Stranger Of The Everyday
It’s akin to realizing that something is hurting only when it stops. I am in fact in the heart of downtown Bangkok yet I feel like I’ve stepped out of the third world entirely. Everything is clean and bright and the air doesn’t smell. In fact, the air is air-conditioned and enjoyably cool. The plate upon which my salad was served is tasteful off-white china, not plastic. And it occurs to me that this place is oddly, deliciously quiet. Sure there is the gentle murmur of voices from other tables and some nondescript piano music seeping from hidden speakers, but I actually have to strain to make out the usually deafening roar of the tuk-tuks as they ply Bangkok’s outrageous traffic. I am sitting in the lobby cafe of the Hotel Intercontinental.
One eventually forgets just how different Bangkok is if you’ve only known Western cities. I have long since become accustomed to grubby accommodation, bad food, and cold water showers, but Southeast Asia is much more dizzying than a mere drop in living standards. This is my fifth visit to this city, indeed it’s hardly possible to manage long distance travel in this part of the world without repeatedly passing through Bangkok, but it’s also my longest stay and I am well into some sort of acclimatization. Which means that I now have to make a conscious effort to recall just how unlike home it really is. Stepping into this little oasis — I had initially just wanted to ask directions from the concierge — has reminded me of that home, instantaneously jolting me back across the ocean. Outside the tasteful glass atrium, the world has become suddenly alien once more. I am craving more of this sanctuary. Right now I’m addicted to the gentle bourgeois mythology of the marble lobby.
I decide to go see a movie. The theatre will be air-conditioned for sure. But first I have to get there. Stepping out into the street, I realize afresh how much Bangkok smells. The air is the first thing I noticed the first time I got off the plane, hot and humid and thick with odours. The city is an ever-changing patchwork of scents, some persisting over large areas or for a long time, such as the wet stink of the canals, some coming and going daily and moving about with a food cart or garbage truck. At any given moment, each breeze brings in a complex overlay of cooking food, sewage, charcoal smoke, dried squid, diesel exhaust, warm bodies, dust, laundry, garbage, pond scum, and probably hundreds of others I haven’t yet been able to identify. The net effect on a nose used to invisible sewers and good ventilation systems is that this place smells simply _bad_, all the time.
As my nose adjusts and the heavily laden air once more recedes into subliminality, I take up a brisk walk through the streets of Bangkok. Perhaps the next most obvious thing about this city is the ramshackle nature of the construction in many areas. There’s too much corrugated iron, too much bamboo scaffolding, even outside the slums. Like the older parts of some European cities, the rear courtyards of Venice or Paris for example, Bangkok gives off the sensation of having evolved organically, or better yet anarchically. Every building seems to have a sheet metal annex or extra staircase; sometimes entire additional stories have been obviously appended. After a while the buildings all congeal together and support one another in a confusing mishmash of structures, criss-crossed by labyrinthine interior passageways which mimic the tiny alleyways that thread the city. Never have I seen toilets so well hidden. The electrical system is a similar patchwork wonder, with its tangles of rotting cables sagging between telephone poles and live wires running under awnings just over pedestrians’ heads. Most buildings seem to have endured two or three amateur rewiring jobs as well, with electrical tape splices on the exposed wiring. In fact every corner store sells light fixtures and sockets, and in general hardware and building supply stores are easy to find in any Thai town. I’m sure skilled contractors exist, but DIY seems to be the order of the day.
Turning the corner onto a major avenue, pandemonium. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. Most streets are lined with hawkers, selling all manner of soups, snacks, noodles, fruits, and grilled meats on a stick. These last are cooked over charcoal braziers. Even now it seems incongruous to watch an old woman cooking chicken over a smouldering ceramic crucible in the shadow of a modern skyscraper. This coexistence of high- and low- tech is completely typical of Asia, where street vendor is a common and respectable profession, if not particularly glamourous or lucrative. Perhaps it’s like waitressing; only instead of hitting the street to find a server job, one can work a cousin’s food stall. And as a result, there is food everywhere! It’s cheap, mostly tasty, omnipresent — it’s wonderful! I wish all cities were like this. But while pad Thai and noodle soup and grilled chicken are easy to appreciate, one is quickly reminded that this is after all an alien place. The stands deep-frying cockroaches and chicken embryos are good for the “ick” factor of course, but more commonly I simply can’t identify what it is that is being sold. Little greenish cubes of fried something or hot disks that smell like coconut or vats of brownish paste tempt me with their scents, and even now I keep running into varieties of fruits and vegetables that I have simply never seen before. For most of these delicacies, the only way to know is to try them, and even though I can learn the Thai names of the new fruits, what do I really know about them in the end? By the standards of my peers I may be pretty handy with fish sauce and coconut milk, but I am not a good enough Thai cook to really understand, let alone recreate, a tenth of the victuals I have encountered. For one thing, I only know a few different ways to cook rice. The Thai on the other hand can and do make it into absolutely everything: noodles, jellies, deserts, milk, and probably even the people are made of rice.
The stalls are getting denser as I walk, and suddenly I’m in a market. Along with food, just about everything small enough to be packed up and rolled away is available street-side. Hawkers line both sides of both sidewalks, in some places they even choke off vehicular traffic entirely as they spill into a closed side street. Either way, it is nearly impossible to navigate through such a maze. Vendors cry out or point or try to engage me in conversation (”Hello, where are you from?” is the classic opener) or even touch me in an attempt to grab my attention. One enterprising man simply tries to hand the end of a hammock to passersby. Reflexively, people take hold of it, thus stopping in front of his hammock stall. Clever. These people are expert and highly competitive salesmen, especially those sellers who cater to tourists. They have long since nailed our social patterns and know how to stop us cold on the street. After a while, it makes one a bit hard and aloof, afraid to meet anyone’s eye for fear of the pitch, but you can get past that. Now I dodge potential encounters with an easy apologetic smile. This doesn’t work in all places in Asia, but the Thai are rich enough that nobody’s life or death depends on a single purchase.
Even outside the market areas, sidewalks are obstructed in any number of ways. Aside from stalls, I must make my way around restaurant chairs spilling out into the walkway, while motorbikes seem to park haphazardly in ostensibly pedestrian areas. Construction is erratic and nonstop — the sidewalks around my guesthouse literally disappear and reappear on a daily basis — and where the paving is mercifully intact it tends to be non-uniform. Southeast Asian sidewalks are a patchwork of irregular steps and slopes and tiles and bumps and gutters. Often really slippery tiles too, odd for a place with such incredible rain half of the year. The net result is that you can’t simply forget about the ground and walk mindlessly as it is possible to do on bland hard uniform western sidewalks. Foreigners are constantly tripping down the street, their shoes getting caught in small ridges or smashing into protruding obstacles. One night I walked into a piece of rebar sticking vertically out of the flat concrete. Luckily, someone had thoughtfully placed an upended metal can over the sharp top of the foot-long rod. My intact shins were thankful for this safety precaution, but I did wonder why no one had bothered to cut the rebar off entirely. Probably for the same reason the gutters are uncovered and buses don’t actually stop completely when picking up passengers: this is a society that expects its members to be able bodied, fleet of foot, and thoroughly responsible for their own welfare. You’ll won’t see a sign saying “keep head and arms inside bus” here. It’s refreshing to be someplace where the government doesn’t worry quite so much about protecting you from yourself, but Thailand _is_ unsafe. Sure, if they want to weld without safety goggles, that’s their lookout, but only the very fanciest buildings have emergency lights or fire escapes.
The bus slows as it approaches the inappropriately named “bus-stop” and a crowd of people dash into the road to catch it. There is much pushing and shoving, as in any Asian crowd. It’s been a while now since the naive Canadian in me stopped saying “sorry!” every time someone crashed into me; no one noticed or cared. Notions of propriety are different here. If someone cuts in line in front of you, it’s your own fault for not being aggressive enough to restrain them. In this case aggression is needed, because the bus begins to accelerate well before I’ve quite reached it. Holding the handles next to the doors, I and the other stragglers run alongside briefly before jumping on. The floor of the bus is made of dusty wooden planks, the first time I’ve ever seen wood used structurally in a motor vehicle. Next to the rear doors there is a bucket full of water with a scoop floating inside, exactly the kind of personal hygiene equipment one finds in rural bathrooms with no running water or toilet paper. Only there’s no toilet on the bus so I have no idea what these things are doing here. Pondering this, I barely have time to grab hold of a support rail before the bus roars off in a cloud of exhaust, which blows back inside through the open windows. Suddenly I have a vivid and personal understanding of why so many people wear handkerchiefs or surgical masks on the city streets, especially when veering through traffic on a tuk-tuk or motorbike.
Street signs glide by as the bus dodges jaywalkers. Before I first arrived, I was worried that I’d be completely unable to buy anything out of inability to read Thai numbers. It turns out that Arabic numerals are almost universally used, even appearing on the currency. The real problem is place names. Thai is written using a unique alphabet of 44 consonants and associated vowel accent marks, but I’m so stupid here I don’t even know my ABC’s. I can’t read Thai maps or street signs because I can’t remember the sequence of characters I’m supposed to be looking for. Fortunately, there is a surprising amount of English signage in Thailand. Most highway direction signs and urban street labels are subtitled with English transliterations. These transliterations vary of course, as English lacks a good spelling for the “dt” or “gk” or “bp” fricatives which I can barely pronounce properly on a good day, never mind the tonal vowels and the whole Asian l/r problem. What is surprising to me is just how much the written spellings of _English_ words vary, as does English “grammar” here. Professionally produced billboards and even television advertisements routinely contain what we would consider grievous grammatical or typographical errors, and let’s not even get started on restaurant menus, which often feature the same word spelled both correctly and incorrectly on the same page. It’s a different standard, they don’t just see this as a problem here. Or maybe they’re making their own English, much as the Jamaicans speak their patios and Singaporeans have the unique English-Chinese-Malay mismash of “Singlish.” You get used to it after a while, though I occasionally find myself longing for the clearly enunciated consonants of a native speaker.
Yet for all its mistreatment, English has a definite cachet. Nearing downtown, Thai writing almost seems to recede into the background amongst the familiar luxury logos. Versace, Armani, and Starbucks are invariably written in English, even though Coca-Cola and McDonalds are often spelled in Thai. As affluence increases, more and more Thai stores also choose to adopt English names, and the grammar gets better too, though you’ll still see conjugative disasters like “Long Runs Watch Company.” And with the language comes the lifestyle, for in those fancy air-conditioned malls and glass towers everything costs much, much more.Like a lot of big cities, Bangkok has both slums and skyscrapers, but I had not anticipated the blatant extremes of the Third World. For a start, the slums are nastier, not real buildings at all by our standards, but a permanent shantytown of corrugated iron, built on stilts above the rotting riverbank opposite the main city. I am awed by the intricate maze of planks and moats, but there’s no way I’d want to live there. It’s picturesque but impoverished and unsanitary. That’s probably why the Thai government put up a big “Welcome to APEC” banner to hide them when Bush came to visit last November. Meanwhile the downtown area — or areas actually as coherent urban planning is another thing that Bangkok lacks — is thoroughly modern. That is to say it is taller, shinier, cleaner, and generally much more Western-looking. The authorities even disallow street vending on the flashier avenues, which feels completely outrageous after you’ve soaked up the madhouse atmosphere of the lower-rent neighbourhoods. Yet the deepest disparities are monetary. A meal can cost literally ten times more if you buy it from a downtown restaurant as opposed to a market vendor. Clearly, there is a large and viable upper class. The kicker is, the per-capita income of this capital city is more than eight times that of the impoverished northeast provinces. Maybe we have our beggars in the midst of plenty too, maybe we have our own unwashed masses to deal with, but the developed world has absolutely nothing on Thailand for income disparity. With my fixed daily budget, I become a prince or a pauper just by changing neighborhoods. I think the locals deal with this better than I do. They know so much more about us than we do about them.
I have made it to a downtown cineplex. As is typical, about half of the movies are Hollywood films subtitled in Thai, so there is something for me to watch. A snag: this theatre seems to lack an English schedule, so I have to figure out showtimes by looking at the little poster icons on the billboard. I buy my ticket for120 baht which is $3 US, making it the cheapest movie ticket I’ve ever bought. You get to pick your seat in advance, which is nice. The rearmost seats are considered most desirable,which is good news for me since I, like most Westerners I know, prefer to sit somewhere in the middle. This concession stand also bows to Western tastes by offering salted popcorn alongside the more common sweetened variety. Inside, the theatre is well designed and maintained,with good seats and digital sound. The air is indeed conditioned, in fact it is downright cold, as it is in all fancy interior spaces. Ridiculously, I’m forced to put on more clothing, and I can only speculate that over-chilled air is something of a status symbol. The lights dim, the previews roll by in several different languages, and just before the feature starts a placard comes up which reads, in both Thai and English, “All rise to pay homage to His Majesty the King.” There follows a montage of scenes from Thai life, edited to a stirring choral fanfare. I am so ignorant in this land, I don’t even know if this is the national anthem or not.
