BKK

When I ask Chiang Mai people about Bangkok I usually get one of two answers: I don’t like Bangkok..or..Bangkok is so fun, it has everything I need. Well I was able to see for myself from the four days I was there with students and teachers and now I have an understanding of both of these perspectives. But to begin this entry I’ll start from the beginning. Last Tuesday we caught the 6:00pm train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. The train ride to Bangkok was long but the time passed quickly and we were able to sleep most of it through since it was an overnight train. Someone had the good idea to take the train rather than the bus.

I woke up the next morning around 7:00, gathered my stuff, and literally within three minutes we were off the train and on our way to the guesthouse by foot. After spending a month in sleepy Chiang Mai and rural mountain villages, I was a little overwhelmed with Bangkok at first. There were lots on the agenda for the first day. First was a canal tour of Bangkok, which was both amazing and relaxing. We stopped to see Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn). It was an intense climb to the top of the Wat and on the way up I heard someone say that foreigners have fallen off it in the past! After the boat tour was lunch along a street lined with vendors. The group split up. I ate with Bintou, Nick, and Ajarn Marcus at a Thai restaurant with aircon and had gwit-diow geng (noodles with curry) and rice. We went to the Museum of Siam. It’s a newly built interactive museum. The exhibits were great and there was lots to read about. I think everybody was just happy to be out of the heat and in the aircon. I think it was the walking around that got to people, not so much the heat, but it was noticeably more humid in Bangkok than in Chiang Mai. After the museum we had free time to ourselves, so naturally everybody went back to the guesthouse to take showers. We had a movie showing in the lobby at 5:00 about the 6 October 1976 Massacre of students during peaceful protests around Thammasat University. We also had the honor of hearing from the very outspoken Tony, a political science major at Chulalongkorn University in the heart of Bangkok. I was stunned by his English. It was some of the best I’ve heard from a Thai student so far. He seemed to be very passionate about Thai politics and gave his honest and unorthodox opinion about the political climate in Thailand now and prospects for the future of Thai politics. Okay so after the discussion is when the night started getting interesting. Let me just say that I didn’t know what a “ping pong show” was before that night and when Reid asked me to go with them to a “ping pong show” I thought he meant this literally. Anyways, that’s later on. First we went to an Irish Pub close to the guesthouse and hung out there for a while. My friend from Bangkok stopped by briefly with her friend from work. Mercy and I set out on a mission for rotee but instead decided to follow the others to the market for shopping. Looking like a tourist, I approached a man selling very illegal and very pirated DVDs. He sounded firm when he said 100 baht for the DVD I wanted. But when I used my Thai and said I was a student he immediately dropped the price down to 70. We wandered around the market for a bit, always getting separated and meeting back up. Around 11:30 I went back to the hotel, because the Ajarns clearly stated that we should be in before midnight. But everybody else had other things planned, so I ended up going back out and meeting up the others again. Tony, with honest and good intentions I think, brought us all to an upstairs club for the ping-pong show. For those who don’t know about it, you’re going to have to google or wikipedia it because it would be inappropriate for me to go on any further about it. We weren’t allowed to take photos, but I’m sure it would of made an interesting facebook album, don’t you think so?

We stayed in the Bangkok Christian Guesthouse off Silom Road. Thursday was a day for us to hear from what some of the local NGOs are doing. We took the skytrain to Klong Toey and went to the Duang Prateep Foundation. This NGO helps people living in Klong Toey, Bangkok’s largest slum. This NGO is doing a lot of really good things for the people who live there. Without education early on, slum life can be easily become a vicious cycle of poverty and the Duang Prateemp Foundation is doing a lot to work against this by helping the children. We took a tour of the Klong Toey slum, which I think some of the other students had some mixed feelings about. But poverty is not something that should be ignored and we don’t see much of it in Chiang Mai, at least not around where we stay. It felt much hotter and I felt a little claustrophobic as we walked through because everything is so close together. A lot of the people there have problems with debt. I’m sure the others wouldn’t agree with me, but I feel this may have been the most meaningful thing we’ve done this semester. The next NGO we went to was the Bangkok Refugee Center, which dealt with people living in exile in Thailand. When I think of refugees in Thailand the first thing that comes to mind is ethnic minorities from Myanmar and Laos along the border regions. So it was interesting to hear about urban refugees and I was surprised when I heard how many countries the refugees come from. I talked with sat and talked for a while with some students around my age from Sri Lanka. They said that they want to go back to Sri Lanka but they cannot. Thailand is a good place for refugees because, especially Bangkok, it is ethnically diverse and they are able to blend in easily, especially among the countless tourists. The Refugee Center is a safe place for them to go to if they are ever in trouble. According to what we were told, the Thai police cannot enter the complex.

From 4:00pm on it was free time. At night we went to the same market again not far from the guesthouse. It just so happened that the street with all gay bars happens to be the most fun place to hang out at night around there. So we drank at a gay bar, called 9 Nine I think, towards the end of the street. Some of the others were drinking at a bar at the other end. The Cabaret Show with katoeys (ladyboys) was the highlight of the night, there’s no doubt about that one. One katoey sang a really slow and I guess sad Thai song, way melodramatic and way over the top to the point of unnecessary (but I guess that was the point). Anyway, she was pretending to cry when suddenly large amounts of snot started to just run all down her face, it was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen and too awesome to describe. I’m not sure how they did that with effects but it was well done. I’m so mad nobody got a picture of that. I looked around and everybody in the club was laughing hysterically. For a minute I think even she was laughing when she put her head down.

Friday morning I woke up two hours before everybody else and made sure I was visibly downstairs to eat breakfast, the first one, at 7:00am sharp. I’ve been running a little late for things and so I wanted to get make sure I was up and ready for Friday. Strange enough, when I went back up to the room at 9:15 Reid and Nick were both still fast asleep. If I hadn’t gone back to the room I’m not sure if they would have woken up in time. We set off for the democracy tour of Bangkok with Ajarn Paul Chambers at 9:30. All of what we were being taught on this tour was all new to me and it was great to visit the places where events took place. We went to the street near Thammasat University where most student protests in Thailand have taken places and the point where people congregate during protests. We ended the tour at Thammasat University and saw the red elevator that students were machine gunned down in by Thai soldiers because they were not able to close the door in time. I had lunch at the university with Tony and some others. After lunch, some people went to see some wats, but I went with Ajarn Marcus and some others to the Forensic Medicine Museum. We took a boat across the river. The museum had bodies of murders, dead babies in formaldehyde, brains of people that had died in every way imaginable, and all kinds of other stuff. There were some really good exhibits too. After that we went to Wat Pra Kaew, which is the most sacred wat in Thailand, site of the Emerald Buddha, and often visited by the Royal Family. This place was incredibly beautiful and the temples were very impressive. The Emerald Buddha is actually made from jade, as our tour guide told us. No photographs were allowed to be taken inside the temple. You were only allowed to stand outside and take a photo looking in. I went inside and sat down and watched as many tourists around me snuck photos of the Emerald Buddha, with total disregard for the Thai man standing behind us as he repeatedly said “no photo.” If I had his job I would hate foreigners. The one thing that they ask people not to do is to take photos of the Emerald Buddha, and still people did, even as they were being told not to by an employee standing nearby. I don’t like being around touristy places and it upset me when I see people being so blatantly disrespectful. I walked around and talked with Dao for a bit while we tried to find the rest of the group.

Dinner for Friday night was originally scheduled to be at Little India, but plans got changed and instead we ate at an Indian restaurant not far from the guesthouse. It was definitely the best meal I had while I was there and one of the highlights of the trip without a doubt. It was expensive, and we had to pay for the ice, but it was worth it. After dinner we went to the night market again down the street, where all the shops and bars are. We drank at the same gay bar again, it seemed to be everyone’s favorite and I liked it too. We went to another katoy show but tonight was special because it was the “Grand Opening” (every Friday was the “Grand Opening”). This just meant the show was a bigger. It was 200 baht, double what we had paid the night before. It was a great show and I think everybody had a lot of fun. I talked with a Thai man and Canadian man who both lived in Canada and were in Bangkok for a while visiting. After the show it was rotee then back to the guesthouse.

Saturday we had to ourselves. I woke up to a text message from my friends, Oh and Moo, saying that they would be at the guesthouse to pick me up in a half hour. I met them downstairs in the lobby and we decided to go to the aquarium, which happens to be the biggest aquarium in Southeast Asia. When we got there I saw that we could pay extra and get a package deal to see the 4D movie and the boat ride. I read the sign – 950 baht. Oh kept saying 500 baht but I didn’t know what she was talking about because what I was reading said 950 baht. Then she told me that the sign next to it, which was in Thai, said 500 baht for Thai people. It was written out in Thai so foreigners couldn’t read the different price. I told the guy at the counter that I was a student, showed him my Payap card, and paid the 500 baht Thai price. We had a lot of fun at the aquarium. I want to go back again next time I’m in Bangkok. After the 4D move (its called 4D I think because it was 3D and also had motion and other effects too), we got lunch upstairs in the Siam Paragon mall upstairs, one of the biggest malls in Asia. We all got different food so we split up and I got lost when I tried to find our table but luckily Oh saw me and called me over. It was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, food court I’ve been to. We got back on the skytrain and I went back to the guesthouse, packed up my stuff, had a meeting upstairs to discuss our time in Bangkok with Ajarn Adam, and got back on the skytrain with everybody to go to the train station for the 13 hour train ride back to Chiang Mai. I woke up on Sunday to bright lights and Ashley shaking me telling me to get up. Within minutes I was off the train and back in Chiang Mai. Bangkok was so much fun but I was glad to be back in Chiang Mai.

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