Welcome to the Jungle

Bangkok and the nearby pig farming town of Samphran

I arrived at the Bangkok airport early Saturday and began searching through the waiting crowds for my ride. A few dozen taxis and hotels tried to convince me that they were in fact the ride I was searching for but no one had my name out there. I realized that my cell phone's contact book had decided not to work in this country and I had no way to get in touch with the organizers, so I had the tourist help desk make an announcement and discovered that my group had been standing, sign in hand, 200m off at a coffee shop.

It seemed the main highway was closed so we spent the next two hours driving through Bangkok traffic; this is something I never want to attempt myself as lane markers seem to have no meaning and all matter of vehicle and beast swerve all over the road without regard for safety or law. Along the way we stopped at some random roadside shack to get my first experience in Thai food; restaurants here don't typically have any menu or prices so you just invent your own dish (though chances are they won't understand PB&J) and depending on the ingredients, it'll probably cost between a quarter and 60 cents; I don't know the words for anything so I've managed by randomly pointing to things – this has led to some interesting combinations like spicy spinach and squid rice (highly recommended). The majority of my experiences with random food vendors have been positive; in most cases they won't sell you something that is not intended for human consumption or would taste utterly terrible to the typical faraang. On at least one occasion, however, I think I was served a raw, fermented fish which is horribly bitter and causes instant stomach trauma; in another instance, immediately after I bought the food, a huge rat popped out of the wall and took a big bite out of the pile I had just ordered from - I couldn't get a refund but did manage to make a trade for food from a pile further from the hole. I don't think I've eaten dog yet but have unwittingly downed buffalo, pig intestines, pig stomach and various other pig parts not commonly believed to be edible.

We reached Samphran and unloaded my stuff at the “mansion"; sadly this turned out to be a normal apartment, but it was fully furnished with AC so I couldn't complain too much; fortunately bowl toilets seem to be commonplace here, but flushing and toilet paper are not – my bathroom was equipped with a variable-pressure hose that you would fire into the bowl for a gravity flush or elsewhere as a substitute for TP (I never adapted this latter tradition).

The school group didn't tell me what I was supposed to do from there so I took a “motorcycle taxi" (where you ride on the back of a scooter with nothing to keep you from bouncing off as the driver hauls over the poorly-maintained, heavily-trafficked roads at 70kph – the drivers are required by law to have helmets but there's no such provision for the passenger) into town; there wasn't much of anything to do there, so I killed half an hour trying to order food then went to sit in church and read til Mass – some Thai kid stared at me for the next two hours – as I was soon to discover, this part of the country gets few visitors (its main attraction being pig farms) and my predecessor and I were the first westerners many of them had ever seen. Mass followed the same structure as anywhere else in the world (except everyone bows instead of shaking hands), but it was particularly difficult to understand as it was oddly all in Thai.

That night, I met Joey – the guy I was replacing, who explained to me that absolutely no one spoke decent English, most speaking none at all, and there was zilch in the way of structure or lesson plans for my classes. We went to Big C (the local Walmart – where all the teenagers hang out) and tried to catch a showing of War of the Worlds, but it had somehow been dubbed within hours of its American release - this did not seem as if it would be the best introduction to the language.

The next day I went to “the mall" with my boss; this was an utterly massive shopping center with an amusement park on the top floor. We had lunch at a restaurant where they made you cook your own food and the point was reaffirmed that I would get no guidance whatsoever as to what I was to teach the following day.

Later that afternoon, I grabbed a bus toward Bangkok – I had no idea where Bangkok was, but it seemed as if it would be hard to miss. I hopped off at several points along the way to sample things in markets I assumed to be edible or to ask if I had in fact reached the city yet.

As I got closer to the metropolis, I grabbed the smaller city buses which turned out to be run entirely by teenagers who blasted music over heavily-modded stereo systems and honked and threw things at the other busses. We came to a river where traffic came to a standstill (there is no good time for traffic in Bangkok), so I opted to explore on foot – this didn't get me much of anywhere so I returned to Samphran without ever knowing whether I had actually reached Bangkok proper.

In the morning, I took a motorbike into school just to turn around and go back because a teacher disapproved of my wrinkled jeans and shirt. So, dressed in khakis and a dress shirt, I launched into my first class with some random lesson on a day in the life of Garfield. The next group was older so I asked them what they thought they should be learning – they had no idea so I just made up some garbage about geography; the beautiful thing about teaching English to foreigners is that as long as you keep talking in a semi-coherent manner, you can write it off as “immersion" even though you might not be teaching anything of the slightest value. The next class just bounced off the walls and talked in Thai for 40 minutes, so I labeled them a lost cause and worked on an actual lesson plan. By the next period, I had nailed down the topic of “Time" which I would use for the next 2 weeks and 1100 students.

The remainder of the week exposed me to the full range of classes – some listened intently the whole time, others demanded that we play a game or that I sing a song in the first 5 minutes and wouldn't let me get back to teaching for the rest of the period, and others smuggled small furry animals into class in their pockets. There are no seats in my room so the kids have six degrees of freedom and make liberal use of it; I usually just try to isolate the 75-95% of the class that could care less far enough way such that they go on fighting, playing hopscotch, and humping each others' legs without distracting the interested students.

I led the life of a rockstar – wherever I went, kids waved hello, girls screamed and asked for autographs, and others simply stared in awe. When I decided to stop by a concert where the whole of the student body was assembled, a whisper passed through the crowd, and a wave moved through the mass as all 3000 students turned their heads to watch me. Everyone insists that I resemble one celebrity or another – the most common seems to be Anakin from Episode 3 – I'm hoping they're referring to his look before the horrible deformation of the lava planet.

I got a new place next door to school – roughly 9 times the size of my Australia room, fully furnished with a king-size bed, 8 massive windows overlooking the town center and a flushing toilet all for only $67 a month (from what I hear, this is top dollar). There's no AC or hot water, and if I ever actually open the windows, I get the delightful smell of the pig farm across the street and a thick layer of dust from the smoke stacks - every place has its little annoyances.

Each day the kids play soccer in the nearby fields and they invite me despite my obvious lack of any talent whatsoever. I don't have the slightest clue what any of them are saying so I just kick it at anyone who says my name and smile and nod at everything else (this is not really effective since the word for my name also seems to mean “dribble it up and take a shot on goal").

Somehow I was convinced to work for a few hours Saturday morning – I was no doubt enticed by the special $5/hour wage (my usual pay rate is right around $1.25). As it turned out, my class was all single women; once again, I had no lesson plan but they were fairly adept, so we skipped the whole teaching bit and practiced conversation (probably more challenging for me than them). At some point, it came out that I wanted to go to Bangkok, so they conferred and decided to skip out early, pile into a car, and drive to the city.

We went to see the world's largest teakwood mansion which offered lots of artifacts - from a 19th century king's jigsaw puzzles to the current king's power tools. We had a Thai guide who spoke English with a heavy accent such that neither I nor my Thai companions could understand anything she said. We watched a Thai cultural show where guys with sticks beat the crap out of each other and ladies in heavy make-up and elaborate costumes with unusually large, hairy legs, pranced around and pretended to be deer and hunters and other weird stuff.

After this, the driver quietly attempted to leave Bangkok, but as we approached the highway, I raised an objection as there was still much of Bangkok to see and I didn't want to make a 2-hour bus trip back. They tried to talk me out of it – claiming that the city was rife with bad men, but in the end they conceded to let me go in the company of the two younger women.

We visited the Golden Mount; it would not surprise me if Bangkok were the flattest city on earth, with not so much as a speed bump or step in its entire sprawl, but I did manage to find the one giant rock that jutted out of downtown and forced my companions to hike up it (I truly have a talent for this sort of thing). After a few hundred steps, we had great views from the temple at the top; the Bangkok skyline switches dramatically from modern skyscrapers to incredibly colorful, intricate temples, to ramshackle huts with palm trees growing out of them.

This trek exhausted the girls, so they fled back to Samphran, convinced I would never survive the night. I ventured on to a few more wats and to the edge of Chinatown; here I found a market that stretched for several kilometers in a couple different directions, but offered nothing but flowers as far as the eye could see (it's a travesty to have this much market with out a single snack food). It was getting dark, so I called Joey to ask about hostels but he told me just to take a taxi to his apartment (he now teaches Kindergarten in the city), so I jumped on a dtuk-dtuk (motorized tricycle) and sped down countless alleyways, sidewalks, and sewer ditches clear to the other side of town – this ended up costing me around 4 bucks which is roughly twice the cost of an upscale hostel. Along the way, I got a call from one of the women checking to see whether I was still alive; I told her that the bad men had stolen all my money and I was now living on the streets and dancing so that tourists would toss me spare change – this did little to assuage her fears. Joey's new place cost the same as the luxury suite in Samphran, but was roughly half the size of the standard broom closet and for some reason was split with a Thai student.

That night we took the skytrain to see a Portuguese movie with English and Thai subtitles, and then crashed some party full of UNC exchange student. Back at the apartment, it turned out that Joey had 4 other houseguests so we arranged ourselves quite literally in sardine fashion and I managed a few hours of unsatisfying sleep before again setting out on the town.

That morning, I got lost for a bit and ran into a few more wats, markets and parks before heading up to the Chaktujak market. This is one of the world's largest undercover markets with everything from honey-roasted locusts (I'm slowly working up the nerve to try these) to squirrels on leashes. I was lost in this souk-like maze for around 3 hours with little to show for it except a six-year-old guidebook and a belly full of unrecognizable snack foods. Taking the train back towards town, someone directed me down a narrow alleyway that was lined with disintegrating shacks and infested with wild-eyed dogs and chickens that were little more than a few stray feathers pinned to skeletons – if I were ever going to get avian flu, this would be the place. It soon opened up into a pleasant walkway through the treetops that ran to a peaceful park. From here I got hopelessly lost and didn't arrive at the legendary “Grand Palace" until several hours after it had closed, so I wandered around Chinatown, visited Wat Pho, which featured the famous reclining Buddha, and caught a series of buses back to Samphran. It took about an hour to get the last 3 kilometers back to my apartment as I had a bad habit of jumping on trucks going the wrong direction and traffic was particularly bad due to a couple of elephants that were going down the wrong side of the road, moving on a red light and hardly every signaling – this sort of reckless behavior leads me to question whether elephants should even be allowed on this nation's highways.

The second week was much like the first with a similar mix of classes; in one group, I had a kid who fed his pet squirrel milk from a bottle and several others that spent the period reading a graphic Thai version of “The Art of Sex." In the kids' defense, these distractions were certainly far more interesting than whatever it was I was teaching. I got a chance to learn the game of badminton – as it turns out, this is a really intense sport, where rather than gently volleying the shuttlecock to a field of grandmas on the other side, you leap into the air and hammer it down the opponent's throat.

As the weeks passed, I tried to avoid Bangkok as much as possible; I didn't really care for sitting on a bus for 3 hours to go 30km and desperately sought out ways to do what I needed to do without going anywhere near the capitol city. Unfortunately, many things simply cannot be done in an area lacking the smallest hint of English proficiency. I ducked out of school early one Friday to get to the Vietnam embassy before closing time. As could be expected, the bus stalled in traffic a few kilometers short of its destination and I had to sprint the remaining distance. Vietnam is unique in its visa requirements, as they require that you specify the exact dates you intend to show up and leave as well as your port of entry and exit. This is a most irritating restriction as I have only a vague notion of when I'll be anywhere. India will let you show up and stay for as long as you want but can only accept applications and issue a visa between the hours of 9 and 12 mon-fri, making it virtually impossible to obtain one without skipping out of a few days of work.

Next to the Indian embassy was Soi Cowboy, the epitome of Bangkok's drive to satiate rich foreigners' basest desires; fortunately it was the middle of the afternoon and the area was far from full force. Oddly, the subway stop here took me directly to Patpong, downtown's red light district. After wrestling through hordes of marketing agents for the less traditional version of the “Thai massage," I got out into Chinatown where a huge food festival awaited me. Here I picked up a giant stick of rice and beans cooked in a sugar cane tube and watched some random Chinese dancing show. I worked off the snack walking over to the Indian district and picked up a delicious meal of curry and roti for under a buck.

After this, I finally managed to find the famed Khao San Road, the undisputed backpacking heart of Asia. Here, souvenir shops offered mass-produced frog instruments and teakwood Buddha images with obligatory bargaining (unless you happen to have a million baht weighing down your pockets), snack stands offered overpriced deep-fried insects, and live bands blared out English hits. I found a guesthouse for 3 bucks and spent the night seeking out the guidebooks for the next few countries where I'd be stopping off.

The next morning, I crossed the river to the Temple of the Dawn (which naturally is best viewed after dark); here my celebrity reached a whole new level – two Japanese girls approached me and held out a camera, asking “Together?"; naturally I assumed they wanted me to take their picture, but rather than hand me the camera, they each took a turn posing with me – be on the lookout for my face in a Japanese blog in a month or so (possibly with the caption “Me and Anakin"). I grabbed another boat to Wat Pho (home of the ridiculously long reclining Buddha) and the Grand Palace, which seemed to feature every architectural style in the history of Buddhism. Next was the National Museum, which is reportedly the largest in Southeast Asia but was hardly time-consuming due to its lack of air-conditioning. Then there was a long walk up to the National Library, which has a few English books sprinkled among thousands of Thai volumes, and a quick ride on the express boat back to the Samphran bus.

My first trip to Bangkok had left me in a state of utter confusion, but I have now come to realize that this city is perhaps the most rational of any on the planet. There aren't really any consistent laws that interfere with the natural order of things, so everyone essentially does what is in his/her best interest and, in most cases, what conforms to the moral tenets of Buddhism. The result is a remarkably liberal society where anything can be bought and any activity can be enjoyed for dirt-cheap, as long as you keep your wits about you and ignore the myriad con-men that tell you the museums are all closed and your best bet is to spend the day shopping for custom-tailored suits.

So this is one of the world's largest cities...