Right now I am lying on a mat in Mae Sot, Thailand. I'm directly underneath a fan because it's really hot here. Lots of you are probably asking what I'm doing in a small town in Thailand on the Burmese border. Here's the story: Currently, I have a tourist visa for Sri Lanka, which means I'm only allowed to be in the country for a month. So, I have to leave Sri Lanka each month to renew my visa. While this is a little annoying, it does force me to go see other parts of South Asia. I picked Thailand because my friend Matt Schisser lives here, and it would be a shame to have been in Sri Lanka for almost a year and not visited him. I later discovered that there are around 10 Whitman grads living here, including a friend of mine called Katie Levy. Both Matt and Katie are working for NGOs that help out Burmese people who manage to get across the border. I flew into Bangkok 3 days ago, and spent the last 2 days in Bkk trying to see as much as possible without knowing any Thai or knowing much about Thailand outside of what my Lonely Planet guide told me in the first 10 pages. Here were the highlights of Bangkok for me:
Landed at the airport and took a taxi to the Mo Chit bus station to meet up with Katie. Mo Chit is the bus terminal for getting to northern Thailand from the capital, and is enormous. Around 150 bus "gates" that I saw, not including another section of the bus station filled with what looked like vans. Katie had taken an overnight bus from Mae Sot to meet me in Bkk. She's only been here a month, knows 2 words in Thai (which I also know now) and hasn't explored Bkk much either, so she took me up on the offer to come meet me and adventure around the city for a while.
From Mo Chit we jumped on a bus to Khao San Road, the backpacker and tourist ghetto part of Bangkok. We were definitely the only white people on the bus, and we quickly discovered that lots of Thai people don't speak much english at all, and many of the signs here are only in Thai. We found the right person to ask 2 stops before ours, which was lucky. Khao San road has more shirtless (or wife-beater wearing) dudes with tattoos and either buzzed hair or dreads than I have ever seen before. It seems like its a real big part of the traveler circuit that includes climbing and scuba in southern Thailand. However, there was infinite good street food, from grilled chicken to pad thai available for less than a dollar. Even better, there are people wheeling around fruit carts everywhere, and you can get a bag of papaya or watermellon or pineapple for 50 cents. In my 2 days in Bkk I probably ate close to 20 servings of fruit and at least 10 helpings of pad thai, along with other foods that looked interesting, which I tried.
The Grand Palace is one of the main tourist attractions in Bkk, but well worth it. It's a totally absurdly decadent palace where everything is painted in gold paint or jewelled, and where the king used to live. Katie and I jumped on a free tour that lasted a couple hours. By the end my feet hurt really badly, but I had gotten to see some beautiful buildings and the emerald buddha in his winter attire.
One of my favorite things was a bit of text under a bodhi tree meant to warn tourists: Beware of your expensive belongings. Fascinating that a mistranslation of "keep an eye on your expensive belongings so that people don't steal them" resulted in something that the buddha might have taught while sitting under his bodhi tree.
That afternoon, I returned to Khao San road, relaxed in the gloriously cool A/C room, ate a ton of pad thai and lots of fruit, and fell asleep early.
The next morning promised a lot of things on the to do list before getting on a bus at 10:20 pm to Mae Sot. The next morning started with something that most mornings ought to: Mango with sticky rice. Definitely on the list of the things that I want to eat right now. I then headed to Wat Pho, another Wat near Khao San Road. It included some very beautiful buildings and paintings, and the very impressive reclining buddha:
What makes this place even better is that it's where the Bangkok Massage Academy is located, and you can get a 30 minute thai massage for about $6 from a professional masseuse! It felt great, but the feeling was short-lived because I had to hop on a night-bus that evening which undid all of the good of the massage. After Wat Pho, Katie and I went looking for Chinatown so that I would be able to communicate with people for a change. We may or may not have found chinatown, but we did find a cool market (one of hundreds like in in Bkk).
we munched some street food that was too spicy for katie, and then tried to find someone who could tell us what bus to get on to go to the siam center. After lots of pantomime and finding people to translate for us, someone answered our question and we were on our way.
The Siam center took us from crazy market to crazy ultra-modern shopping mall. It was by far the biggest shopping facility I have ever seen. It has about 8 stories in 4 different buildings, with each story the size of a normal shopping mall. Each building has a movie theater on its top level, and each one appeared to have a department store that occupies part of each of the 8 stories. After wandering around this place for a while, we jumped on the skytrain (lightrail system) and headed towards the Bangkok Night Bazaar. We got off a stop early and had to walk, but in the process found a cool park where tons of people were running and exercising. At one point everyone stopped running and started doing aerobics to some music blasting out of huge speakers. It was impossible to capture the scope of the mass-aerobics exercise on camera, but I estimated between 300 and 400 people participating with 8 people leading the group. Wow.
We walked on after watching for a while, and ended up in the night Bazaar, which is a huge outdoor market with some open areas for listening to live music, excellent food (you can find food on literally every block in bkk), and fish that eat the dead skin off of your feet:
This felt great once I got used to it, and I realized that I had already encountered these fish in the wild here in Sri Lanka while swimming in a stream. It was much scarier in that situation--I didn't know what was nibbling on my feet. After the night Bazaar I jumped on the subway to the Mo Chit bus station, grabbed some more food there, and jumped on the wrong bus. They kicked me off, told me that I had bought a ticket for a different bus than Katie (but still going to the same place), so I jumped on another bus and tried to fall asleep. I woke up the next morning before dawn about 10 km outside of Mae Sot.
Its back to work for me right now, but I'll write another installment (or two) in a day or so about: my time in Mo Chit, my camping trip in a Thai national park, my experience hanging out with the kids of burmese political prisoners in an illegal thai school where they live, another yoga retreat, life in Sri Lanka round 2, and a bunch of other things you won't want to miss.
As always, write me back, I'd love to hear from you.
Luke
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