Bye bye Bangkok, Hello Hong Kong
March 13th, 2000Bangkok Airport, Thailand
THANKFULLY Bangkok airport has an Internet connection.
And it's actually cheaper than just about everywhere else (including the other e-mail place here in the airport that is almost six times the price!)
I left Ayuthaya in a hurry - I ran out of time and I still had a bunch of mails to send, including this one. Tomorrow I leave Thailand and head to Hong Kong. It doesn't seem like I've spent a month here. (Actually I've spent more than a month and inadvertently overstayed my visa by one day - all because I forgot that this was a leap year - but this will only incur a 200 baht fine).I will miss a great deal about Thailand. It may be clichéd to say that Thailand is "the country with the smile", but it's true - if you smile, everyone, almost without exception, beams back at you. It's as if the whole nation is cheerful. Maybe it's the sunshine.
Sanuk is supposed to be the key to Thai behaviour - anything worth doing must have an element of fun. And so it is; people laugh and joke with each other in a way I think it would be hard to find in many other countries. Even bargaining is done with a great deal of fun and overacting.
That Thai food is mostly delicious is hard to refute. The food is spicy but not overly so, noodles and rice are prominent, which I like, and coconut plays a central role in many dishes which can only be a good thing. However, there is an aspect to Thai cuisine that I cannot relate to. And it's not just because of my, some would say quot;extreme", dietary outlook. Apart from Fish & Chips, seafood doesn't have a large section in the British culinary lexicon. For this reason, I suspect that the squid-flavoured crisps on sale here wouldn't be a big winner back home. On a brightly coloured packet containing strange pinkish wafers I read the following description: Squid Seasoned The ultimate in snack seafood must be that available on the trolleys that are wheeled from bar to bar in Chiang Mai's nightspots. No candy floss or toffee apples here. Instead, yes, Fish on a Stick - a convenient dry snack food with all the delicious taste of Fish. Mmmmm. |
I have taken it for granted that there are huge gold-covered temples around every corner and the saffron-covered monks and white-covered nuns that you see everywhere seem completely normal. Even everyone stopping dead at 6pm everyday to stand for the national anthem has lost its novelty.
I will miss the very characteristic Thai folk/pop music that blares out in Bangkok and other cities. I bought some in Ayuthaya but as I don't have a CD player I don't actually know what I've got yet! I'll miss the language too, which sounds far more musical in its use of tones than Mandarin or Cantonese.
In the end, although I spent a month in Thailand, I never made it to a beach, let alone The Beach. But beaches are just a small one-dimensional aspect to Thailand - it has many other interesting directions, and anyway I can do the beaches when I come next time!
Next stop Hong Kong. Hope I can afford the Internet charges!
| << Dan's workcamp experience | Index | Hong Kong >> |
© 2002 Dan Hodson
Map © Graphic Maps
All Rights Reserved.