Thai Talk Radio

I marvel at the street food vendors here who blow in and set up pretty large and elaborate operations every day.  I wonder if they have a pre-assigned spot on the curb, officially or otherwise.  Whipping up food, plates washed in buckets of water on the ground and god knows where that water comes from and how often that water is changed, hand towels draped over traffic barriers that magically appear and disappear.  At night random but official looking guards will block off a small section of street and charge people to park there.

I'm sitting outside on my balcony looking over a sea of . . . well, sheet-metal in every kind of condition, some new, some the rusted-through spots patched with scraps of rusted-through repair material.  Right in the middle a new hotel will pop up or what looks like an office building.  Thai talk radio is cranking somewhere, roosters are crowing somewhere else, incredibly loud squawks coming from some kind of bird that we've not yet managed to put eyeballs on, and not for lack of trying.

I like hot weather and I don't like air-conditioning and I can tolerate really hot and humid weather but this place is off the goddam chart, and this is winter.  This is the cool time of year. Every now and then a local will comment on how nice the weather is.  I literally can't get my arms around what it must be like when it's hot here.  It's 8 in the morning and I have a thick sheen of grease on my body already, and I'm in the shade.  It's seriously scary.  It has been a series of scuttlings into the shade and the air-conditioning and the pool.  I have been in more pools for non-exercise, recreational reasons in the last month than I've been in over the last 20 years, and I am not making that up.  I don't even differentiate between clean and dirty clothes anymore - their condition is predicated on wet or dry because five minutes after you step outside you can forget about it.  Dirty clothes don't even stink - they smell like a shirt that has been dunked in water then hung out to dry over and over and over.  Kind of musty but not stinky.

Bangkok is delivering body blows.  I'm definitely still standing but I'm going to go down soon.