In Krungthep

My brother lived in Bangkok aka Krungthep Nagari for awhile, this was written after my first visit. Revisiting my observations of August 2005 induced a great deal of lunch time nostalgic reverie.

Sydney is the Big Smoke of Australia but for an Asian things can seem pretty quiet around these parts. If you spend a year buried in Sydney where the sky has a blue permatint and barring the constant low hum of cars, the loud mobile phone wielders on the local train, the pounding music of the stores and the kaw kaw of seagulls nothing constitutes noise, it may well be that before long you will wish a holiday in more raucous parts of the world. And when you step off in the early dawn into the liquid heat of Bangkok, you know that this city is an antidote to your year in Sydney. A week in the city however merely affords fractured impressions. The river (Chao Phraya) and endless languid trips on a ferry. Fetid and clean klongs (waterways). More water in large pots on pavements housing pink lotus plants. Masses of pale green closed lotuses wrapped in banana leaves and immersed in large buckets of water. Spectacular wats (temples) seemingly serenely afloat on a concrete city. Large photographs of the queen. Shops, stalls, carts, goods, locals, firangs. Clusters of monks in yellow and orange robes, silent and everywhere. Dank Chinese shops (remarkably identical all the way from Singapore to Bangkok). Small perfectly formed eats. Iced coffees in plastic bags to ward off the heat and give a caffeine kick. More entwined pretty boys than Sydney. It can all seem a bit like the pictures of ubiquitous LP editions on Thailand. All of this was enlivened by an endlessly amusing game (for us) that my father and I devised - finding the Sanskrit equivalents of names ranging from Kanchanaburi to Thammasat. Even more endlessly amusing was my father's intrepid expeditions on local buses where the incongruous alchemy of his bad Thai and the commuters bad English magically transported us to desired destinations. Some things remain etched in memory. Wat Arun studded with the porcelain ballast of Chinese ships of the 1800s and looking for all the world like a modern art installation which makes use of discarded objects, an artist's comment on Thai-Chinese history. The emerald green landscape, misty rain and the Khwae river at Kanchanaburi - a stark contrast to the war museum it houses (the bridge on the river Kwai is here). The tranquility of Wat Bowon which is off the tourist track. Like many Asian cities, there is something seductive about Bangkok. Maybe because there is little room for anything else but people, the cities seem to reflect everything from a rarefied, sophisticated existence to the intimacy, squalor and corruption of spaces that coalesce into each other. Just the kind of place where a million stories can be born.

Picture credit: swamibu