A tale of two cities

From Singapore I flew to Bangkok. Taking to heart the less than stellar reviews of my Singapore post I am going to spare you the full compare and contrast with Bangkok, though it may come up as an essay question on the final exam (wink, wink). I have come to accept that most of you prefer turtle erotica or pretty doggie pictures to cogent social analysis and will stoop to your level.

I will say that Bangkok is sort of an anti-Singapore. Where the Lion City is clean, orderly, efficient, conservative and safe, Bangkok is the Wild West. It is a crowded, dirty, hot and noisy, anything goes sort of place. It has much more life and excitement than Singapore and feels more real and genuine. It has true history and character and is far more likable. On that other hand, it is far less livable and after 48 hours I was glad to get out.

I visited the Royal Palace to pay homage to Thailand’s Kings, and especially its greatest king, Yul Brynner. I have always admired Yul as a role model for us bald people, though I think making Thais eat with forks instead of chopsticks was a big mistake. Eating with chopsticks is part of the appeal of Asian food. I kid of course. You will recall that Yul played Thailand’s King Mongkut in the musical “The King and I”. That musical is barred in Thailand because they feel it ridicules the King and country and is replete with historical inaccuracies, and I’m sure it is. The Thai kings did a really impressive job preserving and building a kingdom between powerful neighbors – first the Khmer, Chinese and Burmese and later the English and French colonial powers. Did you know that Thailand is the only country in Southern Asia that was never under foreign domination? Did you also know that Yul Brynner was the only Thai king ever to have won an Oscar?

The Royal Palace is fabulous and I will post photos at some point. Also, in central Bangkok you can’t swing an eight armed statute of Vishnu without hitting a gorgeous Bhuddist temple. They are known as “Wats” and are everywhere. It’s a shame that they don’t have something called a “Why” or a “Who”, or we would have the making of a great “who’s on first?” routine. (As of now it is a little dry: “what did you see today?”, “Yes”, “Yes what?”, “Yes, Wat!”….). The Wats are fabulously ornamented and decorated, and you get all sorts of fancy Buddhas, in jade or silver or gold, or encrusted with diamonds. Or sometimes they just go for quantity and you get hundreds of them in one room, or size and they are enormous. These aren’t fat Buddhas, by the way. They are reasonably svelt. Perhaps the fat ones are in China or India, I couldn’t say.

One problem with Bangkok is that they have few streets, and the ones they have are organized like tree branches, radiating into smaller and smaller alleyways. All the traffic is funneled to a few main thoroughfares and is horrific most of the time. That’s one drawback of not having been colonized. The French would have gladly bulldozed whole neighborhoods down to put in grand boulevards. They would also have taught the Thais how to make a decent croissant. You wonder why Anna didn’t tell Yul to forget about the chopsticks already and put in some decent streets. And sidewalks too, while he was at it. The few they have are narrow, riddled with pot holes, and covered with street vendors – all at the same time. Also, since the French weren’t around to impose a roman alphabet on the Thai language (as they did for the Vietnamese), and most street signs are only in Thai, navigation is a particular challenge. Walkabout’s philosophy is that the only real way to get to know a city is to, well, walk about it. And Bangkok makes that quite perilous. There were times when I practically had to hail a cab just to get across the street.

Bangkok is modernizing quickly, and in the midst of the chaos there are office and residential towers and shopping plazas springing up that, in them selves, would not be out of place in Singapore. The problem is that the basic infrastructure of roads and transport wasn’t there to support them. They are being creative in cobbling together solutions, including elevated highways and rail lines over some of the main avenues. It feels a bit short of the task and is in danger of creating a “Blade Runner” type of future world where the old decaying city exists underneath the modern world of skyscrapers. But I said I’d stop with the societal critiques, so I will. Bye.

Your faithful correspondent,

Walkabout Dave