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Post by ilbonito on Mar 18, 2010 8:06:47 GMT
Hi guys, I just joined the board I recently came back from Thailand and I put together a photoblog trying to capture what I thought was fresh or unique about Bangkok, a city I love. I thought some of you here might like it, so I'm recycling a bit and posting some excerpts: I love Bangkok. There is something about BKK that reinvigorates the soul; it is like walking through a living, breathing comic book, an alternate hyper-reality where things that couldn’t possible occur happen on a regular basis. Its not a beautiful city – although there are places in it of extraordinary beauty. But its most characteristic urban landscape is of dingy corner stores, roaring freeways, 711s and soiled concrete apartment blocks. Yet I would never call it depressing, or dreary. Bangkok is a city that loves life. It loves the bizarre and the novel. It loves to be weirded out. It is a city with an endless appetite for new fads and crazes. It loves to eat; and there is food everywhere. Open-air restaurants with plastic chairs crowd every street corner, and the footpaths heave with carts selling mango rice or fried chicken drumsticks or duck soup or donuts. Bangkok loves whiskey and beer and Red Bull (which it invented) and valium and Xanax and amphetamine-pumped diet pills, available prescription-free over the counter, no questions asked. It loves noise and flashing lights and surging crowds, clutter and chaos. And yet when it wants to be (on its Skytrain monorail or in its gleaming malls) it can be surprisingly sleek. But it is never sterile. It loves things that shine and flutter; banners, glittery shrines, disco balls, sparkly jockstraps sold on the street outside gay bars. It loves kitsch; twinkling fairy lights draped over everything, statues of gods or bikini girls or frogs or Hello Kitty. Bangkok loves flowers; garlands of jasmine are draped anew every morning over the city’s shrines. At midnight the flower market is a flurry of fragrant petals as customers arrive for fresh orchids. And even in the concrete jungle, there are animals everywhere: mangy stray dogs and indentured elephants roam the streets, and birds tweet in bamboo cages. Bangkok loves Buddha, and Indra and Kwan Yin – often in the same shrine – and it worships its king with a zeal that is almost frightening. And most of all Bangkok loves to laugh. If anything marks Thailand – its people, the Tshirts on the street, the ads on TV, the graphic design – it is a sense of playfulness, an unabashed enjoyment of anything that is fun, fresh, colorful, humourous or cute. Bangkok: What is not to love?
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 18, 2010 8:11:15 GMT
Since this was my sixth time in the city I decided to do something a bit different, get off the usual trail. I’d done most of the big sights, and this time I wanted to be a bit adventurous and get a little more under the city’s skin. So when I heard about an artists’ studio/hippie commune squatting in a semi-derelict building in an inconvenient suburb, I thought I’d go along and see if they had a room to stay. They did: it cost 100 baht ( 2 Euros) a night, but if you didn’t have that they let you stay for free. The concept was a hostel/”refugee camp”. (Who could fly to Thailand and then not afford 100 baht for a room?) It was filthy – but it promised free didgeridoo lessons and “first aid drumming” (I never understood the concept) and was full of big, airy, empty rooms scattered with half-completed-and-then-abandoned art projects, and cats, and piles of old clothes. One day the residents decided to paint a Guns N Roses mural on one of the walls, but then the main girl left before she was done, leaving the ghost-like outline of Axl Rose floating in a corner. The guy who ran the place wore shorts and dreadlocks (I never saw him in a shirt) and when I asked what time the hostel closed, he replied that the front door was broken so he couldn’t lock it if he tried. Various other feral/drifter/hot-boy-with-acoustic guitar/girl-in-headwrap-types would occassionally wander into vision and then disappear up a stairwell. The building seemed mostly disarmingly empty. It was interesting. At night you could stand on the roof (where until recently, I was told, nine Russians had been camping in tents) and watch the sun go down. I lingered there, because my 2 Euro room, though charmingly painted, lacked any windows, ( surprisingly common in Thai buildings, no wonder everyone always hangs out on the street). On my first night I go locked in. The door to let me out of my windowless, quickly-becoming- claustrophobic room refused to open. I banged hard, but the guy next door only turned up his Appalachian folk music, before finally getting the drift and letting me out twenty increasingly-frantic minutes later. I had visions of being incinerated in my locked, sweatbox of a room (the building’s wiring was pretty funky-looking), and swore I would leave. But then the next day I changed my mind; there was something about the place that made me feel… free, wandering around in my bare feet and Hare Krishna-style top. I just slept with the door open. But after two nights I decided it was time to go; the location was a bitch – it was a 20 minute walk to the river, then a local ferryboat to get just about anywhere, and the lack-of-window factor was still bothering me (as was the now-broken toilet). And some hippie **** stole a shirt I had hung out to dry on the roodtop camping area. So much for love, peace and understanding. After a long, sleepless night listening to the reverb of bass through my open door (the dreaded crew downstairs were always playing reggae and smoking ganja, and I had visions of police turning up for a noise complaint and then throwing us all in a hellhole jail for the drugs), I moved on.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 18, 2010 8:13:06 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2010 11:26:56 GMT
Welcome aboard ! What a great entry OP onto the Port. I have never been to that part of the world but,am intrigued and have heard so many things about it. Your thread is another welcome eye opener. Thank you! ( I used to have a part Siamese cat we called Bangkok
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 18, 2010 14:43:51 GMT
"if you are interested" ~ ?! Whew, I'm writing this after a visit to your blog. I'm only giving you two thumbs up because that's all the hands I have, otherwise I'd show a forest of thumbs.
Hey -- recycle, rework, toss around anything you want here. This thread is a great look at what happens to a traveler who ventures off the tourist path. I love your intro, with its capturing of what makes the place pulse, beyond the beauty and ancient culture.
A couple of questions, please .... how did you go about getting below the surface? Six trips is a lot, but a "foreign" city even in ones own country can be daunting. On your first visit, were you there to see Bangkok or was it just the entry point to Thailand for you? It would be great to hear how you went from being a green tourist to someone who willingly fell down the rabbit hole.
Thanks so much for this.
And oh yeah -- did Bangkok really invent Red Bull?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2010 14:51:16 GMT
Well, Bangkok is the very first place I ever saw Red Bull. Great story, ilbonito -- I have been put in windowless room in Asia more that once, and it is not for me. No matter how little I am spending, I now refuse any room without a window.
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Post by Jazz on Mar 18, 2010 20:46:26 GMT
Excellent! great photos and a good read...love the 'feral drifters' ;D. I like your name, 'ilbonito'. Do you like tunafish?
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 18, 2010 20:54:59 GMT
Thanks all.
I passed through Bangkok because I'm Australian but I lived in Tokyo and Seoul, so I'd stop off on the way to and from Oz. The first time I visited, oddly, I didn't like it - simply because I was unprepared. The city seemed huge and I had no idea what to do and in the end didn't do very much. I was also paranoid about being ripped off. I was a very "green" traveller.
Almost ten years later I visited again - and just fell in love with it. For people who like big, exciting cities, I think Bangkok is one of the best; and its culture is so rich, colorful and fascinating. Every time I've been I've progressively dived in more, and usually come home with armfuls of Thai CDs, books and magazines to learn more. There is something addictive about it. Its one of the few places I palpably miss (like mini-homesickness) when I'm not there.
And about Red Bull: yeah it is Thai. The original, much stronger, Thai version was apparently favoured by truck drivers bussing around Thailand in the middle of the night way before it was marketed to clubbers in the West in its diluted form. Asian countries generally are really into those (sometimes nasty) energy drinks.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 18, 2010 21:08:20 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2010 21:33:31 GMT
Even though I've been to Bangkok more than 15 times (okay, mostly as a stopping off point for a few days on my way to somewhere else), you have definitely captured the essence better than I have been able to do in my pitiful attempts.
I absolutely encourage the others here to visit your excellent blog since you are only enticing us with these photos!
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Post by spindrift on Mar 18, 2010 22:43:20 GMT
Those are great pictures. I'm going to take my time reading the script and savour it to the full.
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 19, 2010 2:49:32 GMT
I liked the sign announcing the six- ledgged croc. Did you see it?
Nice one!
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Post by gertie on Mar 19, 2010 3:37:18 GMT
Wow, love the beautiful pictures! Great blog, ilbonito. I was so happy to see you had bear-garden featured, one of my very favorites.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 5:01:13 GMT
thanks all for the kind and welcoming words! jazz: hahaha, no "ilbonito" is actually a name I made up to reflect my interest in the three countries (othan my native Australia) where I've spent the most time: Korea, Japan and Brazil. "Ilbon" is "Japan" in Korean, and "Ito" is Japanese for thread. I used to post a lot on Lonely Planet's Thorntree forum giving travel advice for tokyo, so it was "a thread about Japan"... And then "bonito" means "handsome" in Portuguese which was just ongue-in-cheek sarcasm.... kerouac2 - glad you enjoyed the blog because I actually used some of your info (properly attrbuted!) on my recent Paris trip. I took you advice and went to check out Rue Myrnha! It was great, thanks Maybe I'll post my Paris report next? hwnpp - I did see the six-legged crocodile, but it was in a suspiciously murky pond so I couldn't count its legs. It lives in a special "handicapped crocodiles section" in the world's biggest croc farm on Bangkok's outskirts. Several years, during an official ceremony to mark the park's anniversary, it apparently smashed through the glass of its tank and roamed through the screaming crowds. I love the story because it just embodies so much of Bangkok's surrealism and its sometimes "Twilight Zone" feeling. What other city would seriously be attacked by a marauding six-legged maneating reptile? Its like something out of a trashy sci-fi movie but somehow, these kind of things seem to happen in Bangkok all the time.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 5:02:03 GMT
PS - Gertie, just discovered Bear Garden, but she's cool isn't she?
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 5:18:34 GMT
Sex, traffic, golden Buddhas - Bangkok is famous for many things. Art deco architecture is not one of them, but it probably should be. Vast swathes of the charming “old” part of town consist of crumbling apartment blocks from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, painted in blue, pink and yellow. The city even spawned its own distinct style – Thai deco – sleek modernist buildings with ornamental, distinctly Thai flourishes like temple eaves and golden lions. On my first day I took a walk down the grand ceremonial avenue that links the old and new palaces. It has one of my favorite street names in the world -Ratchadamnoen Klang, (right up there with Buenos Aires’ Hipolito Yrigoyen and Avenida Jorge Schimmplelfeng in Foz do Iguacu) But my favorite part of early twentieth century Bangkok is less glamorous, more grimey: Talad Noi, “the Machine District”. Here, on the edge of Chinatown, dark shophouses hawk wires and chains, industrial blades, components, engines, hooks and pulleys – all in lovely, though unnoticed, 1930s blocks. I love how in Miami the art deco district is full of models and wannabes and tourists on walking tours (I imagine), but here it just rumbles with the screech of gruff dudes driving around on little forklifts. Every city should have a tropical-ethnic-art-deco-industrial-machinery-wholesale-district!
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 19, 2010 5:29:26 GMT
"Handicapped crocodiles section"? I'd love to see the icons on the signs used to identify that area! The marauding croc story is great -- sort of a mini-Godzilla incident.
I loved the detail about your bringing more and more bits of the culture -- cds, magazines, etc. -- back home with you. Sounds as though you might wind up living there some day. Is it hard to keep up your Thai language skills between visits?
Unlike Gertie, I'd never heard of Bear Garden, but am so happy for the introduction.
Your pics are great -- the one of the lady sleeping at the cafe is fantastic.
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Post by bjd on Mar 19, 2010 7:37:24 GMT
Having only seen photos of temples and more temples from a friend's visit to Bangkok (on the way to somewhere else), I never wanted to set foot there. I must admit I have changed my mind after seeing your pics -- I like cities, and like the kind of districts where people live and work. If I may, I'll add a picture one of my sons took in Shanghai a year ago. He too likes those kinds of neighbourhoods. Would these ladies fit in Bangkok?
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 8:40:42 GMT
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 8:50:46 GMT
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Post by bjd on Mar 19, 2010 10:13:26 GMT
I think there are colourful things in Shanghai too, but the general pollution makes most of the pics I have seen gray. The colours come from what people are wearing.
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 19, 2010 10:50:58 GMT
The first one looks like Wat Kaek on Silom BJD, the pic could have been made in the cooler season, the guy walking away enen wears a padded, sleeveless jacket. I think in Yaowarat oon a backstreet you could see similar scenes, but with less warm clothes. There are some very serene and quiet streets there too. Though most would only know the main road with all the gold shops, neon signs and fruit market.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 11:37:21 GMT
hwinpp, you're right Its the Mariamman temple in Silom.
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 19, 2010 11:52:52 GMT
Here is an entry I made on my blog (on a previous trip) on another Bangkok favorite: I am staying at a very odd hotel. Before arriving, I checked directions to the place ( the Atlanta) on the internet. Their site advised: The entrance to the hotel is quite difficult to find. However, look carefully and you will see it beneath a sign which reads: this is the place you are looking for, if you know it. If you dont, you'll never find it. This is absolutely true: nobody comes to The Atlanta by chance.It had all started when I faxed my reservation over ( they refuse to use email). A week later, a letter arrived in a beautiful 1940s-style envelope, by airmail, confirming my visit. When I finally pulled up outside the hotel, at the end of a meandering residential street near Sukhumvit, my curiosity was exploding. I stepped into the lobby; and it was like checking into the Twilight Zone. I was greeted by several cats, staring at me from the black and white floor. Fans whirred overhead, and potted palm trees rustled. A few people were sitting quietly on plush little red sofas. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. It was a David Lynch movie. The building's history is a macabre case in point. It was originally contructed as a toxicology laboratory (!!!) in the 1930s and converted into a hotel in the 50s. It is still a beautiful period-piece, but with a weird hushed feeling. In a city where so much has changed in the last fifty years, it is slightly unnerving to find yourself somewhere that hasn't changed at all. But that is not the strangest thing. Plastered all over the hotel are signs, dozens of them, expounding on the philosophies of its stern and mysterious owner. It is as though the whole place feels the need to provide a continual running commentary on itself. The hotel restaurant boasts the largest annotated menu of Thai vegetarian dishes in the world&. In the lobby signs direct guests to the reading room or to the "art deco light table for viewing photographic slides and negatives"; and sternly forbid non-guests from entering the hotel garden. Stepping into this lushly overgrown jungle, one comes to a small pond where more signs educate the visitor on its two resident turtles, themselves nearly fifty years old - Archibald and Doris (named after Doris Day) . They once roamed the lobby but have been given a special outdoor enclosure as climbing the stairs was "chipping their carapace". The hotel pool beyond gets its own photo exhibition, stuck up on the cheerily painted wall. The pool is clean and charmingly rundown, with chipped tiles, surrounded by palms and bouganvilleas. Looking at the photos, its easy to see that it is much as it was decades before. It was the first hotel pool in Thailand, having been converted from the laboratory's antivenom snake pit (!!!). Also, I learned, it used to have a large cinema screen behind it, so that guests could sit in their rooms and watch the movies. I guess the Atlanta was idiosyncratic from the start. Their website expounds on their philosophy: Run on conservative principles and imperiously heedless of fashions and trends, The Atlanta is untouched by pop culture and post-modern primitivism. Its style and atmosphere hark back to gentler and more cultivated times. The Atlanta is popular with cultured occidentals, with writers, academics, artists, cinema & theatre and other professional people, with dreamers and innocuous eccentrics, and their families. The Atlanta is against sex tourism. Sex tourism is exploitative, socially damaging and culturally demeaning: those who want to buy sex should do so in their own country. The Atlanta has a zero tolerance policy with regard to trouble-makers and all illegal activities, including the use or possession of illicit drugs. Such miscreants are reported to the police without advance warning, without hesitation and without apology. Those who wish to spend their time in Thailand whoring, indulging in alcohol abuse, drugs or other illegal activities should stay elsewhere. It goes on to notify guests that they will have no hesitation in reporting offending guests names to the newspapers (!!) in their home countries. And to think all this local color, in such a funky building; in a room with airconditioning and a balcony, and a pool and a gym, for ten Australian dollars a night! Sure, the rooms themselves are fairly shabby, but still, it must be one of the most remarkable hotels in the world.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 19, 2010 13:58:10 GMT
Oh my god, you stayed at the world famous Atlanta. I admit that I have never dared to stay there myself. However, I did once stay at the Chelsea in NYC, which is about the same caliber although probably not as clean as Bangkok.
Oh wait, now I suddenly had visions of at least 10 Bangkok hotels that I have stayed in that can no way qualify as clean.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 19, 2010 15:23:34 GMT
Ha, Ilbonito! Thanks for the great surprise reply. Who knew?! I love the carefully literal labels they put on the handicapped crocs, and the way the fork & spoon icon is placed next to the humans icon, which is next to a crocodile icon. This inevitably started the earworm: "he's imagining the way you'd fit within his skin". Your friend's comment about the dinosaurs is priceless. Our minds must run in similar directions, because I was convinced they were these guys, crankily looking for the smoking section. Don't know where I was in the ten minutes between our posts, but I completely missed the great deco and industrial products pictures. The second one, with the turquoise building on a cramped street with flowers, is pretty much how I envisioned Bangkok looking in the parts away from the tourist sites. What a contrast between the vibrant street scenes and the "weird hushed feeling" of the hotel. Great pictures, all. The shrimp photo is out of this world. (and speaking of photos -- Bjd, your picture is 1000 px wide! Can you fix it, please, as it's dramatically stretching my screen.)
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Post by Don Cuevas on Mar 19, 2010 15:40:07 GMT
Intrigued, I went to the Atlanta Hotel website. It's certainly a document of firm principles. I got an odd, somewhat uncomfortable feeling from the hotel's pictures, though.
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Post by bjd on Mar 19, 2010 18:17:49 GMT
Bixa, the photo is scaled down to 700 wide. It doesn't do anything on my screen. Delete it if you want.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 19, 2010 18:22:15 GMT
It didn't do anything to my screen either (and I am having all sorts of other problems -- that was not one of them, thank god).
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Post by ilbonito on Mar 20, 2010 0:01:57 GMT
Oh my god, you stayed at the world famous Atlanta. I admit that I have never dared to stay there myself. Why, Kerouac? Are you one of the "miscreants" the signs warned against?
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