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.