OK: So I should write about my trip to Bangkok or I’m pretty much not going to. As regular readers of my blog/twitter/other forms of computer addiction will know, I went to sunny Thailand at the end of January. And it was teh cool.
Trying to remember all the stuff we did is pretty difficult. We were only there for four days but we crammed in enough stuff that it felt like a much longer holiday. We’d kind of forgotten a bit about the exchange rate being so good, so when we got there we were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves super-rich. Unfortunately, we were also super-dumb; almost every person you meet in Bangkok is out to scam you somehow. At first this is quite confronting; like when the first taxi you get in charges you 700 baht for a fairly routine trip from the airport and you almost asphixiate in the back seat because his gas tank is on the fritz. Or when half an hour later, you’re dumb enough to get into a tuk-tuk at the insistence of a friendly man who insists today is a “special day where entry to temples in Bangkok is free”. It was clearly the Bangkok Gem Scam. Yes, a scam so obvious and well known that it has it’s own fucking wikipedia article. Luckily we got out pretty quickly after that and went shopping.
And the shopping was goooooood. I bought shit. I bought a lot of shit. Clothes, mostly. I insisted I wasn’t going to get any clothes tailor made until I had too many 100 baht ($3-ish) long island ice teas and started stupidly window shopping. Next thing I know, I’m inside being measured up for shirts that are, admittedly, fabulous.
We managed to get a few massage-type things in, which was rad as I’ve never really had a holiday where things like that actually happened. Again, crazy cheap and crazy excellent.
What else? Well, we hired a khlong and went out looking at the canals of Bangkok, which from what I gather is a lot like what the city was like before it boomed in the ’90s. That was pretty cool. There are houses falling into the water, next to bizarre concept houses, next to temples… still, the khlong driver was running a racquet of high-pressure souveneir sales and clearly had deals with a few places including a muay thai fighting joint that he pulled us up to and pressured us to check out. He extracted 20 baht from the souveneir ladies on little paddle boats by revving his engine until they coughed up. Uncool, but this is kind of what Bangkok is like. You get used to it and it ends up being a fun part of the city.
One of the most amusing ripoffs was when we asked a tuk-tuk driver to take us to Patpong. He was a little too enthusiastic about it and charged much less than I’d expected. Every taxi and tuk tuk driver in Bangkok wants to take you to Patpong, and most will get pretty vocal about it, so the kickbacks from it must be pretty decent. But he didn’t take us to Patpong. He took us to some random back alley warehouse where they wanted to charge us a stupid amount of baht for entry. We ended up not paying much as we just walked out and they quickly followed us asking “OK! OK! How much you want to pay?”
I bought a ladyboy prostitute/bartender a drink as by that point I was well in the habit of greasing the wheel with small tips and favours (and also because it was fun to buy a ladyboy prostitute/bartender a drink) and we sat down for the show. Which was pretty much everything we could’ve hoped for. They started with ping pong, I’ll put it that way. That’s like U2 opening their set with Where The Streets Have No Name or Scandal’us opening their set with Me, Myself And I (things are about to get odd, so if you’re the prudish type, skip to the next paragraph). From there we enjoyed Girl With Cigarette (woah!), Girl With Amazing Pepsi-sculling Vaginal Cavity (the whole bottle! In! Out! Woah!), Girl With Enormous Length Of Ribbon, Girl With Razor Blades On A String Oh My God and a few other delightfully unpalatable sights. The pepsi thing has stayed with me. I can’t look at cola the same way now. Oddly, we seemed to be the only two people in the place enjoying ourselves. It was full of men who seemed to be trying to look as disinterested as possible. Totally hilarious. We then left, got into a random tuk tuk and asked the driver “that wasn’t Patpong, was it?”. “No.” He said flatly. Hilarious.
We checked out the temple of the reclining buddah, which is almost awe-inspiring enough to make you believe in buddhism, though we channelled that sensation into the purchase of a small jade buddha and some hideous wall art. The wall art was the most amusing scam of the whole trip; a man outside the temple holding a series of identical but slightly differently coloured felt prints, insisting that he was the “original artist”. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him, which is kind of problematic in Bangkok - if you don’t dispute even the most reasonable claim, stupid things happen, like you end up with three identical pictures of a generic south east asian scene in three different colours.
We went shopping at Chakutak night market on our last day there and then Siam Paragon on the way back. Chakutak is fucking awful; about six times the size of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Markets and full of boring crap. But it’s not as bad as the Siam Paragon, which is a generic large shopping centre; full of luxury brands and rich Thais; having not seen too many well-to-do-thai around where we were staying in Banglamphu, I was a bit shocked and said something to the effect of “So this is where all the rich people are hiding.”
That night we did a few random things that were kind of great; fish massage was surprisingly pleasant. You stick your feet in a fishbowl and fifty or so carnivorous goldfish come and bite off your dead skin using their tiny mouths. Once you get past the tickling, it’s like you’re being gently stroked by ten hands at once. Also, we ate bugs. Serious bugs. We started with caterpillars, which reminded me of those bags of “French Fries” chips you can buy over here. We got a bit enthusiastic after that and bought bags of maggots and grasshoppers; the bags were surprisingly HUGE. The maggots had a dusty texture and the grasshoppers were delicious; they spray all the bugs with soy sauce, which the grasshoppers seemed to absorb perfectly so it was like biting into a crunchy soy bomb. We ate too many of them and felt sick. They looked like this:
So much else happened but I realise I’m dribbling on here; we checked out the enormous Chinatown district and accidentally ended up in this rooftop restauraunt where they made us an amazing grilled sea bass, filled us with beer and let us look at their panoramic city view for something like $20 AUD. I got overexcited about going fabric shopping and then we accidentally stumbled over a market where everything was closed except a dozen or so shops containing women sewing amazing drag costumes. That kind of thing kept happening; we pretty much spent our whole trip stumbling over surprise awesomeness.
Obviously I bought some music while I was there and you can find bits and pieces of it on this blog already; I’ll be posting more soon because there’s some interesting stuff there and it’s something a bit different to listen to. And obviously I ate a lot of thai food and it was awesome.
We had a day in Singapore on the way back but it wasn’t much fun; ended up lost in a big shopping centre in the city centre that was full of boring luxury brand shops. The highlight of the last day was wandering around the enormous, visually striking, terribly run Suvarnabhumi Airport and realizing we could bring four litres of alcohol into Australia as we looked at the duty free for bugger all money. Actually, the highlight of Singapore proper was lunch at McDonalds and where I enjoyed their terribly titled Double Prosperity Burger. It is basically a hot beef roll stuffed with the most disgusting burger meat and cheapest gravy you can imagine. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t feel prosperous. But it was an amusingly disgusting dining experience.
So anyway, you should totally go to Bangkok.
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