Saturday, December 31, 2011

Sawasdee ka, Thailand! It’s been real.

Friday, December 30, 2011

By our last day in Thailand, Jeff and I have figured out a few things. Like that there’s a scrumptious French bakery in the basement of the mall down the street from our hotel. We pick up pastries there and meet Scott for breakfast at his favorite coffee shop on the ground floor. Java lovers are spoiled in Thailand: each cup is brewed to order.

I’ve yet to get one of this country’s famed massages, so with little else on today’s agenda, I decide to track down a spa. Turns out there’s one right behind the mall. It’s high-end—I even have to fill out paperwork before a ninety-minute work over. This girl is around half my size, and she about has me in tears, locating my trouble spots and pushing, pulling, and kneading them until they dissolve. Yes, she walks on me. Unlike other rubdowns, after which I’ve felt like I’d been hit by a truck for a few days, I feel limber and relaxed. I tip generously, paying a total of twenty American dollars, and wish I’d discovered this place earlier in the trip.

Outside, I run into Jeab pulling out of the mall parking lot with a car full of friends. She can’t talk long, but it’s fun to bump into someone I know in Bangkok, like I’ve made myself a little bit at home. Later, Jeab tells Oil that she was impressed to see me out and about in the city on my own. I’m just two or three blocks from my hotel—hardly impressive after  yesterday’s sojorun.

In the afternoon, Jeff and I go to a movie. Scott has warned us to make sure to stand during the trailer about the king, a tribute equivalent to the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” This is our third film—we’re experts now, familiar with the mix of American trailers, Thai trailers (goofy romantic comedies with zany sound effects), ads, PSAs, and finally the royal reel. By the way? Real Steel is kind of great.

We pick up more pastry from the French bakery for dinner: pizza cups stuffed with ham, pineapple, and jalapeño. While we debate whether to also get bread spread with cream cheese and corn, another customer, a young Thai woman, indicates to Jeff that it’s good. How could we not?

Back in our room, we pack and eat dinner at what is our kitchen table for one more night.

For photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Up until today, our adventure in Thailand has been pretty much perfect. Thanks to Scott and especially Oil, the experience has been rich and varied and smooth, all the anxiety and stress of traveling in a foreign land—navigating the language, the accommodations, the transportation, the culture—ironed out in advance by our generous hosts. Really, Jeff and I have just kind of had to show up each morning. I will be eternally grateful to Scott and Oil for this trip and don’t know how to begin to thank them.

But today I’m on my own. (No one else wants to go to the National Museum, apparently.) And it doesn’t go as planned.

There’s an English-language tour of the museum at 9:30. I have to get all the way across town, so I leave around 8:15. It’s not nearly enough time. I take the subway to the Skytrain, both of which I’ve used before, to a Chao Phraya Express boat, which I haven’t (it’s different from the river taxi we took on day two). I’m confident I can get there, or at least I keep telling myself I can, but I underestimate how long it will take me to figure out, say, how to get from the Skytrain station to the pier and how long it will take to chug up the river, farther than we traveled the night of the dinner cruise. It’s exhilarating, though, to be out and about in Bangkok, on my own.

When I get to the museum around 10, the English-language tour is long gone, so I wander about the campus on my own. Half of the buildings are closed for renovation; the galleries that are open are as utilitarian as a high-school gymnasium, and it’s hit or miss whether the artifacts have descriptions in English.

But on one wall, I find the crumbling remains of the sixth- or seventh-century terracotta sculpture pictured above, and I am enthralled. It is no less exquisite, no less haunting, reaching out to me from antiquity (rather, it’s more so), for its missing pieces.

In another building, one that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go inside had all the exhibits been open, I find a fleet of royal barges, intricately ornate boats that the King and the royal family use for state occasions and religious ceremonies. Some of the vessels are under restoration. I watch as a woman manipulates pearls of putty with a miniscule scalpel, replacing glinting shards of glass as tiny as her pinky fingernail on a skid that spans half the cavernous room.

It’s about 11:30 when I leave the museum, and I realize I’m near Khao San Road—the backpacker’s mecca where The Beach, both the book and the movie, start out—so I decide to head there for some street food. I’m on the wrong side of a busy five-point intersection, though, and can’t figure out how to get across. A taxi driver sees me wandering with my tabbed Frommer’s and my camera bag slung on my back and shouts, “Khao San Road?” I wave him off. Finally, I see a white girl who seems like she knows where she’s going. I follow her.

I follow her for blocks and blocks. It’s kind of creepy, but I keep her in my sights, and wouldn’t you know it, she leads me straight to a few blocks’ stretch of cheap hostels and American fast-food joints, crowded with Thai vendors and tie-dyed, dreadlocked farang.

I buy a plate of Pad Thai and a Coke and eat on a curb in an alleyway out of the sun.

Before I leave Khao San Road, I buy a Coke T-shirt and a pair of Thai fisherman pants, which I’ve worn nearly every day since, and head back to the pier.

Next on my itinerary is the Royal Barge Museum on the opposite side of the river. According to my map, it’s right next to Bangkok Noi, so I disembark there into the labyrinth of a local market. The museum isn’t where I think it should be, and I wander, for an hour, in one of the few parts of the city, where I’ve been anyway, where I don’t see any other tourists, eventually stumbling onto a university campus. Ultimately, I figure out that I should’ve gotten off the boat the stop before.

By now it’s 2:30. I’m hot, and I’m tired, and I still have an hour-and-a-half trip home. I give up. Next time, I tell myself.

No, today doesn’t go as planned, but like the broken pieces of the statue that so captivated me at the museum, it’s enchanting expressly because of its imperfection.

In the evening, we meet Oil and a handful of her friends at the Heineken beer garden outside the mall next door to the hotel. We crowd around a low wooden table and give our carafe its own stool.

Oil teases Jeff for drinking one of these all on his own. We meet a Dutch expat who’s lived in Bangkok for six years and doesn’t plan on going back any time soon.

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

(click photos to enlarge)

In Ayutthaya, Jeff and I ride elephants, for real this time—not just a three-minute photo opp at the “zoo” but a rocking, swaying tour of the ancient capital’s ruins. We climb the stairs to mount our pachyderm and are told we’ll each get our own.

“But we’re together,” I say.

“Too big,” the ticket taker explains.

The largest mammal on land can carry a Thai family of four but can’t, apparently, handle two farang.

While we ride, the elephants’ ears flap on our bare toes. Coarse whiskers sprout from the tops of their heads. Their skin feels like dry, cracked leather.

One handler listens to a transistor radio. Another clips his nails. Back at the corral, yet another napped on his animal’s back.

We stop to snap pictures in front of the ruins, and the elephants lift their trunks for a tip for their trouble. The bar over which my legs are draped puts them to sleep.

Scott and Oil have opted out of this activity. Oil has walked under an elephant for good luck, but she’s afraid to climb on top.

When we return, the baby elephant is running loose. It was cute at first, Scott says, until it started pestering him for his bottle of water. Oil buys a basket full of cucumbers. We feed the elephants and pose for a picture with the calf.

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Tuesday, December 28, 2011 

It’s not until we visit Ayutthaya that we are confronted with the cataclysmic flooding that inundated the northern hills, central plains, and Bangkok itself this fall. The first temple we visit, Wat Phra Mahathat, waives its 50 baht (about $1.50) fee due to damage to (ironically) its ruins. Established in 1350 by King Ramathibodi I, this ancient capital of Siam was home to 33 kings before falling to the Burmese in 1767 after a fifteen-month siege of the city. Today what remains are crumbling vestiges of temple compounds and rows upon rows of headless Buddhas.

Another temple at which we stop is closed entirely, still wet. Scott buys postcards from a vendor who probably won’t see another customer all day. The beautiful images show Wat Phra Mahathat underwater, like the city of Venice.

At the restaurant where we eat lunch (beef curry, beef and pineapple, a seafood stew served in a coconut shell), a chest-high line painted on the wall shows how high the floodwaters reached.

The sun is high in the sky by the time we arrive at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon and sizzling hot, glaring off a large reclining Buddha as white as snow.

Oil buys sticks of incense and a sheet of gold leaf. She prays over saffron cloth bundled at the reclining Buddha’s feet, repeating after an old man reading off a worn piece of paper. Then she waves us over and together we pull the robe over the statue. “For good luck,” she says.

Oil slips off her flip-flops, lights incense, prays. She applies the gold leaf to the Buddha’s visage.

Elsewhere on the grounds, an open-air temple is filled with worshippers, their sandals and shoes in a pile outside. Oil invites me inside. She hands me a wood cylinder filled with numbered sticks and tells me to make a wish. I kneel in front of lit candles and shake the cylinder in both hands until a stick escapes. Number twenty. Oil fetches my fortune, the same as hers:

High fortunate life. Supporters give help and benefit. Relatives and companions bring satisfaction. Be happy with prosperous future. Wherever, lots of followers are in order. Keep making good deeds for a long happy life. Do not condescend to others; or else, your merits will disappear. Live on economical basis. Be careful of spending money. All wishes will be fulfilled. Better not rush. Be calm and cool.

She asks me on what day I was born, pointing to a series of small Buddha figures in different poses, one for each day of the week. She identifies hers and Scott’s and Garin’s. I have no idea on what day I was born. I guess Tuesday. (I’m wrong—it was a Monday.) I drop a coin into a metal chamber beneath the Tuesday Buddha and ladle hot oil into a bowl in front of it.

Then Oil strikes a gong with a large mallet three times. She hits it so gently that when it’s my turn and I emulate her, she says, “I didn’t hear.” I try again.

I’m not a spiritual person, but there’s something heartening about the ritual, even what I don’t understand—the sting of incense, the clack of sticks, the cool, smooth stone under our bare feet.

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Jeff and Scott stayed out late last night (I took a day of R&R yesterday), and Jeff wakes up this morning fighting a cold, so he elects to stay home today while Scott, Oil, and I head to the Ancient City, a tourist attraction not even Oil has been to. We travel for more than an hour yet never leave the city before arriving at a 320-acre park in which Thai millionaire Lek Viriyaphant has either transplanted, reconstructed, or created from whole cloth architecture and monuments from throughout Thailand.

The museum is shaped like Siam itself, and the 116 exhibits are placed in their proper geographic locations, but with just a few hours to explore what one would need a whole day to do justice to, I get little sense of this. Muang Boran is too large to explore on foot, and our driver seems reluctant to escort us in his giant van on paths built for bicycles and trams, so we rent a golf cart, which immediately elevates everyone’s mood.

Scott drives, gamely pulling over whenever I spot something I want to shoot. He and Oil wait patiently while I wander around snapping pictures. (Photographed carefully to mask some of the buildings’ scaled proportions, one could produce evidence of having toured the whole of Thailand from one trip to the Ancient City.) Here is my favorite image of the day:

Afterward, we enter a military base in nearby Bang Poo for lunch—more fresh seafood in a restaurant at the end of a long pier. Oil says the locals come here to see the seabirds.

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Annlee and Jeff’s wild tuk-tuk ride

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Although Bangkok is alight with metallic Christmas—or, rather, Xmas—decorations and awash with carols pumping through every public sound system, the holiday itself passes somewhat unobserved in a country that’s ninety-five percent Buddhist. Oil tells us over dinner that Thais celebrate Christmas as an excuse to shop and drink. I reply that many Americans do too.

About dinner: we dine on six courses of Thai dishes aboard a boat that cruises the Chao Phraya River past such landmarks as the gorgeously lit Temple of Dawn. I could not have asked for a more perfect way to spent the holiday in Bangkok.

The menu:

• Poo Lhon: simmered crabmeat in coconut cream dip and vegetable crudités
• Mieng Kham: traditional Thai appetizer with chapu leaves and condiments
• Yam Tua Pu Hoy Shell: spicy wing bean salad with scallop
• Satay Gai: chicken satay with spicy peanut sauce
• Tom Yam Goong: traditional spicy prawn soup with lemongrass and lime leaf flavored
• Gaeng Kiew Waan Nua Yod Maprow: green curry roasted beef with eggplants and coconut shoot
• Pla Thord Katieam Prik Thai: fried sea bass with Thai garlic and pepper sauce (the chef substituted salmon)
• Goong Lai Sua Piew Wan: stir-fried tiger prawns with vegetables and sweet and sour sauce
• Khao Song See: steamed brown rice and white rice
• Khao Niew Mamuong: mango with sticky rice

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Items purchased at Bangkok’s Weekend Market:

• one Thailand T-shirt
• one Thailand onesie
• two beaded bracelets
• one elephant necklace
• five souvenir notebooks with wooden covers
• one map of Siam painted in coffee
• one carved wooden Buddha

Also for sale:

• faux designer-brand clothing
• novelty T-shirts, including one featuring the Minnesota Vikings
• sneakers, sandals, and flip-flops
• handcrafted jewelry
• watches
• wallets
• key chains
• headbands
• toothbrush holders
• luggage
• strings of lights
• wooden puzzles and games
• Coke memorabilia (a whole stall of it!)
• fine art
• antiques
• life-size wooden horse sculpture
• Hitler Ronald McDonald
• animal skulls
• live animals
• coconut ice cream

No wonder Scott looks overwhelmed.

For more photos, check out my Thailand 2011 photostream on Flickr.

Hangin’ with our trip mascot