June 10, 2024

If the world had a global capital of debauchery, it might be Bangkok. What a fucking city, holy shit. I’ll get back to this, but please give me some slack, as my current mental fogginess is much impacted by the aforementioned debauchery. In general, I’ll say that my experiences over the last few days have been so stimulating and so saturating of all of my senses, that the blogs that follow will surely fail to remotely communicate what I felt to any reader. Instead, I’m opting for more of an itinerant outline of what I’ve been up to so I don’t forget in days to come. 

I slept well enough on my flight from athens to Singapore. I took a taxi from the airport straight into the downtown area. There’s the main marina/bay area around which all of the huge buildings stand. Icluded in this is the iconic Merlion, the Singapore Flower, and the Bay Sands Marina. I took a lap in the swimming humidity and walked to the Hawker center, a huge food court where I had my first proper East Asian meal, a bowl of delicious soup and some noodles, all cooked right in front of me. The whole city (country!) is vigorously clean and tidy. One taxi driver told me that you can get hanged if you carry a knife longer than six inches. Pretty strict… but apparently it works, he said he thinks it’s a good idea. I am really glad that I got to see it but I don’t think that I’ll be in any rush to head back. 

The flight to Bangkok was a trifle, I took another taxi towards my hostel. The first impression that I had about the city was its immense scale. The drive from the airport was about 30 minutes along a highway, and almost the entire way, giant futuristic metropolis neighborhoods loomed overhead. 

I got to my hostel, checked in, dropped my bag, and immediately headed right back out to get some street food. The hostel was about a block away from Khao San Road, the place most highly saturated with clubs, bars, dispensaries, and general sinful chaos. Awesome. That first night I stayed very much on the fringe. For probably about five dollars I had dumplings, crispy pancakes, pad thai, and pork skewers, all cooked right in front of my eyes on little carts. It’s a bit shocking how used to the phenomenon of street food I’ve become in a few short (though feeling insanely long) days, but that first night I was giddy, trying the famous south east asian street food for the first time. 

In the Athens airport I met Reudi, a fellow American travelling to Bangkok. We really clicked in a lot of ways, just having a really good time hanging out and riffing with eachother, but also by having a really similar approach and outlook on travel. I met up with Reudi and some friends of his he was meeting from home (they all just graduated from BU, small world! Not many  mutual though). 

I went with Reudi, Rachel, and Jessie to the Royal Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the biggest and most must-see temple in Bangkok. Holy shit. The aesthetic style in Thailand is obviously so new to me, but also just fucking gorgeous. The intricacy of the details, the geometry, the shapes of the buildings, it’s all just out of this world, and so new for me. 

From the temple we began a long trek to a floating market. We walked for a couple hours, making tons of stops. We met a big group of people wrapping some nut-fulled dumplings in bamboo leaves after cooking them, preparing to export them to Montana and Frankfurt, as well as a couple of younger guys sparring Muay Thai in an outside dojo in their neighborhood. We made it to the floating market right around golden hour and, though we missed it actually being open, we got to see the huge fish population of the rancid river swarm when a handful of food pellets were thrown to them. 

At this point, most of Reudi’s friends had to head to the airport to catch flights to their next spots, so he and I kept walking. We had an awesome evening walking towards a giant 100-foot golden Buddha we saw from a distance, and then back slowly in the general direction of the hostels. We got a couple beers on the way and called it an awesome first day in Bangkok. 

The next morning I headed over to Reudi’s hostel to start our freestyle for the day. With a couple of people he’d met in his room, Laura from Poland/Germany, Joanna from France and Tiger from Bangkok, we made our way to the Thai center for Arts and Culture to check out a really cool exhibition on AI, truth, and photography called Photographs never lie. 

Again, Reudi and I opted for a long walk back to the hostel instead of taking a bus or taxi. Boy, was that the right call. The hostels were in the very touristy center, with lots of temples, markets, all generally catered to people looking to experience a dose of Bangkok in a short time. The museum was more in the actual down town, with tons of gorgeously designed sky scrapers, colossal above ground metro systems that look like ten meter wide concrete snakes slithering through the city, and more and more restaurants and street food vendors on every block and corner. It’s truly a marvel that there are so many businesses that are profitable enough to exist and sustain the people that are a part of it. 

From this down town area we walked through a really gorgeous park, a few markets (we got crispy pork belly), and on to Bangkok’s Chinatown. Holy shit. Huge signs in Mandarin, different cuisine in the booths. I got a grilled squid that was delicious. There were tons of signs advertising shark fin soup, but we did not indulge. We tried to find a rooster fight, but couldn’t, even though we used google translate. We made it back to the hostel, got a few beers, and hung out with our friends from earlier, as well as a couple other cool people we met. After a couple hours of hanging, we went to Khao San road. We stopped in MacDonalds to use the bathroom and while we were waiting, Reudi and I met this group of super cool Thai guys freestyling over beats in Thai. So fucking cool. 

We got to Khao San and dived in. Huge clubs with full sized speakers playing their own music, at most 20 feet apart. People tossing their drinks menus and deals into your face, signs offering booze, weed, laughing gas, and sex shows in which people shoot ping pong balls out of their vaginas. We walked from end to end and regrouped over some Mango Sticky rice. Reudi and I were on the same page, total fucking sensory overload, and we were ready to go back to the hostel and call it a night right then. And we did! I think there is a good case to be made for the argument that Khao San Road is the most overstimulating place on earth. 

The next morning, today, Reudi and I walked a couple hours in a direction we hadn’t explored yet, through what seemed like the big government building road, with all kinds of ministries of Agriculture, military training, and more. On the way we had some delicious soup and rice, as well as some complimentary udon with sauce. We made it to our destination, a weekend market, and perused the thousands of stalls for a couple hours, each securing a new and improved fanny pack, before taking a Tuk Tuk back to the hostel. The Tuk Tuk ride, unsecured on a polyester bench, ripping through Bangkok traffic and highways, listening to 90s hip hop, was a crazy experience. We hung out at the hostel with some friends for a while and said some really sad goodbyes. Reudi and only met a couple days ago in Athens, but we’ve been hanging out nonstop for the last three days and it’ll be a big adjustment to travel alone again. I’m super glad I met him and I hope we get to travel again together. 

I don’t have the brainpower to put together any meaningful reflections so far other than these small items. The stigma around sex is so different than in the west. All of the advertisements are really fair-skinned Asian people. The cost of everything is really really low, even for great food and experiences. We tipped 35 bhat at lunch each and the guy at the stall was almost in disbelief, even though that’s like tipping a dollar for a meal that’s a buck fifty. Finally, that eve though the standard of living is very different than in the US, people are happy. People find happiness. We are so so lucky to be able to come here and be able to afford anything we want, and because our lives are very easy, but we are not lucky because our lives are necessarily better than the many lives we glimpsed in Bangkok. 

Now I’m on a night us south to Phuket, where I plan to have a very calm, chill few days, spending lots of time in nature and on beaches, completely conquer my jet lag, and recenter my brain after several of the most astoundingly stimulating days of my entire life.