Well, I made it. Anxiety and packing and ridiculous sherut drive to the airport, and really long flight over the Indian Ocean (I think because El Al can't fly over the Arab states, it flies down the red sea, and then turns directly east towards Thailand), I made it.
Bangkok is a very weird city. Bizarre and weird. My friend Tom described it as the Los Angeles of Blade Runner goes tropical, which is a pretty apt description - theres street vendors everywhere and multi levels to everything and I havent even seen the skytrain [Im writing on a funny, Korean-English keyboard and cant find the apostrophe key, which is why my grammar is really, really bad. It isnt intentional]. It's a bustling city, filled with life, but, as much as I've seen (which is very little), very touristy.
I had a bizarre taxi ride over here; i picked up the taxi at the airport and told the counter where I was going, they wrote it down on the slip in Thai - so I couldnt read it to check it - and we were off. It was mid afternoon, so lots of traffic in the city and the driver pulled over and from my limited sense of where the airport was and where my hotel was, I knew we were in the wrong place. The street was wrong and the hotel was wrong. I tried explaining it to him, but my Thai is non existent and his English was poor, so I showed him on my Lonely planet map, but after a while I realized he couldnt read the English characters. I made a total novice traveler, totally orientalist, faux pas. Eventually, once I realized that "ph" was pronounced "p," and we sat in another 45 minutes of traffic, we made it. So, next time, take the bus.
The heat is evident. It's currently about 10:30 PM (which is 6:60 PM in Jerusalem and 8:30 AM in California) on Tuesday and probably around 75 degrees. Which is lovely, except that the air is thick with humidity and walking around feels like walking through linen. [I sweated a lot walking around just now, so I can't wait to see how things go during the day]. My afternoon started with a shower, a brief nap (in our A/Ced room), and then a lot of walking around the neighborhood of Banglamphu. I didnt go too far because once I started out it was getting dark, but we're next to the river and in the middle of the backpacker central. The streets are filled with non-Thais: many, many white people (but not just Anglos; I heard French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Geman, and Dutch) and other Asian tourists. But the Americans, though, man do they stand out. And in an obnoxious way. Hopefully once David and I start engaging with the culture, we'll do it in a respectful, mildly orientalist way (David will be the mild and I'll be the orientalist).
The food here, so far, has been delicious. I wasn't hungry when I started my walking exploration, so I walked and walked until I was. My street-vendor dinner consisted of two chicken/onion/pineapple skewers and (you ready for this Mer?) corn on the cob, grilled right in front of me, a whole fresh mango, a crunchy fried "pancake" drizzled in chocolate, and a bottle of water. All tasty, all leaving me wanting more, and all totalled less than $3. If only street food in the US were this good and cheap.
Tomorrow David and I explore Bangkok. After that, who knows? I'm thinking now about staying an extra night here, and then heading on to Cambodia and then either Veitnam or Laos or maybe other parts of Thailand. I will say that I will e-mail again, but I can't say they will be tediously detailed as this one. I'm really just killing time now, keeping myself awake before David arrives, hopefully in the next 2 hours. So now I'm off to read some more - I started The Audacity of Hope on the plane ride over. It's very good, very funny and well written and it's, unsurprisingly, reeking of Barack Obama. It's really his presidential campaign, in book form, written 2 years before the campaign. And particularly relevant to today is his section on the judicial system...
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