Wonder What's Next

After nearly a week in Bangkok, I have such mixed feelings about the city.

The view from where I am sitting paints an incredible summary of my idea of this place. I'm in a second floor cafe with a gang of Brits behind me planning their next move in Thailand and a cute little Thai kid next to me playing a game of tiles. This part of the city (Koh San) is packed with tourists and therefore packed with Thai ready to extract as much Baht from them as possible. Just below me I see a teen Thai girl trying to sell some trinket butterfly toys to passersby in this 6ft-wide alleyway. Directly above her hangs corroded sheet metal roofing from shops surrounded by equally dilapidated walls. Draping above the crudely erected shelter are electrical, cable and telephone lines that nearly black out the sky behind them. In the background is some more recent architecture from probably the 70s that is a few stories high. It looks like someone took all the hotels and houses from a Monopoly game and bunched them up randomly and called it good. Everything is so compact and hectic, even in these back alleys.

It's hard for me to trust the locals. I arrived at my hotel in hopes of some good advice or direction in a place where I had no real sense of things. I took a chance and talked to a bellman about things to do and places to see, hoping to be able to trust the hotel staff. The first things he offers are trips to tailors and jewelry stores, which after no more than 1 day you know are 99% scams. The next day I took a tuk tuk ride (see pictures) around the city to see what this place had to offer. We went to a dinky Buddha shrine and set off for some "extra stops" to go "shopping." I leveled with the driver about how the back-scratching circle works and it's like this: he shows me this card that's 5 litres free gas and says that any time he takes a customer to a designated "shopping" area, he gets a gas card. Anytime one of the customers buys something, he gets another card for each purchase. So I tell him - listen, I'll give you 100baht (it was originally 20baht) if you can just skip these places and take me to cool parks and temples. He ponders it and says he really needs these gas cards, and if we go to these places it'll be a free ride and he'll take me for another hour to go view the city - I just gotta go in for 5-10 mins and come back out. So I survive these places and we're ready to go. We drop by my neighborhood and he says he's gotta hang out for 10 mins while his ride cools down, so I go in a travel agency for a few mins and talk to the guys in there (the travel agencies are actually pretty sweet here btw). I come out and he's gone - could be worse, I spent no Baht, but I really did get taken for a ride. Lesson learned.

There are two sides to the coin though. Rachael and Dakota got lucky and found a really cool, honest cab driver the first day they were here who basically became our personal tour guide and did some amazing things for us. He got us a good price on Thai boxing tickets, took us to some fantastic restaurants, amazing Thai massage, floating market that was about an hour outside of town and a ton more. Mickey. Awesome, I'll miss him. The floating market was absolutely awesome - I've posted a few pictures on it.

The nightlife is really crazy here, the food is very hit or miss and the weather is not as bad as I had imagined. I'd take Boulder's fall over this sticky stuff any day though! South Korea will be much cooler I imagine so that will be a nice change of pace. I'm really excited to see Eve and get to experience things in Seoul - I'm definitely done with Bangkok for now, but I'll be back for 1 night when I'm on my way to Koh Samui (can't wait), and hopefully can get some more fun stuff done.

Go Broncos.

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