100 Hours in Bangkok

Lots to Smile about in the City of Angels

Day 1: Thursday, 4 p.m.

For one Thai lady at Bangkok’s Suvarnambhumi Airport things were not going well.

‘My shoe!' she wailed at her Aussie boyfriend, who looked at her like a toy won at a country fun fair: too large to carry home, but too cute to leave behind.

She pointed to the broken strap. He fixed it, and even though he was wearing a ratty singlet and crappy shorts, he bent down on one knee and replaced the shoe on her foot, like a white trash prince.

Awww.

Despite the bad reviews the new airport had recently received, in fifteen minutes I was outside of the 'Golden Land'(as Suvarnambhimi means in Thai) airport and into a cab. Leaving the concrete and glass structure behind, I could have been anywhere in Asia, at some other alphabet soup flughaven….. HKG? KLIA? ICN?

Only the sight of a glittering Thai temple across the road reminded me where I was.

An hour and a half later, after sharing a cab with a friendly Slovakian who worked in telecommunications, I dropped into Siam Square, the Harajukuesque mothership for hip thai teenagers.

A new outdoor Wi-Fi zone had been just established, girls tottered past on towering Japanese style high heel shoes, and guys sported the de riguer footwear of choice, Converse, with their hair gelled into all shapes and formations. The punk haircuts and high fashion contrasted very sharply with the dour, pale faced tourists wandering round Siam Square, wide-eyed and slack jawed as their camcorders hummed.

I then brazed an entry into the belly of Bangkok’s most fearsome shopping center beast: Mahboonkrong (MBK), where I shouldering my way through crowds as thick as Manhattan's Grand Central station at rush hour.

At one shop, there was some rather interesting Thai drama.

‘Excuse me,’ said a man lurching up from nowhere. ‘I gave you 1,000 Baht…’

The sales girl looked at him and then cool as winter mist, reached into her back pocket and handed him back a crisp 1,000 Baht note without a word of protest, or even acknowledgement. The man took the note in his sweaty hands, smiled and lurched off again, satisfied.

Two hours later, after checking out more of the mega mauls littering Siam Square, it was off to that Thai Hi-So fave, Bed Supperclub on Sukhumvit's Soi 11 for drinks and head thumping house music.

Climbing the rickety staircase entrance was like stepping up to a pulsating, blinking Technicolor spaceship, and after passing through the glittering new airport, ridden the spotless Skytrain and subway, and passed through the Gucci clogged shopping malls in Siam Square, standing in front of this shiny spacecraft I felt like I was in a parallel Thailand, reached through a secret trap door in the ground....

...and as I took my place at the bar inside, surrounded by the usual intergalactic mix of backpackers, package tourists, investment bankers, Japanese trendies, designers, Thai tais and more, listening to sounds created by an international DJ flown in from Germany, I felt transformed, transfixed, and transported all at the same time.

Houston, we don’t have a problem.

Day 2: Friday

The next day was a Buddhist holiday. Demonstrations clogged the Bangkok streets; not protests against the government - they were demanding a higher minimum wage, said the driver. 180 Baht per day.

'We all want more money,' he said.

After making a brief stop at the rather strangely named ‘Unseen Travel’ agency, the taxi’s amulets jangling round and round, he dropped me at the Erawan shrine where people seemed to be bowing to the statue and the Burberry store behind the incense smoke swathed temple with the same fervor.

Where at Peninsula Plaza it was tinkling pianos, Club Med brochures and helmet hair do’d ladies doing tea in the lobby, with display windows full of glittering jewels without price tags, at Paragon it was all Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Jimmie Choo, wedged in between a temple and surrounded by towering office blocks and government buildings.

Inside this megamaul, the girls at Gucci were more concerned with making sure visitors were waiing correctly than anything else (this is still Thailand after all) surrounded by $7,000 USD crocodile clutch purses.

Sawatdee Kaa…

Less than three minutes after leaving the perfume scented lobbies of these shopping malls, I was listening to the chime of bells and gongs and breathing in incense smoke, talking to a friendly monk. There were more Soi dogs and cats than worshippers at his temple, within eyeshot of Siam Paragon. The lone monk assured me that on weekends, there were more people. I walked back out, it was starting to rain, and a candle he had lit had been put out by the falling water; even the Soi cats and dogs were gone.

I had lunch at Bei Otto, the expat German food institution that was staffed by local girls in dirndls and boys in lederhosen.

‘Did you get the script?’ asked one patron to another on his cell phone.

‘No. I wont be meeting the Thai finance minister today,’ remarked another into his cell phone to someone else.

Hopping aboard the Skytrain, two girls in Korean costumes were wearing not Kim Il Sung pins, but pins extolling the virtues of KFC’s newest Korean set meal; and at Nana Skytrain station, the five p.m. white collar rush was heavily saturated with working girls and lady boys just about to clock in at the nearby go go bars….. standing at the exit gates, I counted several dozen pass by, each not forgetting to send a smile and wave in my direction, just in case I was to be a future customer.

The taxi driver back to my hotel looked surprised when I told him I had not frequented the bars at Nana.
‘Sure?’ he said. ‘The ladies in Nana Bar, very good business. They are smart like banker.’

Day 3: Saturday

The Nation newspaper had a front page article about Jatukarm Ramathep, the ridiculously large amulets that looked like rap star’s gold jewelry traded for huge profits and were being used by former political enemies as common ground to talk instead of shooting each other. Investors were turning their back on the volatile stock market, and buying the amulets instead, blessed in Nakhon Si Thammarat, turning 100% profits overnight.

Waiting for my early morning riverboat down to Wat Arun from Phra Aphrit, a woman began screaming.

‘Dead man! Dead man!’ she screeched as she pointed to a black head bobbing in the current, face down, arms splayed out. Probably a drunk guy that had fallen into the river, I thought, remembering the dead bodies I had seen in Varanasi, India.

‘Dead, dead, dead!’ she cried, covering her mouth. ‘Aaah!’

Then a Thai Navy boat came cruising along and threw an orange life preserver at the man, who rolled over, coughed, and grabbed it. The woman was relieved.

‘No die! No die!’ she shouted, almost weeping, hopping up and down as she pumped my arm up and down as well for good measure.

After zooming along the Chao Phraya river, passing for a few minute stop at Wat Arun where monks sat in the shadow of the ceramic tile covered pagoda, admiring the sun peaking through the clouds, it was on to the cluster of five star hotels near Saphan Takson Skytrain station, all tinkling pianos, trickling fountains, and luxe spas and Americans of a certain age rubbing shoulders uncomfortably with silver haired Japanese of the same age.

Talking about $200 spa treatments, they whiled away the afternoon enjoying a tea break that commemorated a period of Colonialism that had long since moved on. Then they themselves moved on to the River City shopping mall, crammed with antiques and curios, where rumors were rife of stolen Angkor treasures smuggled out of Cambodia secretly for sale there.

Dinner that night was at Le Lys - run by a French expatriate he had recently bee driven out from his old location by rampant development, located now in a former Mexican restaurant where he serves the best tamarind squid in the city.

After that, I hit the night market at Suan Lum, where piled to every ceiling was tourist trash snapped up by ever larger crowds leaking out from huge air conditioned tourist buses.

I closed the day with a visit to Distil, at the top of the State Tower building, where drinks cost 500 Baht and the crowd was sleek, high nosed, and scantily dressed. (a gust of wind blew up one lady's skirt in what was probably not her first Marilyn moment).

Day 4: Sunday

Want to get an earful (and an eyeful) of the expatriate scene in the ‘Kok?
Look no further than the buffet table at the Four Seasons hotel.

Here, expat brats ran free while their parents oozed an air of lazy prosperity, bred perhaps from a life of no taxes, free flights home, a bloated salary, free housing, and free education for their kids.

A corpulent man from Texas (he told everyone in earshot) waved off a young Thai waitress who wai’d him with his meaty, large paws, grumbling about how little Thai's spoke English.

I was seated next to a shell shocked elderly British couple who were being introduced to their son's new Thai girlfriend for the first time, all short pleather skirt, blood red finger nails with a 60’s bob that shook each time she smiled at her stony faced in-laws who choked on their prawns. They looked over at me with expressions that screamed, ‘WHY?'

There wasn’t much conversation at that table, I can tell you.

After the rarified atmos of the 4 Seasons, it was a quick shot up the Skytrain line to the Weekend Market, which by two o’clock had surged to it’s capacity, people were being squeezed out of the narrow alleys as tightly and as surely as toothpase from a tube; all were red faced with matted haired, clutching plastic bags filled with clothes and handicrafts and jeans and more with slippery, sweaty fingers, wild eyed at having escaped the beast that pulsed people through the market like blood cells.

If you are curious, but don’t want to indulge in the action that’s available at Patpong, then the evening scene at the neighborhood Starbucks is a perfect vantage point from to watch the bird shoot up close.

The customers inside are an odd mixture of package tourists, who probably are staying nearby because the hotels were cheap, and the others that were there, squiring their ladies and gents they had picked up inside, taking a caffeine-laced break from the fun, twirling their souvenirs hair, and whispering sweet nothings loudly in a sort of public address system, so everyone could hear them.

Starfucks indeed.

Day 5: Monday

In my last hours in Bangkok, I retackled the behemoth that is Mahboonkrong (MBK) - all nine floors crammed with knock offs of knock offs of knock offs. Crowded day and night, its not a place for cowards; in a nutshell, MBK is like a massive bee hive high on cocaine.

On the ground floor, I picked up some socks.
On the third floor, I bought some DVD’s.
On the fifth floor, I shopped for pants.
On the seventh floor I shopped for electronics.

And on the second floor, I bought a recharge card from a lady boy, who, like a kaleidoscope, seemed to change gender each time you looked at him/her: a woman with long hair and painted nails one moment; and then a man, with a deepish voice and large bony hands, the next.

He/She was a perfect metaphor for Bangkok itself, all darkness and light, seriousness and fun, new and old, modern and traditional.

It was now 99 hours since I arrived in Bangkok, and I decided to take a tuk tuk to get back to my hotel. The sun had just set, a wall of dark clouds was closing in, and the sunset was swallowed whole.

As I walked towards the taxi stand, I turned a corner and ran straight into a fully made up lady boy, late for her shift at the local 7/11…. She spluttered out an explosion of expletives at me, in a most un-Thai way, shook her tiny balled up fist at me, glared at me some more, then lurched off angrily in high heels, like a princess looking for her neon lit pumpkin.

The tuk tuk I chose looked innocent enough, but turned quickly into a terror ride, surging through the narrow channels of the Bangkok death star. A monsoon rain storm broke all flashes of lightning, dumping huge quantities of water across the roads, and the driver, not the least bit frightened of crashing, sped faster and faster until the whole city became a blur. I was rocketing into space on some Bed Supperclub spaceship, seconds from leaving the earth and everything on it behind.

It was 8 o’clock when I lurched to a stop in front of my hotel, exactly 100 hours after my adventure began.

Shaken, and definitely stirred, I laughed off the tuk tuk ride like I did Thailand - you never know what was going to happen in the Land of Smiles, or what lay around the next corner.

And that’s what makes Bangkok so good.