Bangkok

The streets of Bangkok are a riot of color, sidewalks bumpy with disrepair and jutting manholes, paved smooth with intent intention, and crowded with people coming and going. The personal space around you is continually interrupted; someone asks you to come inside their restaurant (the food is good!), a card is flashed in your face reading “SEX DVD VCD”, a hand is placed on your shoulder, grasping for attention, a tuk-tuk driver roars “where you go” while chasing you, a ball is thrown in your near vision and splats on a table (ah a novelty slime ball, remember those?) and a scantily-clad woman winks at you.

The roaring, teeming, quiet city is at odds with the smile of a vendor selling chicken on a stick, mango sticky rice, smelly fish, cool diet coke cans. Neon signs meekly proclaim SHOOT GUN above a bright Burger King sign. McDonalds is hidden in a building, between a person selling pad thai fresh to order and a t-shirt vendor (Bush is a Criminal! or ORGASM DONOR shirts?). Boats churn through the brown water of a canal while above a endless line of green, purple, yellow, and red taxis zoom to their destinations.

Inside the mall, the MBK center, the riot of color and chaotic choice is somewhat tamed by straight lines and clear paths, but the soul of the city lives on, transformed only slightly. Stores squat next to each other, clothes next to watches, dressed-up food vendors next to trinkets. KFC shares a hall with a fancy salon. Popular Thai restaurants, oddly bland in decoration and senior buffet-like in ambiance rub shoulders with the upscale Tokyu department store.

In the Pantip plaza tech mecca, electronics heaven, swap meet-cum-warehouse, junk crazed partygoers scoop up USB sticks while keeping an eye on the new HP printer under their arm. A laptop box hangs from a hand as easily as a new phone kisses a lip for the first time. Five floors of tilting at windmills, countless thousands of words and products assault the senses, cameras, joypads, computers, specifications, RAM, memory, pirated dvds, software, keyboards, mice. And that’s the first floor, upward you go as the windmills get smaller, proprietors of stores get more laid back and intense, the bargaining begins in earnest as you eye a new camera or hot gadget. Sony competes for your attention along with Samsung and Canon. In a quiet food court oasis on the second floor, you refuel with a bag of Lays chips and a diet coke, while people scurry with tokens to purchase a plate of rice and curry.

Outside again, passing by a store selling metal welded sculptures, you also notice a pharmacy and 7-11, both good places to stop and get a bottle of water. Unlikely places contain the likely, while likely places contain the unlikely, the contradictions piling up until you are comfortable with what is around the corner.

This is Bangkok, a little Thai village contained in a huge Thai village, all exuberantly and quietly, quintessentially Thai.