Dear Friends,
I arrived in Bangkok on the night of July 22, after a logistically perfect but physically arduous trip. 21 hours of travel, gate to gate, is 21 hours of travel—in commercial.
And it’s been non-stop activity since then.
If I wait until I can write a polished blog post, it’ll never get done, so to quote my friend BSK, “good is good, but done is better.”
In abbreviated form, here are some of my first impressions of Bangkok:
Thai people truly live up to their reputations, and are noticeably gracious. One of the secretaries at RIS, in helping print out a map of the neighborhood, said, “Thai people are very nice. They will help you if you need it.” I’ve lived in a variety of places, and in each one, I’m certain that people would help out a lost stranger. But to speak so categorically (which several people have done here, in describing their compatriots’ likelihood of offering assistance) is not something that would ever occur to me.
The food is wonderful (fresh fruits, grilled chicken, noodle dishes), but the irony is that I’ve had very little appetite. For the first week, I ate only two meals a day, and even now, in many instances I feel full after only a few bites. It’s so hot and humid that nature provides an appetite suppressant equivalent to gastric bypass. Since the body doesn’t need to work to keep itself warm, however, I doubt that many Farang (Americans/Westerners) lose weight here.
Yes, Bangkok is tropical, but the heat isn’t as oppressive as I’d feared it would be. So far. We newcomers have been told that we’ve been extremely fortunate with the weather that greeted our arrival.
My years in Arkansas prepared me for how heavy the rain showers can be, but a South East Asian storm is something to behold. I got caught in one while out on my bicycle, and I felt as though I were underwater, I was so drenched.
It’s great to be in a large cohort of new teachers, many of whom are veteran international educators, and almost all of whom are very experienced travelers.
A blog isn’t a journal, but since I named mine after Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth, here’s the confessional part, so it doesn’t all sound like: “Wow, everything is so exotic!” I was only intellectually prepared for how alienating it is to be in a place in which I don’t have any access to the language, whether aurally, verbally, or visually (the script is lovely to look at, but is impenetrable to me). Google Translate is a great tool, but it can only get you so far. I’m an enthusiastic pantomimer, and I readily and regularly impose on that famous Thai kindness by asking strangers for help (or whether they speak any English, or both), but until I take “Survival Thai” (and after, too, no doubt), the language barrier when I’m out in the city is tremendous.
And this isn’t very P.C. to say, but I’ve never been to a developing country before, and the adjustment has been harder for me than it has been for my fellow newcomers who have traveled much more broadly than I.
One quickly adjusts to seeing the very wealthy areas and the very poor areas in close proximity to one another. My school, and the immediate neighborhood in which I’ve rented a (modest) house, is in an upscale area, but where the roads go over the klongs (canals), one can see from the bridges extensive developments of shanty towns along the waterways.
There are tons of stray dogs (called soi dogs, which essentially means “backstreet dogs”). Elsewhere, this would be terrifying (and I do stay on guard), but unless they pack up, the soi dogs seem to live up to this Buddhist country’s reputation for mellowness.
Which brings me to the political situation: thankfully, I don’t even notice it. On the main road from Min Buri (the district in which I live and work) to downtown, one very occasionally passes a military checkpoint, and when I say “passes,” I mean “passes by,” not “passes through.”
I’ll address being a tourist in future posts, but for now, here is a picture of me and some new friends in the back of a Tuk Tuk taxi in downtown Bangkok. You only do it when you’re a tourist, and maybe only once. But it was fun.
