derek gulbranson

Bye Bye Bangkok

I made it to Tokyo and found a hostel for ~$30/night. I lost my directions to the hostel on the way to the hostel but the girl at the info center at the train station spoke perfect English and she printed out a map that showed me exactly how to walk there and what trains to take. And they have reliable wifi. Yea! My iPhone works in my room again.

Think I'll go explore Tokyo for a bit though. Think I want to find a real hotel cause this hostel has a midnight curfew.

Shit. Someone who speaks Japanese at the hostel said the news is saying a typhoon is headed this way. That explains the rain then I guess.

I wrote the following in the airport and on the plane from Bangkok to Tokyo. I'm very glad not to be in Bangkok anymore. I think the stomach bug I had made me a little less tolerant and a little more cranky than normal too.

I think the thing I will remember most about Bangkok is the smell. The mixture of human shit and urine from the multifunctional sewers/rivers/fishing grounds, body odor from the oppressive heat and humidity, and Thai food from the metastasization of street food vendors is enough to put me off Thai food for a very long time. The stench changes as you walk around too, sometimes the smell of Thai food becoming stronger than the shit, sometimes the decomposing human waste overpowering everything. Usually it's mix of the two. How anyone could maintain an appetite amongst all that is beyond me. Bee-infested mystery meat being cooked on the back of a motorcycle-based kitchen cart surrounded by the smell of sewer and American friends of mine telling me it's good, I should try some. I went to Burger King and had a chicken sandwinch. Yes, it's genetically engineered chicken fried in trans-fats with iceberg lettuce but at least I don't have to watch for bees and I get to eat it away from the stench, exhaust and heat for a moment. And I don't have to wonder if anything in it came out of that sewer. (Friends said they saw people with fishing lines down the sewer drains, and surprisingly I did see quite a few fish in the tar black water-like liquid).

I did get bit of stomach bug on the way to Bangkok which probably made it worse. I think I got it from some watermelon I had at a rest stop. Someone said they saw them washing it in tap water. Luckily it only lasted a day or so. I feel much better now.

Bangkok is gross in just about every way I can think of. The polution is crazy. If Al Gore is right and we have a limited opportunity to save ourselves from environmental cataclysm, I really just don't see any way that we will not destroy ourselves. Look at the US, we're supposed to be educated and affluent and I see no way that we will pull our head out if our asses in time. But in places like Bangkok there's no hope at all. When their children start growing 3 heads they'll just try to emigrate to someplace cleaner, hoping they can rape their own enviroment as much as we did ours before they have to pay the piper. My throat still hurts from the "tuk tuk" (an open-air taxi) ride tour the shopping area. Thousands of two-stroke motors with open cabs racing each other to the next stop light. Thank god for California emission controls. And thank god for building codes and city planning and government regulation and modern sewer systems. I will never complain about San Francisco's out-dated sewer again. Yes, it smells at the low points and is wasteful and inefficient and needs replacing (they're working on it), but San Francisco smells like laundry detergent compaired to Bangkok.

Admittedly I wasn't able to find or do anything particularly gay during my short stay in Bangkok (Koah San road is straight-couple hell and my stomach combine with the heat and stench kept me inside more than I anticipated), but the concept of gay in Thailand seems to be limited to effeminate guys that wear makeup or "lady-boy" prostitutes that probably fancy women. Even when we were in Koh Samui, the gay bars seemed more like a place to pick out your prostitute rather than someplace gay people would actually socialize with each other. It seemed quite difficult to get a drink without having some "companion"-type sit next to you and start to rub your leg and attempt meaningless chit-chat in broken English. I had to pretend to be coupled with a friend just to get some peace, even that didn't work so well.

And, as I was told, you can have custom clothing made in Thailand really cheap. It's amazing that so many people can make a living hawking $50 tailor-made suits to tourists. It's actually similar to my neighborhood a bit in that I have a hard time walking half a block without some street-urchin hassling me, except instead of people asking for change and then the backup, a cigarette, they say "suit for you, I give you good price" or "you like Thai food, I give you good price, cheap for you". True, I stayed on Koah San road in Bangkok which is like backpacker central and the rest of Bangkok is not quite so saturated, maybe I was asking for it. Still there must be 10,000 "custom" tailor shops in Bangkok all churning out replicas of the same suit. That was the weird thing about it too, all of these shops had the same suit on the same mannequin on display in the window, and neither the suit nor the mannequin was even slightly attractive. The mannequin had a sort of clown mixed with 1960's horror movie face on, a big clown smile that looked like it's face was made of silly putty and lipstick. All the tailors had different designer brands painted on their windows, Armani, Ralph Lauren etc., but the suit was always the same identical cut. I mean I could probably use a suit someday, I wouldn't be opposed to checking that off the list for $50. But the suit was ugly, and none of the "tailors" seemed to be aware of it. You'd think if you took up suit tailoring as your livelihood, maybe you'd be interested enough to take the time to learn a bit about suits and what makes an attractive one. They all seemed much more adept at hawking the suits than tailoring them.

I also learned during my bus ride to Bangkok that the British are just as capable as the US of producing the loud, annoying, drunken, spring-break, poorly-travelled, English-rules-the-world type of travelers, the kind you wish had never been issued a passport. The ferry from Koh Tao had a large group of English lads having a contest to see who could shove more chips/crisps into their mouth at once without coughing them all over the other passengers. Does any country lack these? I guess I didn't see any Thai behaving that way. I haven't come across any such Japanese yet. Maybe in Tokyo.