This is where it starts to get interesting!
On my flight from Melbourne to Bangkok, about 9 and a half hours, the guy next to me had excessively loud music on his headphones throughout the whole of the flight, and not only that but he also felt compelled to hum along, loudly and in falsetto, to every single song. Grrr. I hate people. In my own inimitable fashion, I had completely failed to make any kind of real preparation for Thailand, other than having the address of my hostel scrawled on the back of a business card. Fortunately my taxi driver a) knew how to find the address, b) spoke decent English, and c) was more or less legit.
I got to the hostel just after most of the guests had gone out for the night, which was a pity, but then I wasn't feeling too energetic after my long flight. So I just settled for going into the 7/11 next door and having the inevitable ten minutes of marvelling at how cheap everything was. When the partygoers came back, I learned that they'd been viewing a spectacle which in the interests of taste & discretion I will refer to, synonymically, as 'feline table tennis'. Ahem.
Yesterday morning I got up and went off on my usual big long city-exploring walk. The weather was totally overcast, stiflingly hot and extremely humid. (I have taken scissors to my jeans and casual trousers, they're cut-offs now, although my tracky bottoms remain intact). Everywhere I went, I was besieged by young guys trying to sell me rides in tuk-tuks (motorised rickshaws), or pirate DVDs, or women, or whatever else. Notwithstanding the lack of preparation mentioned above, I am streetwise enough to know that the best response is just a smile and 'no thank you'. Also whenever they ask 'first time Thailand?' I reply 'no, here many times' and they visibly lose interest right away.
It was quite interesting just to wander round the streets and marvel at how crowded and ramshackle everything is. I thought crossing the street in New York was hazardous but this is just a whole new level altogether. I've been reading a lot of Dickens recently and it's hard not to draw parallels between 19th-century London and places like Bangkok today - the dirt, the seediness, the poverty, but also the humanity and vibrancy that comes with it. So on the one hand you have malnourished beggars, pimps and prostitutes, but then you also have my taxi driver from the airport who told me about how he works extra long days because his wife is too ill to work and he is paying his daughter's university fees, for which he gets no government help. Give the Thais 150 years, perhaps less, and no doubt they'll end up with a coddled & sterile welfare state like ours.
Came back to the hostel, had a shower and spent the afternoon relaxing under the aircon. Later on we all watched the Olympic ceremony and then went out on the lash. (Most of the people in the hostel are Canadians or Americans; the rest are mainly Brits and Aussies, with a few miscellaneous Europeans making up the balance). We went to a couple of strip bars, which as you might expect were full of leering old Western men and tiny little miserable-looking Thai girls. Not really my idea of fun. Fortunately we soon pitched up at a regular nightclub and there we stayed until it was hometime.
I don't think I'll stay in Bangkok too long. I'm going to check out the bus schedules and see what's available.
