A Taste of Bangkok

In all the time we have been in Thailand, we have never written about Bangkok! Lea Ann has been begging me to write another blog (I have been too lazy to write blogs for about 6 months now) so I figured this would be a fun thing to try to describe to everyone back home.

The first thing we noticed about Bangkok (besides the heat) is the stink. Bangkok stinks...period. Lea Ann and I had a theme song about Bangkok the first time we visited...and that theme song was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”. It is definitely appropriate. Bangkok smells like a fish market next door to a sewage treatment plant. Most of Bangkok really is a fish market, with little street vendors selling barbequed fish, sausages, chickens, squids, and bugs. There is also a lot of dog crap on the sidewalks (they have a lot of stray dogs, called “Soi Dogs”) so you have to be very careful where you step! Throw in the air pollution from the 30 year-old tuk-tuks, motorcycles, and taxis and you have “Eau de Bangkok”. It’s not so bad if you plug your nose on a windy day after a rainstorm.

Bangkok is also notorious for its traffic jams. The roads are really small and a lot of them are only accessible from 1 direction, which makes for a lot of U-turns and some nasty traffic. When we come down to Bangkok on the weekends, the drive from Korat is about 4.5 hours but about 2 of those hours are spent crawling the last 1 or 2 miles through downtown Bangkok. Luckily once we are downtown it is really easy to get around on the Skytrain. The Skytrain is fast, cheap and takes us tourists to all the spots we care about. The other option for transportation in heavy traffic is the motorcycle taxi...but Lea Ann and I haven’t had the nerve to try that yet :-).

Another amazing thing about Bangkok is the huge differences in “class” you see every day. Around Sukhumvit (the expensive...touristy part of town) everywhere you go you’ll see multi-million dollar homes, designer shopping malls, and Lamborghini dealerships. Right next door are hundreds of people living in shanty-towns made of corrugated steel and cardboard. For us this is pretty amazing and disturbing to see.

Ok sorry this is starting to sound pretty whiney, but I have one more thing to complain about before we get to the more fun stuff. Being a foreigner in Bangkok just screams “rip me off” to everyone around. Especially if you bust out a map or a camera...you are easy money at that point! Everyone including street vendors, tuk-tuk drivers, taxis, and shop owners will usually increase their prices by about 100 – 300% when they smell a tourist! Probably no different from a lot of cities...but definitely frustrating and annoying! If you bargain with them they will reduce their prices pretty easily though...they don’t like to see a sale walk away :-). Luckily we are pretty good at speaking Thai now, so they know we’ve been here for a while and we know what things should cost :-).
So why do we even bother coming to Bangkok? There are some good things, really. For one thing, we don’t have a lot of things to do in Korat. So we come down to Bangkok every couple of weeks to hang out with other westerners, go shopping, catch a movie, and get some good Western food :-). You can find anything you want in Bangkok...and I usually want Mexican food. There is this little restaurant we go to called “Charley Brown’s” which is our favorite Mexican restaurant where we can get awesome margaritas! The food is pretty good too...