Beautiful Bangkok
Other than refugees from Burma, or Cambodia perhaps, I suspect I am probably the only person who has arrived lately in Bangkok, with its pollution and bad traffic, and found it beautiful. The key phrase of the day: everything is relative.
Lahore International Airport in Pakistan, my location of departure for Bangkok, is a grungy, uninteresting place where gift stalls and the concession stands somehow all blend into the same brown room-bordering mess. The fun part of Lahore Int’l is the well-marked prayer area for pre-flight panic and deity negotiation (or simply for the five times daily prescribed prayer ritual) and the expensive internet centre adjacent to it, where after you’ve prayed for a safe flight you can check your stocks and see if your business trip is even worth it.
Now of course, I was not leaving Pakistan on business. I was fleeing. A refugee of sorts. Running away from the stink of India and her next door, equally stinky neighbour to the west. Countries where everything is an effort, time is negotiable, and cows roam the
streets. India and Pakistan had just got me down. I had planned 14 weeks but I left early. My trip will now end with 10 weeks total spent in India and Pakistan and the next five would be in beautiful, amazing, relief-bringing Thailand.
Beautiful and amazing, as descriptors, are blatantly inadequate as well as unspecific. They do not bring stimulating visuals to mind, but when I stepped onto that purple Thai Airways plane and the air hostesses greeted me in their bright Thai silk dress suits, all I could think was, “beautiful!”. When the �berfriendly hostess then offered a cold drink and there was ginger ale, I thought, “amazing!” and when I went to the bathroom and it was as clean as the one in the Awari Hotel in Lahore that I had visited earlier that day which literally brought me to tears with, “Now this is a bathroom!”, I was stuck again with the nondescript word, “beautiful!!!”
Bangkok, compared to Delhi and Lahore is unbelievably clean. There is no overwhelming constant smell of decay, shit or burning. (There are strange Thai food smells, but those are completely different) There are not, in most streets, cows. Traffic is bad, but you can spend your time enjoying the pause in a reasonably priced a/c taxi. The key: metered. i.e. – no negotiation.
I spent two days in Bangkok wandering the pretty much all-white, all-Western, all-the-time Khao San Road, a tourist ghetto to beat Delhi’s Paharganj any day. Walked past bootleg CD stands, stalls selling fake ID’s and cheap t-shirts. And, oh yes, all those trendy, blond, tanned Western backpackers. I was in my purple salwar kameez and if I wasn’t so desperate for new, clean, Western clothing, I would have enjoyed everyone’s assumptions I was Indian. I may even have turned into a smugly superior traveller to equal the guy in William Sutcliffe’s “Are You Experienced?” who one-ups everyone.
“Beggars on the street? Pshaw!!! In India…”
“You took a tuk-tuk to a shop and bought gems? Sucker!”
Luckily, I kept to myself.
Taking a bus to Siam Centre in downtown Bangkok, like that gleaming bathroom in the Awari hotel in Lahore, I was almost brought to tears. Nine West! Shu Uemura! Yogen Fruz! For someone who shuns most trendy designers at home for lack of funds and the attitude that comes with the clothing, the Materialist-Emily discovered in India was in heaven. The stores were groomed minimal paeans to design and the designers I hadn’t heard of, mainly Thai, surpassed the familiar names for originality and fashion spunk.
I would have had some kind of pulmonary embolism brought on by excessive shopping desires if I hadn’t left quickly after I arrived, heading to the southern bus terminal. I quickly bought capris and a t-shirt at Esprit and that evening happily boarded my bus to Krabi.
Looking forward to a week on a Thai beach, the shit on the streets and grumpy moods brought on by India and Pakistan and my own mind state were gone. Leaving India and Pakistan I felt guilty for giving up after nine weeks. Arriving in Bangkok there was only relief as the Esprit-toting refugee grinned stupidly in a deluxe bus that was actually what it promised to be.
