Bureaucrats In Paradise

Bangkok, January 10, 2012
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The only thing that hasn't changed for me in Bangkok since 1960 is my total feel good about this special nook of our planet.

1960, escaping from a hepatitis quarantine in Calcutta, another long story, I ended up in Bangkok via Rangoon. Even though I had made serious money on my round-the-world trip up to then, in Beirut (belly dancing), Damascus (decorating in an international fair), Izmir (same as Damascus), Kabul (selling a car I had bought cheaply in Turkey) and Delhi (selling gold coins for a lot more than I had paid for them in Turkey), I was totally broke on account of a Calcutta hospital stay.
My home in Bangkok, for about two months, was a shack on stilts reached by a wooden causeway over a swamp.
Years ago, on a previous visit, I tried to find the place but that swamp, in walking distance from the imperial palace, was paved over between tall buildings. This temporary home of mine must have been a precursor of today's backpacker guesthouses. There were no backpackers then but the shack's inhabitants were their equivalent. Brian, according to his words, an escapee from Eaton and overly demanding parents, helped me with my reading of my first novel in English. It was Kipling's Jungle Book, but I remember nothing besides, I think, a pet mongoose saving a little boy by killing a cobra. There were a few sailors who had jumped ship, or missed its departure. One, a tall, hefty, red-haired Dutch man, claimed to be a refugee from Japanese police, after a Tokyo jewel heist. He was a flaming gay and always had some young Thai boys around him, most of the time sitting on his enormous lap.

I made a reasonable living with temple fresco rubbings. I'd bought pieces of black silk and gold bronze paste. With lengths of split bamboo I wedged the silk over stone frescos then rubbed gold bronze over the protruding sculptures. Those rubbings sold. well to tourists, at least to keep me amply supplied with orange soda, the hepatitis medication recommended by my Calcutta doctor. There was never enough for answering the siren song of pretty girls who patrolled the streets in the back of bicycle rickshaws.

Last night was the first time I stayed in a regular, starred Bangkok hotel. I had made reservation for it on account of my very late arrival from Seoul. Despite a fancy bathroom, TV, AC, and mini bar, I was happy this morning to get into the backpacker ghetto of Kaho San.
Here, in an old haunt I knew from before, New Merry V, I have a room with bed, little plastic table, chair, bathroom which is a toilet bowl in the shower stall, ceiling fan. I have to have my own towel, soap and toilet paper (which I can't keep by the toilet because, as mentioned, it is also the shower). When leaving the room I look it with my own padlock, the one from my luggage. Still, even though it is probably not really needed, I chain my luggage to the table. Instead of the 200$ in the other hotel, the present deluxe digs (deluxe because of en-suite bathroom) cost the princely sum of 12$ a night.

As for the backpacker ghetto, Banglamphu, also called for its main drag, Kaho San, wow!!! There must have been a worldwide backpacker population explosion. The few streets in the neighborhood that were populated by these young travelers and the Thai catering to all their needs, have multiplied by a factor of, whatever .... but a lot. There is nothing one can not buy, eat, drink, experience, hear or see. One sign says: One suit, one shirt, one silk tie, one clothes bag, one hanger, choice of Armani or Hugo Boss label, 50 €. I had a foot and neck massage on a well padded deck chair in the street. The masseur, a man!, was at true sadist and I must have been a masochist to let him maul me the way he did. His painful ministration didn't prevent me right after from having two bowls of noodle soup, 30 cents US per bowl. Sitting with a Singha, the local beer, in the street I noticed among the young milling crowds quite a few silver foxes, the people in my age group with graveyard-blond hair. They must be, I reasoned, like me, folk who had loved this place when they were young and now came back for a nostalgic encore.
One thing strangely absent with all the young people around are the smart phones. They actually sit with their beers, juices, coffee, tea, food in outdoor establishments and talk with each other instead of texting. Apparently their home country servers don't do their thing for them here.
There are now even more places that offer cheap flights to everywhere, visas to all places, even Hotdogstan - except to Myanmar. For that they can't serve you. Applicants for Myanmar visas need to present themselves to the embassy in person.
A valuable advice to parents with children that are still at an age when they create acida for their elders because of upcoming college expenses. Here, in the streets you can, besides ID for whatever you can think of, get a Harvard diploma for roughly two dollars.

Also, Bangkok is debunking a prevailing USA fear of black mold. With the recent floods many surfaces are covered with that stuff and nobody seems to care. At least, the population looks as healthy as any other I know.

Now I'll go to the Myanmar embassy.

Evening, same day.

Myanmar seems to be as desirable a place too go to as the US. The line of visa applicants in the street outside the embassy is as long as any in front of a US consulate anywhere in the world - or is it only the intractable bureaucracy of either place that is the same? At any rate, I arrived at the front of my line after about two hours, only to be given application forms. Filled out forms in hand, I eventually made it to the front of another line, where, having reached the window, just before handing in the forms, I saw another sign informing me that I also needed a photocopy of the application to hand in with the original. Thanks to a lenient bureaucrat behind the window, the lady made me a copy for 15 cents (US equivalent). I waited (on provided chairs) about an hour then was called to another window where I was told to come back two days later to pick up that desired entry in my passport.

Among a multitude of other information about myself, the application required me to list all my employments for the last ten years. I was tempted to write in that I was married during that time but then, afraid of other delays, I wrote "retired".

Imagine New York with Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, all tied up together without any separations by rivers and harbor expanses. The layout is not a neatly divided grid of avenues and streets but a jumble of random angles of tiny alleys, regular streets, wide boulevards and elevated highways, sometimes several stories high. Then imagine an additional cool million of inhabitants. Then imagine a vast majority living in two or three story buildings.... You got Bangkok!

From where I am staying in the Khao San area, to the Myanmar embassy it is a roughly one-hour taxi ride (no worries about cost, I managed to negotiate a flat six-dollar fee, both for going and coming). Each taxi driver considered himself a wise guy who knows how to avoid the Bangkok traffic nightmare. Each squeezed through narrow alleys then zigzagged between other road users on wide boulevards between super modern cloud-scratching office towers. Instead of chocking vehicular congestion we got into chocking vegetable cart and street peddler congestion. I tried to guess by the sun in which direction we were heading. It was a wind rose heading, east, west, south, north, in wild succession. The second driver, an old man with but one black tooth in the font of his mouth, tried to be a helpful tourist guide, pointing out all sights we passed. Problem is, he prattled everything non-stop in Thai, so I am none the wiser for it.

The short of this story is: Bangkok is huge.s

Since I'll be here for another while (I also need a visa for China, the Indian I made in New York), you are condemned to get some more Bangkok dribble. Sorry, I promised exciting news of an exiting journey and now this!

Vivere pericolosamente - and reporting about it - will have to wait.