Still in Bangkok

Was planning on going to Kanchanaburi tonight, but plans got scuttled when I wasn't able to get my bags from my hotel after getting my passport back until 4pm. Last bus to Kanchanaburi leaves between 5 and 6, and the bus station was an hour away--yes Bangkok is big, it sprawls, and it has horrible traffic. In other words, Thailand's city of angels is very similar to the U.S. city of Angels--although L.A. actually has a defined downtown area and somewhat of an identifiable skyline. Bangkok really doesn't have any "signature" buildings.

So, instead, I changed hotels, since the only reason why I was staying where I was staying was that it was near where I had to be--the cathay pacific office, and the vietnamese embassy.

I am officially back to travelling on my own, as AJ left early this morning to go to Bali. Unofficially, I've been back on my own since yesterday morning, the last time we saw each other.

The problem with Bangkok in terms of being a traveller is that the legendary/notorious Khao San Road, where alot of the budget guesthouses/hostels are is close to absolutely nothing. It's a 50 baht cab ride to the nearest skytrain/subway station (in theory, you could walk it, but when its hot as heck out, and you have to walk that far just to get the subway, and then have to walk even farther to go prancing about, then you might be a little bit crazy). The problem with the place I was staying at was that, while it was close to lots of things (just a 10 minute walk from a skytrain stop), it was pretty isolated socially, and there weren't any young people around (the bar girls and prostitutes working at nearby Nana Plaza do not count). So I stayed there as long as I had to before moving elsewhere.

Since I could only pickup my passport at 3pm, I spent the day just wandering around. I have already been to Bangkok once, six years ago, and seen all the major sights, so I just decided to walk down to a neighborhood park, Lumphini park, wander around, before taking the skytrain to the river and hopping on one of the Chao Praya express boats that easily double as river tours for cheap tourists like myself (think of the boats as much smaller versions of the staten island ferry, only you have to pay a little over 50 cents per ride--but that 50 cents covers the entire system--the boats ply a line of about 32 stations and piers on the Chao Praya, and one pier is right underneath a skytrain stop).

You know how there is an urban legend about alligators in the sewers of New York City? Well, Bangkok has actual giant lizards--in its public parks. I'm walking along one of the paved paths around the man made pond/lake in the middle of Lumphini (a nice oasis, btw) and I see this giant lizard sunbathing. Not just one, but a couple of them. Apparently, monitor lizards, some of them probably seven feet in length from head to tail, make their home in Lumphini park, and nobody seems to mind them. A group of elderly men playing some sort of traditional game saw me taking photos, and told me to come and join them--they were sitting no less than about five yards from a couple of the monitors, and it didn't seem to bother any of them.

Whereas earlier in the trip, I tried to at least be somewhat polite to the touts offering me rides and the like, now I'm just having fun with them. If someone asks me where I am going nowadays, and I don't need a ride, then I've started saying all sorts of things to them--like, I'm going to the moon, for example. Do you have a rocket ship? Most of them laugh when I say stuff like that, but I'm sure they are saying all sorts of nasty things about me in their native language to one another. To be honest, I don't really care. When some of them try to rip me off as badly as they do when I actually need a ride, then they really shouldn't complain about me playing games with them.

I'm pretty sure my cab driver from my old hotel to my new hotel is Thailand's version of a birther or a conspiracy theorist. He gave me a fair price to my hotel--actually, the only price I was willing to accept as his first offer, so I took it--and told me that he was from outside of Chiang Mai. As we start to head down Sukhumvit road, underneath the skytrain track, and where most of the protestors were camped out, we pass the Central World Mall, and I point it out. His response (his english was pretty good by foreign cab driver standards) and clearly says "government blew up that building." Excuse me? He then points out to me where all the protestors were camped out, a theater that he claimed that the government also blew up, and the site where several protestors were killed. He explains that the red shirts were entirely non-violent, and all were peaceful, and that it was the government and the army that was responsible for it.

I have asked a fair amount of people (or been outright told without having to ask) about the riots and what their opinion on it was. Nearly everyone that I have talked to (including some, like AJ, who were actually interviewing and in some of the camps themselves) have said that the red shirts were the ones to blame in this matter, and they were the ones, not the government, that were the violent ones. By all accounts, the government was actually relatively lenient in dealing with them. Could you imagine the U.S. government allowing a group of some 200,000 protestors to camp out for about a month in the middle of midtown manhattan, shutting down park avenue, madison avenue, and 5th avenue, forcing businesses to close and employees to avoid going to work, paralyzing the U.S. economy while attacking various storefronts and burning out entire buildings in the process? No. They would have been cleared out--either forcibly or unforcibly within a week, and probably within a matter of hours. The Thai government didn't try to forcibly clear them out until after about a month or so.

Yes, my taxi driver was a red shirt--and a proud one to boot (crashcourse in thai politics: Thaksin, the ousted prime minister from several years ago, is for the red shirts--Abhisit, the current prime minister, is a yellow shirt. It was a large yellow shirt protest in 2006 that managed to shut down the Bangkok airport that helped kick Thaksin out and put Abhisit in place). He said that Thaksin was a great prime minister, and he wasn't corrupt at all (factually incorrect--Thaksin and some of his aides have been convicted several times of corruption. To be fair, Thaksin is independently wealthy, a businessman in his own right, so plenty of his money is legit)--it is Abhisit and his cronies that are the corrupt ones.

I tried to probe a little further, and ask him why the government would destroy a shopping mall, and his reasoning was pretty suspect.

That said, he was a nice enough guy and a pretty good cab driver, so all was not lost, and I purposely tipped him (i had exact change, but i decided to purposely overpay and just told him to keep the change).