Two nights in Bangkok

I woke up in Bangkok after taking a night train from Chiang Mai to one of the train porter opening the curtain to my berth and saying, “Sorry! Will arrive in Bangkok in 17 minutes.” Which was long enough to change clothes, brush teeth, repack and be waiting as the train pulled into the station.

It was a gray, drizzly morning, which goes well with gray, gritty Bangkok. At a quarter after 7am, little is open to provide a map, but I was hot and sticky, sweating in five minutes, so I caved and took a tuktuk to Khao San Road, backpacker central. Khao San Road in the early morning hours looked like the leftovers of a lengthy frat party. The streets were piled with garbage and there were people already—or perhaps still—drinking beers. Rats the size of bunnies bounded over the refuse. Homeless-looking backpackers shuffled down the streets in small herds. They looked other worldly, or every worldly, dressed in their amalgamations of clothes gathered from various street vendors.

I took a place on a side street off Khao San, still close to the chaos but stepped back a bit from it. It was a little more expensive than I’d been looking for, but a lot of the cheaper guest houses were booked, and this one had a rooftop swimming pool, which was my first stop after checking in. The post-hangover crowd hadn’t yet started gathering there, so I had the deck almost to myself to do some yoga and the pool near empty for swimming laps.

By noon, vendors were filling up Khao San with cheap t-shirts and sandals, carts to sell fried noodles and chopped pineapple, mango, and papaya. And the hustlers were out. In the first half hour I spent on the street, I heard most of the scams listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook.

I spent a few hours paying visits to some of the temples, passing by the Grand Palace in favor of seeing the Reclining Buddha, so big the temple that houses him, Wat Phra Chetuphon, must have been built around him. Temples in Bangkok are noisy, busy places, but each has a unique set of sounds. In Wat Phra Chetuphon, a row of 108 bowls line a wall, and for 20 bhat you get 108 coins and drop one in each of them, so the temple is perpetually ringing with the sound of coins hitting coins or the metal bottom of the bowl.

At the temple near Khao San, Wat Iam Voranuch, the sound is of mallets ringing metal bells. The bells are said to bring good luck. You ring the bell and wait and listen until the end of it’s ring, and that teaches you patience, and with the patience comes luck. (Or perhaps, you could say, luck comes with patience.)

Across the river (the ferry to get there costs three bhat), Wat Arun has a tower that affords a wide view of the city from a walkway that circles it halfway up. Look out and there’s Bangkok, it’s sprawl of gray roofs and the jagged skyline of skyscrapers. They’re not clustered together, but spread apart to the skyline looks like the jawbone of a Thai person: a tooth, a space of bare gums, another tooth.

I headed through that mess on the Bangkok Sky Train, and on the opposite side of town, met with an editor of a Thai news website. She’s in the middle of a trial for lese majeste, or injury to the king—in Thailand, it’s illegal to say anything negative about the monarchy. It’s the third time she’s been in court since the publication launched in 2004. (I’m not running her name or the name of the publication here just in case.)

As we sat down and I asked her, “How’s it going?” and she dove right into updates on the trial. The accusation came late last year, but the trial could drag on until the end of this year, or possibly even into next year. That’s a long time to wonder if you’re going back into house arrest or will be otherwise detained.

I asked her also about women in the media in Thailand, and she said that there are probably more women than men working in the media, and certainly more women graduating from universities and with higher exam scores, but management is still predominantly male. Sound familiar to anyone?

But what makes the difference for her publication, she said, is not whether or not it’s run by a woman, but the mission of the publication itself. Their goal has been to provide a truly objective approach to reporting in Thailand. It’s part of what makes her feel like she’s still as much a social activist as an editor, she said.

“Give people the Internet and they will free themselves,” she said. Even without it, she said (and we were talking about North Korea now—the Bangkok Post ran a story this morning on how North Korea’s leaders are sure they won’t see the uprisings Libya and Egypt have because their people don’t have access to the Internet), humanity has a power to rise up. Are big changes coming to Thailand? I asked, and she nodded, a serious expression on her face. Maybe a separatist movement in the south, where violence continues though we hear nothing of it. Maybe other things. But give it five or 10 years, and the country could look quite different.

We parted ways just as the street lights were turning on, and I hiked across town for a bit just to peer in at the street vendors.

And then I stopped—I know no one will believe this—in a mall. (Andrea, darling, you would have been in heaven. Prada, Chanel, all those stores, right there for browsing…)

I was looking for a movie theatre, having heard that Thai movie theatres can be quite swanky. So I played that game of walk up to the ticket counter and buy a ticket to what’s starting next. I Am Number Four. Oh yeah.

And it wasn’t all that different. Except before the movie started, they played a short film on the king, and everyone in the theatre stood to “pay their respects” to him. The only word I understood from the song, a floating, aria-esque piece, was his name. And that’s probably all the more I needed. The film shows him doing ordinary things like taking a walk in the woods, but always with an entourage, and of course with a camera watching. One scene—it looks like he’s coming down some stairs and nearly trips, and the men flanking him both reach out a hand. He caught himself and carried on, but what an odd clip to include.

When traveling, my mother always goes to the botanic gardens and the aquarium, and I always go to the National Gallery, which was where I spent Sunday afternoon. The first gallery the desk attendant pointed me to was the king’s gallery. There’s a room full of paintings of monarchs, and then a room of paintings by monarchs, including the current king and his predecessor. King Bhumibol’s paintings, a vaguely impressionistic portrait of an old woman and an abstract with musical instruments, both from the 1960s, show some study of the European painters from the first half of the century. That abstract work looks to borrow subject matter from George Braque, but with the color scheme of Henri Matisse. A red hand grips a gold trumpet, an orange hand clutches a brown clarinet, and both are tangled up in a red, black and white keyboard and a green trombone, all of it over a background of orange, yellow, green and blue. It’s an effort to put sound into paint, to capture jazz on the canvas (which is more Piet Mondrian).

I spent my last night in Thailand wandering through the street markets, nibbling freshly cut mango and then splurging on a taro ice cream dipped in chocolate and rolled in almonds.

Today, Monday, I’m packing up and heading to the airport. I’ll be sleeping in New Dehli tonight.