The pretty bits of Bangkok

The next day we were determined to knuckle down, so we got up early (as if we had a choice) to find new lodgings, and located a cheaper place back from Khaosan (really this time). We headed out again to see the Grand Palace, Wat Pho and the Reclining Buddha, and Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. They're all a short walk from Khaosan Road, but it meant running the gauntlet of “helpful strangers” kindly letting us know that these sights were closed today and old women trying to force bird food on us. We didn't speak to any of the helpful ones so we didn't get to hear what their suggested alternative activities were going to be. An old woman hung three bags of nuts over my arm as we walked past her and was pointing at me, about to claim I owed her money, when I simply chucked them back at her and kept on walking. Everything we saw that day was lovely, although the Emerald Buddha is a little it of a letdown. It's not even made of Emerald, but Jade, it's tiny and you're not even allowed to take photos inside the wat, so they're all a bit blurry, because they're taken from outside except one that is sneakily taken inside.

In the Grand Palace there were quite a few people working on maintenance, touching up frescos or working on a stupa. It seems to me that this kind of continual maintenance is a good idea because then you never need extensive renovations like the reinforced concrete of Sukhothai. The Reclining Buddha is an impressive object, taking up the entirety of the temple. After Wat Pho we picked up a portion of som tam (papaya salad) for lunch, making sure to ask for it “phet phet”. This one was a scorcher! While we were eating it, a 50 year old Thai guy (he told us) came over and said he was amazed we like that. “It makes us laugh when we see farangs eating that food, because we are not used to you eating spicy food”, he said. He said he had been working in a rock cover-band in Pattaya for over 30 years and started to list the songs they played.

I told him that this was the same play-list that had kept us awake for two night running. Apparently he knew the band responsible. People keep telling us that Thai people are only interested in your money when they talk to you, but here was a clear case against that line of thought. This guy was definitely just being friendly. Actually during Songkran we spoke to plenty of people who wanted nothing more than to soak us, but there may have been alcohol involved in their bon-homie. When we returned to our guesthouse we realised there was no electrical point in the room. This was a problem since the place we planned to go next, Ko Chang on the Andaman coast, is an island with very basic facilities: the electricity only runs for a few hours a day so we needed to charge up all of our new electricals before we left Bangkok. Downstairs the guesthouse ran a small internet cafe, so we asked if we could plug things in to charge. Ten Baht per hour we were told. They charged phones for us for free even on Don Det where the electricity only came on for the evening, and was generated from diesel, which is relatively extremely expensive. Annoyed by their greed we decided we would probably be able to charge them during our stay overnight in Ranong, where we would catch the ferry.

Model of Angkor Wat

After a successful day's tourism we finally gave in and splashed out for some books: Tom Sharpe, Blott on the Landscape; Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerald; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo; jg ballard, the drought; and Ian McEwan, Saturday. Following the advice of my sister, Lorraine, who lived in Bangkok for nearly a year, we planned to go to a Blues Bar she used to visit on occasion, but I thought I'd buy a beer from 7-11 on the way. They had a brand of beer I hadn't noticed before and it was cheap and strong so, always interested in economising, I bought it. Not beer, in fact it was rice wine, which was not what I was in the mood for, but I drank it anyway. The bar turned out to be quite nice, but more expensive a place than I had expected my poor English-teaching sister to have gone.

Blues Bar

So we were forced to buy Sangsom (300ml) and Coke instead of beer. That on top of the rice wine, and I was already on my way. On the way home from there, we were persuaded to come upstairs to a new bar, lured by a cheap bucket. Once inside they persuaded us that a shisha of grape tobacco would go very well with our cheap bucket. The shisha was very expensive. Suckered again! We got chatting to couple who were “just friends”, but the guy had come all the way to Thailand to see this girl he had met online. As the night wore on, she revealed to Joanne her secret that she was in fact a ladyboy, but her friend did not know. In fact she had been through loads of surgery and had a complete sex change, but still did not feel like a real woman.

Joanne hits the bong

How strange that in a country where trans-gender individuals are so accepted in the mainstream, that men who have a full sex-change are still considered ladyboys at the end of it, rather than becoming a “real” woman, which is I think how it's treated in the West. Here anybody from a guy who acts a bit camp, through cross-dressers, all the way to post-operative “gender reassignment” are known as ladyboys: third gender. That night we were horribly late home, but at least we were able to sleep our hangovers off the next morning and some of the afternoon. When we did get up, we found a cheaper bookshop, so ended up by more books: Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before; JM Coetzee, Disgrace; and Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible. We now have far too many books again, and I'm not getting through them very fast because blogging is eating into my reading time.

Joanne and katoey

The pretty bits of Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand