That Kind of Day

Poor, old Bangkok.  I'm ragging on the 'kok, no doubt about it.  No real reason for it but I'm on a roll, you feel me?  Mostly, I think, it's the end of a long vacation and I'm tired; on top of that I really am in a pretty hectic environment right now.  This place never stops coming at you with the noise and the traffic and the commotion.  It's wearying if you're fresh and I'm coming in weary.  On top of that it's a place with no sense of coherence.  I have no idea where the downtown business district is or the tourist area or the old town - it's a big jumble of everything stirred together.  It's soup, an appetizer, the main course, and dessert all tossed into a blender and served piping hot.  

We took a walk today up to see the Big Buddha, the one that's standing up, the one mentioned by every last tuk-tuk driver in the city as they try to get you to make the circuit between the Big Standing Buddha, The Big Sitting Buddha - which we saw and he wasn't that big and frankly, needed a little Buddha rehab - and the Big Reclining Buddha - totally worth it, that Buddha, really quite big and covered in gold leaf.  We walk on a roiling street past the location of the Big Standing Buddha, unbeknownst to us, until I yell in to an old woman in a noodle shop: "Big Buddha?"  She stares at me blankly.  A little dude on the street overhears me, gives me directions, turns out he did graduate school at the U of Missouri in the '60s, "loves Americans." We backtrack and eventually find this ridiculously small, unmarked alley - Urine Alley, SuperK nicknamed it - that leads back to the Big Standing Buddha.  It is damn big.  It also looks like it was made out of preformed plastic and then sloppily painted at the same shop that made the Lard Lad of Simpson's fame.

We soldier on, out of the wat.  We have as a destination this big park complex that contains these structures: Anantasamakhom Throne Hall: not open to the public; King Chula Longkorn Statue: in the middle of - I am not making this up - a sea of asphalt that is the size of dozens of football fields put together with cars and motorcycles zooming across it at weird angles and at high rates of speed; and the Dusit Zoo.  The first two don't cause us to linger.  On the way to the zoo we start to see signs for the Golden Place Arts and Crafts Center.  Remember when it was legal to put many, many signs along the road saying: "See Mammoth Cave."  Then 100 yards later: "Mammoth Cave - Ahead."  And on and on?  It was like that with the signs: big red arrows pointing the way.  We follow the signs into this parking lot and enter the Center.  It was a small 7-11, basically, with a couple of souvenirs hung up.  It was so disorienting, so unbelievable that anyone could call this an arts and crafts center that we went back outside and asked the guard at the gate where the Center was.  He looked at us like: "Fuck's the matter with you?" as he pointed out the convenience store . . . er . . . arts and crafts center.

We're done at this point and head for home.  Close to the hotel is a restaurant that serves Italian food except there's only a couple of Italian dishes mixed in with the Thai offerings on the menu.  We take the hint and order a Thai dish each plus an egg roll appetizer from an uninterested young woman.  After a while she comes out with a plate of burnt egg rolls and says, roughly translated: "These are burnt.  I can take them off the bill if you want."  We give it a shot but they're burnt.  The waitress doesn't come back.  Some guy comes over and gives me my plate of food - which I finish before SuperK gets served - and takes away the burnt egg rolls.  No one comes back after that. I go into the restaurant and corral the waitress who does indeed give me the corrected bill, for which I was grateful, although a better solution would have been to not bring out food that was messed up and hope I liked it.  I admit to admiring the technique: "Hey, we fucked this up.  Deal with it."  

I did not tip anyone at this particular restaurant where I HUGELY enjoyed the experience.