Tag Archives: bangkok

Version 0.57 (Just Looking out the Window)

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04/24/19

Sitting in the lobby of the hostel, at a long table set against the large windows that look out onto the little square where this hostel and another, several restaurants, and the karaoke bar next door are situated. It is a quiet morning, late, nearly noon. A woman sits on a bench beneath the awning of a Korean bbq spot playing with her phone. Occasionally someone passes through the square: a tortured soul stumbling along the shores of hell, submitting to some past life’s sins. Creatures forced to endure these temperatures for eternity. The heat out here is incredible, and the humidity nearly so as well, and yet all the Thais are seen in jeans or long pants. The woman across the way even has on a denim jacket.

I’m amazed.

Though, if one were to drag them to the north or central U.S. during a winter they would not be able to put on enough layers to keep warm.

A cat has just crawled out from beneath a car. It looks a lot like the cat, Chibi, at the other hostel, Kamin Bird House, which I actually miss a bit. A lovely Japanese name for a cat. I like it very much. It is common practice that if you own a cat here you have its tail docked. Unless these cats are bred this way. I’m not sure what the reasoning would be (for the former, not so much the latter), so I suspect perhaps it it a particular breed.

I have just finished breakfast: simple “food” consisting of toast, bananas, and instant coffee. No plans for the day. Real coffee somewhere eventually, and “work”, and take a wander through Chinatown perhaps. A fruit seller has just setup shop in in a parking spot in front of the bbq joint. Immediately the woman under the awning gets up and purchases a bag of papaya or watermelon, and an employee of the restaurant makes a purchase as well. And just that quickly the fruit seller moves on. I though I might get a bag of something. Well, the city is full of these guys. I’ll find one later.

The woman at the check-in desk is watching a Thai soap opera. In it a woman is speaking while a melancholy guitar is plucked in the background. When I see people watching these things sometimes I wonder if they’re reliving a time in their past. An incident, maybe. Or a relationship. What is the draw to these shows that are so heavy with contrived drama? My mother used to watch this sort of programming when I was a child. All My Children, As the World Turns… I believe there were a few others, all with the same general premise, all quite dark, and dripping with an over-the-top drama and phoniness that one wonders how they could be taken seriously. Yet they all had their followings, and were all quite popular for a while.

Version 0.56 (What Does it Mean to Have “Seen” a Place?)

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04/22/19

Fresh crisis today? I don’t know.

That’s not exactly how I wanted to start this journal—so dramatically—though it was bound to be on something about feeling a bit lost, a bit without purpose (how many times have I written about purpose now?).

What the fuck am I doing in Bangkok? Honest to God I truly don’t want to be here. Maybe I really need to embrace some of the more touristic things, and head into the older part of the city and the areas near the river? Maybe I’ll be more inspired and motivated to photograph there? The heat makes any time spent outside miserable, though. It doesn’t help that in some sense I feel that what I am doing is a waste of time, that my photography is not appreciated, will never be appreciated, is unimportant, doesn’t matter (though why should it?). I have been feeling like an absolute trash photographer lately. The lowest of the low. I am a coward, too scared to face someone on the street and take his/her picture (not that that is a new feeling, but the intensity of it is). I feel like the dumb, white tourist offending the “exotic” locals by photographing them; every glance in my direction is discouragement. Maybe I just need a change of scenery in the city. Maybe I just need a change of head-space, a change of head, a change of brains. a change of self perception. Having moved hostel locations should help with that. The biggest problem here, though, is purpose, as I wrote in my third sentence. I have no purpose. The purpose of the whole trip is travel, and I’m not doing much of that. I take some sort of vehicular transport from spot to spot, mosey around the place, then move on. Can I really say that I’ve visited Thailand when I haven’t left the city of Bangkok? What does it mean to “see” a place, anyway? How much of a city or country does one have to explore to qualify as a person who may say he has seen it?

I’m writing all this in a smallish hall within which numerous food vendors are set up by the Thong Lo BTS stop. I’m at a bright, canary yellow table, sitting on a metal stool. All around me is a rush of people swooshing to and fro: vendors running out food and drinks, and visitors looking for an empty or near-empty table, or searching for a food stall that looks appealing. It’s all metal and plastic stools here, as it seemingly is at all street food stalls throughout Asia; and colorfully painted square metal tables; and white tile floor, definitely not right now very white. The aroma of food cooked or cooking or raw suffuses the space, and all those smells and aromas mingle together into one homogeneous scent of food unless someone walks by with a plate of something, which has a tendency to waft up right beneath one’s nose as it is brought past. Right now I smell cucumber or papaya, and some sort of meat sizzling on a grill, and I hear distinctly something crackling in a wok, mingling with the voices of those behind the counter. Mostly the space is a rumble of conversation pierced periodically by a passing scooter, the gait of a woman walking in heels, the bright high voice of a child, the tinking of silverware, the stacking of plastic plates and bowls, the low almost imperceptible rumble of a bus (or is that the sky train?) Fans and iced drinks are the only means of keeping cool in here, though occasionally there is a draft from outside that blows pleasantly into the complex. A couple sits at a table and laughs out loud together. He has just arrived, and brought her something, but their relationship I don’t think is what that statement might immediately cause one to think, and she walks out from behind a stall to chit-chat at a table and look through what he has brought. I like this place. It is for all peoples: westerner, easterner, and Thai alike. It’s not for the rich, it’s not for the poor. It’s for anyone who comes hungry, no matter what his or her place on the rungs of the social ladder.