Days 43-48: Bangkok

Mar 12-17

I stayed in a simple but clean and comfortable six-bed dormitory at the Hosteling International youth hostel in Thewet, a less touristy and more relaxed neighborhood of Bangkok recommended to me by Charlie. The Hosteling International organization is quite an interesting one, having been around for a hundred years and with locations in most of the tourist-visited countries of the world. The organization is centered around cultural exchange, meeting and learning from other people, environmental sustainability, and peace. They are often quite inexpensive, a wonderful place to meet fellow travelers, have friendly and helpful staff, have great common spaces and facilities, and you don't have to be a ¨youth¨ to stay there. My HI hostel in Thewet is forty years old, the oldest of about six in Bangkok.


My neighborhood was near the national library and a market filled with tailors and food stalls where I enjoyed my favorite Thai dish, pad si yu gai (wide noodles fried with collared greens, egg, and chicken, plus a twist of lime).


The only negative to my time in Bangkok was the hot and humid weather that sucked the energy from you, and the mosquitoes that did a number on me. I generally don't like to bother with bug spray and just get used to the bites, but these ones were extremely itchy for days after. I took at least two showers each day due to the heat.

One of the friendly travelers I met at my hostel was Alex from the Philippines. He is a youthful and eager 38-year-old manager of a train control center in Manila, and was in Bangkok for a three-day conference on Asian train systems. He invited me to join his scheduled tour at the Bangkok Skytrain control center. We rode the Skytrain to its end where the headquarters was, and learned about the inner workings of a large city's train system. The head manager spoke good English, so I could ask him non-trivial questions.


After the tour, we took the subway (different from the Skytrain) to its end, looked around the primary, suffocating Bangkok train station, and then wandered through tiny backstreets of Chinatown and a car and motorbike repair neighborhood where used parts were piled high on the sidewalks. We finally found a pier to catch the water taxi, used mostly by locals to commute, back to near our hostel. The taxi assistant at the back of the boat communicated with the driver at the front via a whistle, and he jumped off the boat to anchor it while riders disembarked and embarked, then untied the boat and jumped back on.


The staff at the hostel were also very friendly. Boa and Tak, two Thai 23-year-old women who had studied ¨business English¨ together at university, befriended me and took me and others out for dinner a few times. I had a really fun evening out with Alex and Tak, first at a hotel in Chinatown for her university annual reunion ¨red party¨ (most people wore red). We met a bunch of her friends, ate some good food, and watched hilarious singing and dancing performances put on by her classmates in competition for king and queen of the party. Afterwards, a bunch of us went out to a bar for drinks, dancing, and live music.


Continuing my tour through Bangkok transportation, I rode the bus (of which there are an incredible number in Bangkok) to a mega mall complex. I still find it amazing that large cities throughout the world all have huge malls. I found a small video game arcade where there was a mob of spectators watching one guy consistently beat a stream of challengers in Tekken 6 (a classic two-player fighting game). Also, this mall boasted a McDonald's with a culturally adapted Ronald McDonald statue outside.


My hostel had a decent wifi connection, so I was able to use my N800 to talk with my parents, Jess, and some other friends from home. The N800 has proven to be a great travel gadget for skyping, minor email, reading things online and offline, backing up my photos to extra memory cards, and uploading photos overnight to my server. It is quite slow for some things, but then there are almost always computers around for about a dollar an hour.

On my last day, I finally did my first normal tourist activity and visited a nearby temple. During my time in Bangkok, I just wasn't motivated to see the usual tourist sites, and I'm finding my other experiences are much more memorable. That evening, I joined another friendly guy from my hostel, French Canadian Bruno, for an evening of Muay Thai (kick boxing), the adored national sport of Thailand. I'm not particularly into watching people beat on each other, but it was quite exciting at times, and more than half the fun was the setting. In retrospect, we were glad we had chosen the cheap seats, as we could still see fine and that's where all the locals were. Betting was the central activity, with a lot of yelling, hand signals, and scurrying around. The almost entirely male crowd cheered and chanted for their boxer, and then large denomination bills changed hands after the match was over. There were ten matches in all, lasting about four hours over the evening, and we stayed for most of it.