Bangkok

Bangkok is a big, weird, dirty, confusing place. We landed last week and immediately became dizzy and disoriented; whereas the public transportation in Singapore was super efficient and easy to use and labeled in many languages, directing its diverse constituents around a clean and modern city... Bangkok was more or less the exact opposite. ALL signs in squiggly Thai, totally confusing layout, dirty and crowded and noisy as hell. To top it off, most people don't speak English here, so it's hard to know who to turn to for help.

[sidenote: the language barrier is fine by us-- it's a little imperialistic to expect English out of everyone, and anyway J has been brushing up on his Thai with a handy phrasebook, so mostly we're okay. It was interesting, though, coming from Singapore-- where everyone speaks several languages and they even have public service billboards asking, "How well does your child speak English?" with a cute Malay kid next to an empty speech bubble. It just doesn't appear that the language barrier is a big concern here, for so many reasons-- variety of ethnic groups and economic classes, perceived differences between urban and provincial Thais, anti-western sentiments in the media and the government, who knows what else. I'm reading a great book right now called "Thailand Unhinged" about all this stuff.]

What makes it even harder to get around-- the people who DO speak any bit of English are the ones trying to bamboozle you! The very second we stepped out of the train station, a man came up to us out of nowhere and offered a veritable fountain of information-- he even took our map and circled all the temples and interesting sights, where to get something to eat, where to stay in the city, where the "government tourism agency" was, etc. He said that Banglampur (the neighborhood where we were headed) was flooded, and that people were leaving in droves to stay in other parts of the city. He sent us on a sort of wild goose chase, and in the end we discovered that our 'hood was not flooded, that people were not fleeing, and that he had just been trying to sell us some ridiculous vacation package. If that sounds frustrating, imagine that it happened four or five more times, mostly with tuk-tuk drivers (a tuk-tuk is a gassy, sputtering three-wheeled motorcycle taxi found all over Thailand. The drivers harangue you incessantly with "Hey you! Where you go!" over and over again) who will basically tell you anything so that you'll hop on for the ride. We were inadvertently taken to tailor shops and coerced into having suits made (somehow we resisted..) taken to temples that were only open to westerners for "government holiday", told to go south, told to go north, told all sorts of untruths and misled in every direction. It's a little disheartening, being in a new and unfamiliar place and feeling like you can't trust anyone you meet.

In the end, we bought (and overpaid for) bus tickets to Krabi, on the southern Andaman Coast. The lady who sold us the tickets also convinced us to book two weeks at a little bungalow stay in this tiny beach town, which was unwise of us to agree upon because it's been raining more or less every day we've been here and there isn't a whole lot to do but wait it out.

We'll try to figure out somewhere else to go, if the rain doesn't let up. Missing my family, missing my friends, trying to keep a chin up, even in the rain..

11:49AM
Ao Nang, Thailand

PS - In other news, Amanda Knox was just released! I don't know if anybody else has been following that story but I just saw the verdict and shed a happy little tear for her... You go girl!