit of rice down.  Whereas now I’ve adjusted pretty well to Phnom Penh and as such, the heat in Bangkok doesn’t get to me. I guess I’m one of those people who doesn’t adjust to immediate changes in temperature very well (especially if they’re extreme changes).

Last time, because I was going through that adjustment period as I was travelling, my experience was affected.

2) Tourist Season:

Because this is the hot season (and the beginning of the rainy season), the vast majority of tourists stay away (the same thing happened in Vietnam last summer).  This has a couple of effects.

First of all, the crowds are gone.  The crowds in February were incredible.  Take Times Square on a busy day, expand it to the whole Rattanakosin neighbourhood, and put the heat up to 35 degrees. It is really horrible to be in a sweaty, stuffy crowd of tourists all trying to head in different directions.  I remember getting into a taxi just to remove myself from this moving mass of B.O.  Even at night in Chinatown you would have to move through the market at the speed of the crowd because people were so tightly packed into the narrow lanes.   

Now the crowds are gone so you can walk around the popular area  and be able to breathe.  Also gone are the touts and vendors that are inescapable during the high season.  One of my strongest memories of Bangkok is being unable to walk 2 minutes without yells of, “Lady where you go?” “Tuk-tuk!?” “Where you go? I take you on tour all day, 20 Baht!”  Any time you approached a popular attraction there would be at least one or two people who would try to tell you that it’s closed today and that you should instead come to a different, more interesting place (a really common scam here).  Having to constantly deal with these kinds of accosts leaves a bad taste in your mouth (because you have to be reasonably on your guard at all times and you can’t ask people for help because such a large number of them are actually there for the sole purpose of scamming tourists).

It’s not that all of them are gone now.  There are a couple of vendors in front of the royal palace, and 2 people in my hostel fell for the annoying 20 baht tour trick (they get commission for bringing you to different stores between temples).  But the numbers are a lot lower.  It’s not worth their time to stand around the palace all afternooon when they might get 30 or 40 people a day as opposed to a thousand or more.  It means that getting to the places you want to go is a far more pleasant experience.

Finally, the lack of tourists means that you can really appreciate how beautiful some of these buildings are.  The Royal Palace, for instance, really is spectacular.  But when you are surrounded by people everywhere, it breaks up your field of vision and you can’t appreciate the images in front of you (I think, for instance, that the great wall of China remains the most spectacular thing I have ever seen in my life in part because we were the only ones there.  When I look at photos of the wall covered with tourists, it just isn’t as visually stunning).  I went back to all the main temples and it felt like I was seeing totally different places because they were empty and I could take in the architecture fully without the visual distraction of other people.  I was far more impressed this time around and could appreciate the details far more.

3) Overpacked scheduling

Bangkok was my first real taste of travel and I made typical rookie mistakes like packing my schedule super tight in a way that didn’t allow for unexpected delays.  This meant that if anything went off-track, everything went off-track and I would get really frustrated.  This time around, having seen all of the important sights already, I didn’t feel pressured to be as GO GO GO as I usually am when I travel.  I could take the time to go see Pirates in 3D at the Siam Paragon (RAD.  Got the awesome VIP seats that are more like couches with blankets; stood up for the national anthem before the movie), I could take more time at the Chatuchak weekend market, and I could pop into cafes and read and write for a while when I was feeling tired.  It  made the whole experience a lot more pleasant – not being a bit stressed out about keeping to a schedule.

4) Lack of Time:

I think cities require more time than other types of places.  There is so much going on in a city and so much filler, that sometimes it’s difficult to absorb everything in 2 or 3 days and it’s hard to find the cool and interesting things because they’re often spaced far apart.  Having 3 days and no main attractions to tick off the list, I had the chance to discover that Bangkok is actually an incredibly livable, charming city.

Here is why Bangkok is awesome.

The Parks:

I don’t usually work out while travelling but I’ve started training for a marathon which makes skipping workouts a lot more costly (as in, if I don’t do my 75 minute run today, I’m screwed for next week when I have to go up directly from 35 to 95 minutes).

As well, Sienna pointed something out to me which sold me on the idea of running while travelling.  Usually when you’re in a city you just go to the main attractions.  Knowing that you have to run a reasonably long route encourages you to check out an area of the city (or of the countryside) that you probably never would have seen.   I had never thought about it this way but it is totally true, and it proved true in Bangkok.

Before leaving I googled “running in Bangkok” and came up with a place called Lumpini Park, which is in a business district in the South – an area I would have no reason to go to normally.  The park had a 2.5 km loop, a man-made lake, bathrooms, canteens selling water, and other workout amenities.

By the time I got there at 5 am on Saturday, Lumpini park was already filling up with people.  Just like in Phnom Penh you see people by the Independence Monument doing Tai Chi in the morning, so here you could see lots of old men and women doing mild calisthenics to the sound of Thai pop.

Exercise in Southeast Asia is done outside.  In Phnom Penh, nobody but the expats (and the very very rich Cambodians) can afford the $100/a month you need to spend on an air-conditioned gym.  Bangkok, a much wealthier city, has many more gyms but they are still accessible only to the elite.  As such, public parks are presumed to  be common exercise spaces.  Lumpini park had an entire weightlifting area in one corner of the park.  There were all the same types of machines that you would find in the weight room at most gyms at home, except they were outside and for public use.

It was really great to run in Lumpini Park.  At home all Sienna and I can do is either run circles around Independence Monument on Sihanouk Boulevard (which becomes almost unbearable after 40 minutes because you get so bored) or run to the riverside (slightly less boring).  There are certainly no public weight rooms around.  I think this is in part because of the poverty – people would definitely take the equipment and try to sell it for scrap metal.  In Bangkok most of these parks have guards to make sure that they are safe and the equipment stays put.

The much smaller park that I went to for my Sunday run was a smaller version of Lumpini – there was a guard, there was a weight-lifting area, there was a fenced off soccer field, and there was a fountain and some sculpture.  I was a bit of an idiot to choose the smaller park for my longer run because it got pretty boring towards the end, and it also became evident that most people there thought I was crazy for running for so long.  The soccer team would pause their game to stare.  Regardless it was nice to see that even a  smaller park in a slightly more remote area still had all the amenities of a bigger park in the business district.

Later in the day on Sunday, after going to the Chatuchak weekend market, Maura (a girl from my hostel) and I ended up Suan Rot Fai park.  It was like a Northern version of Lumpini, except that the track was a bit longer (3 km), you could rent bikes, and there was a free butterfly garden.  We also saw a Guana (I think we did – at least Maura seemed certain it was one).  In any case, it was an enormous lizard hanging out in this park like it ain’t no thing: just chilling with the butterflies.

I miss having public parks.  I didn’t take enough advantage of them when I lived in Korea but now that I’m trying to run outside on a regular basis in a place where there are none, I’m feeling the lack.

The Malls

On Saturday, after going to the Tailing Chang floating market early in the morning I decided to pass the hot afternoon hours checking out the upscale shopping area around Ratchaprasong intersection.

It was hard to believe, watching teenagers saunter by with hands full of shopping bags, that this area was so central to the protests last year and witnessed some of the most intense violence.  Central World, the shopping center I was going to, had only reopened in late September 2010 (in fact, the parts that were most affected by fire have not been reopened).

The violence did leave it’s scars on the area.  You cannot walk into Central World, into the Siam Paragon, or into any other mall in the vicinity without going through pretty intense security. At almost every entrance to the malls you can find a police officer from the anti-detonation department.  The memory of the July bombings is still strong, and the measures reflect that.

Central World Burning

The malls themselves were pretty interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s interesting to see how the basic idea of a mall gets re-imagined in Asia (I make this generalization because I saw a similar trend in Korea and Japan.  It’s very possible that there are malls in North America that do this too and I just haven’t been to any of them).

The Siam Paragon was less a building devoted to shopping, and more like a general lifestyle center catering to the needs of established and aspiring wealth.  Wandering around, I saw an enormous area called “Genius World.”  When I walked in I found lots of schools offering every possible extracurricular activity imaginable.  Among others, there were piano lessons, Taekwondo, English classes, and different kinds of dance.  The idea is that parents can drop their kids off for their lessons, and spend that time shopping.

On the bottom floor of the mall there was also an open ice-rink where boys were playing hockey as some parents watched.  On the top floor there was an enormous aquarium  (Siam Ocean World).  There was also an IMAX movie theater.  Between the Siam Center (an affiliated mall) and the Siam Paragon there was a stage, and on Sunday on our way back we saw an awesome dance performance.

One could easily come and spend a day here.  If bored you could walk by way of the skywalk to Central World which has its own activities, or to Siam Discovery which has a bizarre wax-figure museum.  These malls are built like the kind of space where a whole family could spend an entire day without getting bored, and everyone would find something suitable to his or her taste.

I hesitate to call this an Asian phenomenon because I haven’t been to many malls elsewhere in the world.  I can say that in Korea, in Japan and in Bangkok I’ve observed a focus on making shopping malls into general entertainment centres.  At the very least I don’t think that this could be said of most Canadian malls (with the exception of the  West Edmonton Mall).  I think only the most devoted shoppers could spend a day at the Eaton Centre in Toronto without getting extremely bored.  I certainly can’t spend as much time in a mall back home as I spent at the Siam Paragon on Saturday.

The other reason that I found the malls interesting is because it brought home to me just how much wealthier Thailand is than Cambodia.  I know this seems like an extremely obvious statement and it’s not that I didn’t realize this.  It’s just that the images I had from Thailand and the images I had from Cambodia on my last trip blurred together for me.

I only spent 2 days in Bangkok.  I spent them in the historic district where all the palaces are, and the housing in between the attractions is pretty decrepit.  There were also a lot of beggars, touts, tuk-tuk drivers vying for your attention and street vendors (none of these things gave you an impression of wealth).  Then we peaced out to Kanchanaburi, which is one of the least developed areas of Thailand.  There people were much poorer than in the city (though not anywhere close to as poor as rural Cambodians) and you could see a lot of the same things as you saw in Cambodia: 5 kids on a motorcycle, the eldest being 13 or 14.  Night markets, farm animals, few cars.

And then Phnom Penh and Siem Reap brought similar images as  Bangkok: hordes and hordes of tourists, shops upon shops of souvenirs, restaurants and patios catering to the backpacking crowds.

It is only now when the tourists are mostly gone, and when I’ve had a bit more time to look around both cities that I’ve begun to fully appreciate just how vast the differences are. Beyond the quaint, relatively well-off center, Phnom Penh quickly devolves into slum housing.  Particularly depressing are the neighbourhoods around garment factories which have cropped up haphazardly to accommodate the thousands of young women who work there.  Even more impoverished are the areas on the outskirts that house those families who have been displaced from their lands by any number of causes (such as sugar plantations, and the developments around Boeng Kak Lake).

Bangkok, on the other hand, is a city of enormous skyscrapers and hugeluxury malls like Central World.  Unlike Phnom Penh where the vast majority of vehicles on the road are motos in Bangkok  there are only cars on the road (I tried to find a moto taxi out of curiosity and it took me a while).  There’s a subway, a skytrain, and a bus system (all non-existent in Phnom Penh).  This is not to say that there is no poverty in Bangkok.  There definitely is.  You can see it pretty clearly on the outskirts of the city, as well as along the canal system (if you take a boat somewhere instead of the bus, you’ll see that the communities along the canal are very very poor, rivaling in appearance the slums of Phnom Penh).  You can also obviously see it in the brothel areas.  Still, every city has poor neighbourhoods.  The difference is in degree and proportion.  In Phnom Penh, the vast majority is exceptionally poor, where as in Bangkok, poverty doesn’t seem to be the overwhelming norm.

The structures are also there in Bangkok for getting out of poverty.  In Phnom Penh, even if you manage to send your child to a decent school and to university, quite often there’s still not much that she can do.  Kunthea, for example, has a degree in accounting.  So do many of her friends.  She is working as an admin for the ILO because there is not much for her to do here with an accounting degree.  A kid who goes to med school here is still very limited in opportunities because hospitals are scarce and inferior (the medical knowledge in this country, including at the med schools is very sparse).  Anyone that needs anything done flies to Bangkok, and those who can’t afford Bangkok go to Saigon for treatment.  Only those who can’t do otherwise use the medical services here and doctors aren’t paid that much.   Government officials can make a lot of money but only through taking bribes.  The best opportunities are in agencies like the UN.  The UN is one of the only places you can make a decent living without being corrupt.

At least in Bangkok there are payoffs at the end of the struggle.  It may be extremely difficult for a poor family to put a child through med school, but at least once they do they can be assured that the education the child received is excellent and that there are hospitals where she can work.    It may be hard to get into university and pay for it, but at least there are good jobs to go into after.  In Cambodia there are very few options for graduates with education (in part because the education is bad and as a result foreign investors bring in expat management instead of hiring local graduates).  In Bangkok you can imagine that your kids might have a better life by going through the system.  In Phnom Penh that’s not the case.  Every family that can afford it sends children to Singapore and the U.S.

The Street Food

The last main thing that makes Bangkok a wonderful, livable city in my opinion is the street food.  The last time I was here I didn’t get a chance to fully appreciate it.  First, because as usual, it takes me a while to adjust to the heat and while I do I have absolutely no appetite.  Second, because at that point it was my first time in Southeast Asia and I wasn’t sure if it was safe.  It is, in fact, perfectly safe.  Also absurdly delicious.  One of the things I loved most in Korea was street food.  I missed it so much all year this year. I wanted Dokbokki, or Sundae, or anything that’s not a hot dog.

Phnom Penh also has street food but it’s a lot less safe, and a lot less hygienic.  Street food is mainly eaten by people who can’t afford to eat other food.  In Thailand, everyone eats street food, just like in Korea, and as a result there is a huge amount of variety and turnover.  Most of my meals this weekend (except for dinner on Friday and dinner on Sunday) were street food.  You can get delicious kebabs, bizarre salted eggs on a stick, mussels inside fried eggs, noodle soups, all kinds of fruit, spring rolls, wraps – anything you want.  The vast majority of it is perfectly safe.  There’s no 100% guarantee, but neither is there one back home.  You can always eat something bad and get sick.

This is just a personal preference but I love eating outside, crouched on tiny plastic stools around equally tiny plastic tables.  Across the street there will always be other people eating and there will be people walking by, perhaps vendors selling things.  You can always pop into a 7/11 and grab a beer to have with your meal.  You don’t feel isolated while you’re eating; you’re right in the middle of everything and it’s nice. It brings the communal experience of eating out into public spaces instead of moving it inside (though sometimes, I definitely appreciate getting to take a break from the hectic outdoors  by ducking into an air-conditioned restaurant).

I was surprised to learn that not everybody shares my extreme like of street food.  I was also surprised to learn that I don’t get along very well with people who don’t.

I went out on Friday night with people from my hostel but was forced to excuse myself an hour into the excursion because one of the guys was driving me up the wall. This rarely happens to me.  I usually like most people I meet, so I don’t have that many tools for dealing with people I dislike.

His name was Konstantin and he was from Germany.  He seemed ok at first.  He had been travelling for 6 months already (always a good sign) and Southeast Asia was his last stop.  Konstantin, Giselle (a Taiwanese girl staying at the hostel), Maura and I decided to go grab some drinks.   We headed out to Khao San Road (would not have been my first choice,but everyone else seemed pretty keen on it).  Konstantin was hungry and Maura and I wanted some food too, and there is an incredible amount of awesome street food on Khao San.

My warning bells started ringing when we got off our tuk-tuk.  The choice was amazing food was almost overwhelming.  There were stalls EVERYWHERE and people sitting around them happily eating delicious things.  Maura and I quickly started pointing to things that looked awesome.  ”Ooh that looks good!” “Or how about that?!” “Ok, we have to get this! It’s mandatory.”   Konstantin, however, looked unimpressed.  He would walk up to every stall, spend a couple of minutes grilling the vendor on what was in each particular food, think about it for a minute, then walk away.

“Konstantin,”  I asked, confused as to why he was doing this, “do you have some food allergies?” If not, then why not do what everyone does in foreign countries?  Just point to something that looks good, and find out as you eat what’s in it.  ”No,” He replied, obviously not getting where I was coming from.

After another 10 minutes of this we passed up an incredible-looking curry place, a stall with tom yum soup, a kebab stall, and a grilled fish stall.  I was starting to get frustrated.  He would ask me to recommend something and then, without any particular reason, say that it wasn’t for him.  OVER and OVER again.  Exasperated, I asked, “well, if you’re not feeling like trying new stuff today and you’re hungry, why don’t you get pad thai?”  Maura nodded.  She was getting exasperated too.  We were met with a blank stare.  ”You know what pad thai is, right?”

He didn’t.  He was willing to try it though, but not at any of the places I wanted to eat.  Eventually, fed up, I was just like, “look Konstantin, you’re the hungry one, why don’t you choose where to go?”  We walked around for another 10 minutes until Konstantin managed to find the most boring, kitschy, touristy restaurant on Khao San Road.  I’m not exaggerating.  The restaurant was attached to a package tour agency and aside from us there was not a person under 50 at the tables.

Once we sat down, Konstantin deliberated for a long time about what to get.  Eventually he decided against the steak sub, rounded up all of his sense of adventure and ordered a chicken pad thai.  Then, visibly proud of himself for being so flexible he proceeded to tell us all about his plans for the next couple of days (to take a 2 day elephant riding tour that also promised “lots of opportunities to meet the locals off the beaten track.” Vomit.).  He also told us that he had gotten lucky today.  Apparently today was a special government promotion where all tuk-tuks were 20 baht for the whole day.  But gee, the weird thing was that the tuk-tuk driver kept taking him to different stores between temples, and he kept being pressured to buy things.  Isn’t that strange?

At this point I was expending a fair bit of effort to keep my hands in my lap instead of tearing hair on my head.  When you read your lonely planet, the writers always try to use this trick: they create a mythical “tourist” – someone who is completely ignorant of every scam, unwilling to try anything new, and thinks that when he goes on structured organized tours he is getting to see the “real Thailand.”  Then the book tries to sell you most destinations as places where those people would never go.  Except, until I met Konstantin, I didn’t really think that those people existed.  Every other place I’ve been, every other traveler I’ve met has usually been a pretty cool person.  They usually have traveled for a while and have awesome stories, or they’re just starting out but they want to see everything and do everything.  This guy was the mythical Lonely Planet tourist through and through.

I don’t know if the things I’ve mentioned really convey this, but everything about him betrayed a lack of flexibility and a fair amount of ignorance.  How is it possible to fall for the tuk-tuk scam?  It’s on the first page of every lonely planet you read about Bangkok!  Granted, Grace and I totally got duped in Beijing when we thought we were making friends.  That was ignorant of us – sometimes it is probably best to be less open to people.  But Konstantin’s ignorance wasn’t of the open and curious kind.  There was no sense of excitement to explore a new place.  He didn’t even want to walk around that evening and check out the surrounding market which is actually pretty neat – he just wanted to sit, drink beer, and tell us boring things.

I left.  I was pretty abrupt about it – it’s not like me.  I just made the excuse that I have to get up early tomorrow morning for a run, put some cash down for my drink and went to find other friends before they could decide to follow me.  It has really been a while  since someone’s every sentence annoyed me this much.  I also think that in most other circumstances I wouldn’t have been this pissed off but I feel VERY strongly about travel.  At this point in my life it is the thing I feel strongest about – nothing makes me happier.  This dude was getting between me and an awesome evening in Bangkok.  So while usually I’d probably be fine with spending one evening hanging out with a person whose approach to life seems fundamentally boring to me, when he gets between me and great travel experiences all of my patience vanishes.

Luckily, as Maura told me on Sunday, he didn’t pick up on anything.   She on the other hand had kinda wished that she hadn’t been too polite to leave since he spent the rest of the evening talking about all the different ways he got drunk when he traveled in Australia.  Man, it was like discovering a new species.

All in all, except for that hour-and-a-half with Konstantin, the trip was a huge success.  I kinda want to live in Bangkok for a couple of years.  A lot.

Advertisement