one iteration

Fwiends

All smiles

Drinky drink

Halloween haunts

Bars and hopping

Not CEB Approved Shoes!!

Taking pictures

Hui at his best

We’ll all miss you man, have a GREAT trip.

Three boys at Umphium Mai, walking down the street in their rubber boots.  Click to see the Thailand album.

To walk in a Bangkok market is to experience the endless. For even when you reach the conclusion of a row of stalls, there are either still yet more or a quiet darkness.

Even if you choose the darkness, the solace of a cab or tuk-tuk, there is still yet tomorrow; for tomorrow you will have to walk through the same paths, even if they are elsewhere, doomed or exalted to repeat the past day, repeat tomorrow, until each day is a treadmill of human, a revolving door that never stops, a riot of flesh, a sluggish river of elbows and eyes.

The vendors line the streets at night, springing up quickly, setting up shop for the endless stream of bodies flowing by. For their religion is sales, and negotiation their penance, these rootless proprietors of a tiny space, enclosed by plastic and fluorescent.

Traveling alone, if only briefly, one feels a certain sense of freedom; to both mourn humanity and to celebrate the heart. Writing and observing, both intensely lonely things to do, crowd close when you are alone. They tap on your shoulder, asking, “Where have you been?” Often we are too preoccupied chasing after our own highs, looking for money, women or men, or power. Money in the sense of a glad bargain or a penny saved. Women in the sense of a quick tryst or a deep longing. Power in the sense of a strong bicep or an ordered business.

All these and more clutter the obstructed mind, anchoring us to a clouded existence. Not that these obstructions aren’t important in their way, but in order to understand and appreciate something, one must occasionally distance oneself from it.

LAX. Hello America, bye Thailand.

My slide into Bangkok madness began at FoodLoft, on the seventh floor of the Central Department Store, where the chic and wealthy come to dine after a long, hot day of shopping in the six floors of air conditioned starkness. The first tumble began with a glass of red wine and ended with a nipple pinch.

FIrst, dinner at FoodLoft — a clean cavalcade of food, tidy booths of neatly compartmentalized international food. There’s the Italian station, complete with pizza, pasta, salad, and sandwiches. Asia is represented well (represent!) with Indian, Korean, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai selections. Rounding out the gourmet choices are a beverage (alcoholic or not) and dessert station.

Sated, we head off to Silom (Sodom?) to begin our night of carousing. Upon entering the club, the emptiness of the place starkly contrasted with the teeming fullness of the streets outside, with vendors and taxi drivers fighting for your attention. Soon, though, the club filled up sneakily, quickly, a Thai magic trick using white people as assistants.

Then the drag show started with a throbbing fanfare of deep bass and pulsing lights. The crowd was a Thai curry, asian food mixed with a little white rice, topped off with a few exotic spices. Still sizzling from dinner, everyone watched expectantly, hopefully, quietly, and intently.

The performers came on stage in successive waves, each better and worse than the last, many indistinguishable from real women; curves were had by most, breasts by some, but all were in glorious drag. Some songs were in Thai, others in English, and the most electric performance was a rendition of “Diamonds are a girls’ best friend.”

Then the dancing began, and as the beat of the music mixed with the alcohol, fermenting with the moist air conditioned air, a gentle Bangkok madness seized the crowd. We moved up to the stage to dance, and the dance possessed us for a space of time, while time owned the dance, beating, crescendoing, pausing, to the staccato of rock, the drums of techno, and rumbles of anonymous bass.

No rave this was, but coke freely flowed through the stage crowd, inhaled quickly and slowly through a straw directly into the nostrils. Afterwards, straw placed jauntily in the ear, barechested dancers moved to an altered beat only visible to them. A tall, older, white man was the mediator of substance, dealer of straws, laughing, smiling, grinding with drag queens, bouncing from one toned body to another, a giver, a voyeur, and a participant.

I danced on to myself, writing both my loneliness and peace in the space around me while watching others write their stories in the air; some with lustful kisses and squeezes, some with cool calm, and others with amused eyes and indifferent moves.

On a trip to the bathroom, eye contact was established with a passerby, slow grins were the dividend, and a nipple squeeze was the deposit. I smiled and kept walking, for this bank was closed today.

Spent, exhausted, some time later, sitting oustide with Jenny I watched the ebb and flow of people leaving and going the club. Frantic and calm with purposeful action, partygoers left with single-minded determination, water bottles in hand and ecstasy in their bodies, and entered with searching gazes and heads raised upright.

After retrieving Adam from the lustful embrace of a besotted Italian, Armani in his eyes and Florence in his touch, we walked home through the emptiness of the streets with the trash keeping us company. The cool clean sheets of the hotel beds were a balm on our alcohol-heated bodies, and conversation drained us of our remaining energy, allowing us to slide into tomorrow with the club only a fevered dream fondly remembered.

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.

The air conditioning blows steadily into the hotel room as I type away on Adam’s Powerbook (my old one!).  As the temperature drops, my mind wanders to the experiences of the past week.

I’ve written a lot on paper, but haven’t had a chance yet to find a suitable place of quiet repose and translate my scribbles into text on the screen.  I’ll do that soon enough.  Topics of note include the elephant ride, the refugee camp, and Bangkok itself.  Food, too.

Coming right up, with a side of rice.

Love all, serve all. We are at Hard Rock Cafe, a brief moment of Americana (really Englandia, as HRC is from England, but I digress).

Happy Fourth, everyone. Light one up for me and pray that our fine leaders take a moment to contemplate our place (America) in the world and do something about it besides pardoning scum like Libby.

Love all, serve all, indeed.

Bamboo raft.  Pole.

A splash of color moves by, never to be seen again, but to show up around the bend.  The peaks and valleys of the lush growth around the river almost mimic music in its reverberations - up, soaring, your mind lifting free, cushioned by soft ferns, by the brown water, only to fall down, down the slope, eyes following the random logic of the growth.

Once music is released as sound it dissipates with only an echo in your mind - as you pole along a river, senses open, eyes open to the tune of life - “forward, forward” it says relentlessly - “forward!”  As your eyes follow the river, the vegetation, the bugs, butterflies, gusts of moist air, pushed forward in the strong current - it is time to pole.  Pole on the left, our guide motions, pole on the right.

You go through a rapid, the bamboo raft temporarily submerges, almost to your knees,  falling is a possibility, the music swells - and we are through - but not done with the river.

The mystery of a river is a cliche.  Rivers are simply time.  Their essence would not be possible without that capability to move both in the classic three dimensions and in the fourth - time.  When you are standing on a river, pole in hand, listening to the quiet symphony, it is as if you are temporarily removed from time and are able to feel its currents and sense how it moves you forward.

When a butterfly lands on Jenny’s oar - a bright orange little thing - it is an incongruous visitor from afar, a nomad stopping for a spell, stopping time, stopping its wings so that a hurricane would not form, so that a breeze would blow on quiet hills, so that a mist would fall in a swamp, and so that a snowflake would form in the highest reaches of the atmosphere.

Then your eyes catch another splash of color, and the music starts again, your brain and senses lost in another storm of notes.

You know how you get a mental image of what a trip might be like, but it never quite is close to reality? Well, that happened to me about this trek that we just got back from.

Three days, two nights.

Some highlights (too tired to write right now):

• You can’t feel leeches (yes)
• Indigenous villages are hard to get to by foot
• Bamboo rafts are teh rock (ftw!)
• You can blow bubbles with only a leaf
• Downhill is harder than uphill
• Elephant hair is very wiry
• Quiet dignity of village people
• Cats here are timid. Very. Dogs too.
• Falafel after 3 days of Thai food is delicious. (Not that the Thai food wasn’t also delicious).
• French men are pigs (its true…)

Anyway, tomorrow holds a 6 hour bus ride to Mae Sot. Jenny’s pad and a Thai/Burmese refugee camp. No tourists allowed, but you can get in by invitation.

Been learning a bit about the particular trouble the Burmese have been through, more on that later.