I walked to Bangkok's Chinatown yesterday, through the visible street-smoke, resenting the fact that mere respiration is toxic here. I picked my way through alleys absolutely crammed with stalls absolutely crammed with electronics pieces; both ready-to-use and parts for assembly, and including miniature workshops where people were assembling computers and audios beside roaring traffic and heavy smoke from pork barbeques, with fans blowing above their seats that have no shielding cage (so look where you step!)
Chinatown looked no different to my untrained eye than other parts of Bangkok except for the fact that writing is in Chinese as well as Thai and there are more Chinese shrines inside the shops and lots of gaudy fat Buddhas or cartoon-smug pink doll-children figures. I really have so little understanding of what I'm looking at that I feel ashamed to call myself a traveller there. When I feel that ignorant I feel as bad as the other tourists, and am probably just as likely to cause offence unknowingly. Of course I am very respectful as much as I know how to be, but inintended offence is, I suppose, just a risk I take of being in another country.
The floors of the markets, especially the food stalls, are constantly wet, presumably from washing the food; in the meat, seafood and fish markets you never know quite what is splashing you; drips come from above half the time, which I think I've concluded are usually condensation from airconditioning in buildings overhead, but I also got sprayed a number of times by catfish or eels fighting to bury their gills in the last remaining millimetres of water in their trays.
Large buckets of baby turtles or, should you fancy one instead, full of big warty toads. Mmmm. Don't make a pig's ear of your display of pig's ears. Awful offal. Did I have the guts to ask what the guts were from? Did I get cold feet looking at all the cold feet of chickens or other animals?; feet are popular to eat apparently. It's fantastic to see people use all parts of the animal, and that there is no squeamishness around doing so. There were a number of grey nobbly masses that I couldn't identify; I think they may have been parts of brains or an organ turned inside out.
There are people grinding coconut milk (made from the hard part of the coconut plus water, not from the coconut juice), and whole stalls full of containers of strange coloured pastes, presumably thing like green and red curry powders, but I don't know how to understand the answers to the question 'nee keu arai krap?' -- what is this? Stalls of fried bananas, roasted bananas, baked bananas, but NEVER mashed bananas; red bananas, whitish ones, green ones, yellow ones; long ones short ones fat ones thin ones and any of various combinations of the above.
Typical snacks stalls are 2-bite sized thin portions of pork being barbequed on bamboo sticks over beds of charcoal, often also fish or chicken done likewise, accompanied by sticky rice if you want it (a rice variety from N.E. Thailand/Laos, eaten by the poor people of those areas as a staple, but ironically a treat for people elsewhere including foreigners; it is long-grained, and steamed, and sticks together in a well-textured lump like African porridge (pap) or Tibetan barley-dough (tsampha /ngamphe), but the single rice-grains are still visible and separable; it's quite different from overcooked normal white rice. As another snack, it's often sold sweetened, with a sauce of sweetened coconut milk, and mango slices.
Then you've got the stands that sell soups, those that sell fried rice and phad thai noodles, etc etc...and they're all mobile, pushable on wheels. The cooking ones typically appear and disappear in one spot at particular periods of the day, but there are a lot that are pushed around all day, usually selling fruit: pineapples, sold whole and more commonly chopped up in a little plastic bag with a bamboo skewer to feed yourself; papaya, durian, watermelon, pomelo....You soon learn what a good price is and I refuse to buy what I consider overpriced as I can generally find it at the typical price nearby.
OK, so I tried durian, openmindedly, and it was pretty disgusting. I think my problem was that I expected something fruity, and while sweet, it is more like potato or avocado in texture, but of course then there's the legendary stink on top of that. I almost couldn't finish my portion. It's expensive too, so although it was worth trying, I doubt I'll bother again, although I'm told it varies greatly with ripeness.
Having worshipped jackfruit in a previous blogpost, I can add with experience now that jackfruit varies considerably and it's actually quite difficult to find a good one; I was lucky that time and have only found jackfruit equivalently delicious on one occasion since. It's usually too firm, so rubbery, and not juicy enough, with thin rather than rich flavour. Which is a shame as I usually expect ecstacy again.
However, I recently discovered mangosteens, which on my first try were set to be my new infatuation. They look like tiny eggplant/aubergines, but round, and deep matte purple. About the size of smallish tomatoes. But they are hard and almost barky. The 'skin' is a good centimetre thick, and thick and fibrous, much more woody than that of an orange. It's very bitter and to be avoided. Inside it, however, are virgin white crescents of amazingly juicy flesh reminiscent of a lychee but a more mouth-watering flavour and usually no pit/pip, and not as rubbery in texture as a lychee (no lychees aren't rubbery, but imagine something even more juicily collapsible.) The flavour has to be experienced to be believed.
However, like everything that's bought fresh and grown locally by small producers from diverse genetic stock of local varieties, mangosteen varies, and you get more or less interesting ones. It's wonderful though, in this globalized world, to discover delicious fruits that for whatever reason really haven't made it, or not consistently, onto Western supermarket shelves. There is still an 'other' out there, still an 'exotic'; difference hasn't yet been erased by McDonalds (although there's one two blocks from here and here I am in an internet cafe using Microsoft). Sure, difference seems to be on its way out, and tourism and Westernization seem set on destroying many aspects of what used to mean 'Thai'. Other travellers tell me to go to Laos now while it's still not commercialized; however, I met two English travellers who said that in Laos they couldn't avoid the cartels of taxi-drivers/hotels who had monopolized whole towns to prevent travellers from getting good prices and to effectively outlaw renting of bicycles so that tourists are unable to avoid using the taxi-mafia to get anywhere. They told me of hotels where every day of the week shows a different American sit-com series, be it Friends one night, and (I don't even know the names of others) on other nights....Of course, globalization has already come to the poor, backwater country of Laos, which most Westerners have never even heard of. The 'get there before it's gone' attitude is of course a major force in making it disappear. All of that depressing stuff aside, on a personal level it is still a joy to discover tropical fruits I've never seen nor heard of....even though telling you about them is probably a globalizing force in itself.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Human grime
After a week in the tourist trap of Bangkok's Khao San Road, I'm ready to get out of this place. I have a sore chest from the pollution and my throat feels like I've been smoking 20 a day (not that I've ever done that, but after feeling the effects of just a puff or two on one, I can imagine).
There are always new people to see-- tourist-watching is possibly even more interesting than watching Thais at this point. International backpacking is clearly no longer a phenomenon of Western Europeans; I've met travellers from Morocco, Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, etc. And heaps of Israelis.
It is fascinating to watch the diversity of travellers' tastes, styles, attitudes. There are lots of try-hard 'cool' types--ravers, hippies, self-conscious fashion victims. Then there are the typically Australian or British beer-swilling types (they do little else except often seem rude to Thais and assume Thailand to be like any other Asian country.) I was with a few last night; they bought drinks and then refused to pay for them, and stole the glasses; they kicked the taxi when the driver offered his lowest price that they still thought was too high (it was actually the lowest I've heard for that time of night); they shouted at the taxi-driver all the way home; one of them offered him drinks while he was driving and constantly messed with his radio and radio-settings despite everyone's protests to stop; it was embarrassing to be identified with this race.
It's not surprising the owner of the guesthouse I'm in is grumpy and rude to foreigners; this is all she sees, and them bringing back prostitutes nightly and drunkenly. We're always an ambassador of our country and our culture and race when we travel; I'm not moralizing when I say so, it's just how it is. It's so disrespectful to misbehave like that and so much worse in someone else's country where you're a guest. It's sad. But it's /really/ common, and it's not only the beerswillers who are unpleasant, rude or disrespectful to Thai people. I suppose it's a racist thing, partly.
It backfires too, of course. We travellers get conned and ripped off, so it becomes a vicious cycle of hatred and exploitation. The owner of my guesthouse is rude and unpleasant and unhelpful, and doesn't clean the rooms properly, and the place is disgusting. It's not necessary for somewhere to be disgusting to be cheap, surely. There's little expense in basic cleanliness, and that's all that's required. It's only polite to the guests.
I'll tolerate a certain level of grime if the sheets are clean, for a good price. But there's a good price and then there's just an unacceptable room. I have been in one that I learnt to accept for the past week. 150 Baht for a bed and a fan, with holes mosquitoes can get in, cracks in the walls that let in light from the corridor, a bed that is the shape of a basin, and a couple of hooks on the bare walls, and a fan that works. The fan was nice. Everything else was barely OK. But better than camping, so I was content. I didn't mind the ant highways going over my backpack or the piles of flying-ant wings that accumulated in a corner or the gecko shit on the walls or the wasp on the inside of the penetrable mosquito screen. It's a shame they never clean the walls though; there are all sorts of stains of god knows what, and peoples' cigarette ash in nooks, and I think it's just unnecessary to leave them there. It would also cost next to nothing to put in a waste-paper basket and a shelf, but hey.
Today my friend Monique is arriving, so I arranged a room with two beds. This is almost the same size as the room I was in before, so even less floorspace (if you can call it that) around the beds, and the beds are narrower. There is only one window (the previous room had two, being on a corner), with a worse view, looking at people's lower halves under tables in the restaurant just metres from the window, and no privacy. And everything is a little bit grosser. However, the price is DOUBLE the previous price at 300 Baht. I always thought the whole point of sharing a hotel room was to reduce the price per person. However, I was kind of desperate to find a room so I took it dejectedly and somewhat resentfully. All the more reason to get out of Bangkok. For the same price or less in Phetchaburi you can get a huge room with two double beds and an en suite bathroom with an amazing view of the river and enough space to do not only yoga but a dance class in your room. And welcoming people at reception. Rather attractive prospect at this point.
There are always new people to see-- tourist-watching is possibly even more interesting than watching Thais at this point. International backpacking is clearly no longer a phenomenon of Western Europeans; I've met travellers from Morocco, Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, etc. And heaps of Israelis.
It is fascinating to watch the diversity of travellers' tastes, styles, attitudes. There are lots of try-hard 'cool' types--ravers, hippies, self-conscious fashion victims. Then there are the typically Australian or British beer-swilling types (they do little else except often seem rude to Thais and assume Thailand to be like any other Asian country.) I was with a few last night; they bought drinks and then refused to pay for them, and stole the glasses; they kicked the taxi when the driver offered his lowest price that they still thought was too high (it was actually the lowest I've heard for that time of night); they shouted at the taxi-driver all the way home; one of them offered him drinks while he was driving and constantly messed with his radio and radio-settings despite everyone's protests to stop; it was embarrassing to be identified with this race.
It's not surprising the owner of the guesthouse I'm in is grumpy and rude to foreigners; this is all she sees, and them bringing back prostitutes nightly and drunkenly. We're always an ambassador of our country and our culture and race when we travel; I'm not moralizing when I say so, it's just how it is. It's so disrespectful to misbehave like that and so much worse in someone else's country where you're a guest. It's sad. But it's /really/ common, and it's not only the beerswillers who are unpleasant, rude or disrespectful to Thai people. I suppose it's a racist thing, partly.
It backfires too, of course. We travellers get conned and ripped off, so it becomes a vicious cycle of hatred and exploitation. The owner of my guesthouse is rude and unpleasant and unhelpful, and doesn't clean the rooms properly, and the place is disgusting. It's not necessary for somewhere to be disgusting to be cheap, surely. There's little expense in basic cleanliness, and that's all that's required. It's only polite to the guests.
I'll tolerate a certain level of grime if the sheets are clean, for a good price. But there's a good price and then there's just an unacceptable room. I have been in one that I learnt to accept for the past week. 150 Baht for a bed and a fan, with holes mosquitoes can get in, cracks in the walls that let in light from the corridor, a bed that is the shape of a basin, and a couple of hooks on the bare walls, and a fan that works. The fan was nice. Everything else was barely OK. But better than camping, so I was content. I didn't mind the ant highways going over my backpack or the piles of flying-ant wings that accumulated in a corner or the gecko shit on the walls or the wasp on the inside of the penetrable mosquito screen. It's a shame they never clean the walls though; there are all sorts of stains of god knows what, and peoples' cigarette ash in nooks, and I think it's just unnecessary to leave them there. It would also cost next to nothing to put in a waste-paper basket and a shelf, but hey.
Today my friend Monique is arriving, so I arranged a room with two beds. This is almost the same size as the room I was in before, so even less floorspace (if you can call it that) around the beds, and the beds are narrower. There is only one window (the previous room had two, being on a corner), with a worse view, looking at people's lower halves under tables in the restaurant just metres from the window, and no privacy. And everything is a little bit grosser. However, the price is DOUBLE the previous price at 300 Baht. I always thought the whole point of sharing a hotel room was to reduce the price per person. However, I was kind of desperate to find a room so I took it dejectedly and somewhat resentfully. All the more reason to get out of Bangkok. For the same price or less in Phetchaburi you can get a huge room with two double beds and an en suite bathroom with an amazing view of the river and enough space to do not only yoga but a dance class in your room. And welcoming people at reception. Rather attractive prospect at this point.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Vignettes
Bangkok.
The umpteen very beautiful hookers on the arms of unabashed white men, everywhere.
Rats in the sink in my guest house. I can see the lights outside through the many cracks in my walls. When neighbours open their doors I jump, thinking its mine. My friend was kept awake by groaning prostitutes in the next room. The men complain that the grumpy hotel-owner insists they pay an extra 100 Baht if they bring a prostitute back with them.
My mattress is U-shaped, not from being squashed but from /wear/.
I'm in an internet cafe run by Israelis and full of VERY VERY LOUD Israeli tourists, shouting in Hebrew all at once; the default websites and the keyboard are in Hebrew. It's strange after being among the quiet, gentle Thai people. All the Israeli tourists cluster here in inpenetrable bundles in this place and the one next door, creating a strong bubble of Israeli-ness, a little island of Israeli culture, and in it I can see what it might be like to be on the outside of a dominant culture, as I feel clearly out of place and in the minority, and no-one tries to include me. I've seen similar British/US clusters elsewhere, but not in Thailand.
Tuk-tuks (motor rickshaws) zooming past with big sleevless Australians pointing their feet out of the side (very rude in Thailand, to point your soles at anyone).
Thais and foreigners swaying and waddling drunkenly down the road.
The old toothy Thai woman who sells mango and sticky rice on our street, who was angry at me when asked for a fresh mango that hadn't been sitting in the sun for ages, assuming I was trying to swindle or screw her over like presumably so many tourists must.
All the 'oppressively cool' young 20-something tourists, so clean, so sexy/macho, so fashion-conscious, able to look perfect even when backpacking. Try-hards, I've heard them called.
The Japanese tourists who all manage to look simultaneously modern yet elegantly Asian in their particular style of travel-clothing.
Walking miles and miles to find a market with fresh fruit; feeling the smog and exhaust painful in my lungs.
So hot I just lay naked on my bed and dripped in the middle of the day, waiting.
A sudden friend with intense connection for 2 days, now she's vanished to Cambodia, maybe never to be seen again.
Plans that look so solid suddenly wobbling and fading as visas look uncertain, people don't answer phones, jungle guides vanish into the jungle when they're supposed to be taking you on a trek...
Bangkok's noise starting to get to me after 4 days. Peace or respite no-where. Spending hours in my hotel room wondering what to do next and staying out of the chaos, confused and uncertain. Stepping outside into the street and feeling bombarded. Wondering what I'm doing here, really.
Trying for hours to get answers about simple questions like how long can I stay in Thailand, how many times can I make visa-runs to the border, or can I even do that at all. No travel agent can tell me; the British embassy could not; the government tourist information cannot; what the hell? Surely tourists wonder about that all the time, how long they can stay? The immigration bureau phoneline is a closed death-loop of recorded messages, the operator option, if you can ever find it, just leading back to the recorded main-menu. The immigration office is one and a half hours away, and I'm not convinced they'd give me the answer either.
The umpteen very beautiful hookers on the arms of unabashed white men, everywhere.
Rats in the sink in my guest house. I can see the lights outside through the many cracks in my walls. When neighbours open their doors I jump, thinking its mine. My friend was kept awake by groaning prostitutes in the next room. The men complain that the grumpy hotel-owner insists they pay an extra 100 Baht if they bring a prostitute back with them.
My mattress is U-shaped, not from being squashed but from /wear/.
I'm in an internet cafe run by Israelis and full of VERY VERY LOUD Israeli tourists, shouting in Hebrew all at once; the default websites and the keyboard are in Hebrew. It's strange after being among the quiet, gentle Thai people. All the Israeli tourists cluster here in inpenetrable bundles in this place and the one next door, creating a strong bubble of Israeli-ness, a little island of Israeli culture, and in it I can see what it might be like to be on the outside of a dominant culture, as I feel clearly out of place and in the minority, and no-one tries to include me. I've seen similar British/US clusters elsewhere, but not in Thailand.
Tuk-tuks (motor rickshaws) zooming past with big sleevless Australians pointing their feet out of the side (very rude in Thailand, to point your soles at anyone).
Thais and foreigners swaying and waddling drunkenly down the road.
The old toothy Thai woman who sells mango and sticky rice on our street, who was angry at me when asked for a fresh mango that hadn't been sitting in the sun for ages, assuming I was trying to swindle or screw her over like presumably so many tourists must.
All the 'oppressively cool' young 20-something tourists, so clean, so sexy/macho, so fashion-conscious, able to look perfect even when backpacking. Try-hards, I've heard them called.
The Japanese tourists who all manage to look simultaneously modern yet elegantly Asian in their particular style of travel-clothing.
Walking miles and miles to find a market with fresh fruit; feeling the smog and exhaust painful in my lungs.
So hot I just lay naked on my bed and dripped in the middle of the day, waiting.
A sudden friend with intense connection for 2 days, now she's vanished to Cambodia, maybe never to be seen again.
Plans that look so solid suddenly wobbling and fading as visas look uncertain, people don't answer phones, jungle guides vanish into the jungle when they're supposed to be taking you on a trek...
Bangkok's noise starting to get to me after 4 days. Peace or respite no-where. Spending hours in my hotel room wondering what to do next and staying out of the chaos, confused and uncertain. Stepping outside into the street and feeling bombarded. Wondering what I'm doing here, really.
Trying for hours to get answers about simple questions like how long can I stay in Thailand, how many times can I make visa-runs to the border, or can I even do that at all. No travel agent can tell me; the British embassy could not; the government tourist information cannot; what the hell? Surely tourists wonder about that all the time, how long they can stay? The immigration bureau phoneline is a closed death-loop of recorded messages, the operator option, if you can ever find it, just leading back to the recorded main-menu. The immigration office is one and a half hours away, and I'm not convinced they'd give me the answer either.
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