In my country it’s Autumn now. The heavy warmth of the summer air turns fresh and crisp and the ground feels more solid underfoot. The mornings are sharp and silent and in the bronze evenings the veld grass releases cardamom-scented sighs. With each day there is a quietly unfolding sense of sleep, of the coming of winter.
In Thailand the seasons are changing too. Each day is steamy with passing showers, the sky thick with the hot breath of the coming monsoon. In the quickly darkening evenings the street stalls release the scent of cardamom into the night.
On a certain September month I found myself wandering down side-sois saturated with sunlight, being passed between the directions of strangers and Google maps, searching. I was on assignment to write a Bangkok city guide and I didn’t want it to be a sh+tty guide, so I was ferreting for places that weren’t generic, that would be overlooked by the average neon-vested Joe, places made by Bangkokians for Bangkok.
It’s ironic that I would have to leave Thailand to discover that ephemeral Thai quality of relaxation, the ability to sink with luxurious slowness into each moment. Indeed, to make even walking down a busy city street an exercise in blissful langour .
I’ve recently read a number of articles posted by fellow expats bemoaning the slowness of Thailand, even one entire piece dedicated to how infuriatingly slow Thai people walk in Bangkok. This particular moaner felt that this was a grosse display of inconsiderate behaviour compounded with an intense impractical use of ‘the system’: walk left, stand right. Don’t stand EVERYWHERE. Walk, as this is the efficiency for which the system was designed.
English is not merely a language, but a way of being. The English language embodies, in its fluidity, its spelling, its errant use of prepositions, the very notion of historical greatness, and a dignified disdain for the petty rules of commoners (although the commoners, like commas, are vital to the integrity of English and the English).
The complicated beauty of its spelling bears its profound and valiant history like a banner through the ages – a banner which not even the Americans could unravel with their narrow simplifications of words like ‘thru’ (shudder). ‘Thru’ is a shameful, trivial little word, like a schoolboy who has forgotten his trousers. Ye, it is the stuff of nightmares. No, thrOUGH carries the rich memory of Chaucerian English, which still flowers like an April month in the heart of every stout Englishman. ThrOUGH remembers the many invaders and invasions which made English as cosmopolitan as a London curry.
Recently this bird flew the nest and migrated south to its homeland. There in the dryer climes of southernmost Africa it nestled in the hot silent grasslands, beneath a clear sky splashed red at dawn and sunset.
When living in a foreign place, going home and coming back again can create a strange confusion as to what is home and what is foreign. Just as I grew to know the face of Bangkok in the fractured reflections of the Chao Praya river, so I saw the African sky drifting down the Orange River and saw my own face there too. Where I had come to recognize the starry twinkle of the city lights blinking in the humid glaze, I now saw again a thousand stars scattered like silver spearheads across the dark African night.
Two days after the Paris attacks I find myself on a puddle-splashed street in Bangkok, rain murmuring softly on my umbrella, nudged aside gently by patient passing cars. On this closely-gathered street three communities – Christian, Buddhist and Muslim – have lived in calm commune for hundreds of years. It is notable as a community. People talk about it.
Today’s brooding philosophical statement: in life, things go wrong.Trains are delayed, lifts stop mid-air, people skip queues, banks misplace funds, calorie readings on bags of donuts are grossly misrepresented. Every day societies around the modern world are dealing with life’s constant barrage of mishaps and inconveniences, but while the problems are basically the same in most countries, different societies’ methods of dealing with problems are also, well, different.
Take train delays. Not too long ago I was stuck in a slowly forward-shuffling file of people peacefully waiting out the hour-and-a-half delay on the Skytrain station. On this fateful day I underwent an emotional revolution. Where I come from, these sorts of unwarranted inconveniences result in loud complaining, shouting, maybe some shoving. If the delay lasts long enough they might just burn down the station (in my country we like to solve one problem by replacing it with another). Continue reading “Bangkok is a free anger management course”→
I’m something of an aberration to my gender, a strange deviation, an inexplicable oddity: I don’t like shopping. Well, when I say I don’t “like” shopping, I mean to say I despise it. Whenever one of friends comes up with that dingbat suggestion of “Let’s go shopping!”, usually accompanied by Anime-like wide eyes and a little drool, I shudder. Traipsing through mundane aisles of eternal folds of synthetic and satin, tight-fitting this and Cara Delevingne that, hypnotic techno mall music, elevators, carrier bags, sticky fingers from the tenth Starbucks latte. It’s horrifically unimaginative. It is the anti-matter left in the absence of conversation and creativity.
As we sit warmly ensconced in our soaring urban dwellings, illumined by cellphone screens and computer glares, half-aware of the twinkling humming outside world, the urban world, the unsleeping urban organism, let us look back to the time before this, to the dawn of today – to the 90s.
The glittering arteries of the urban being.
I was still a relatively infantile half-wit in the 90s (a child), completely clueless about the rapid developments around me, the 8-point tremors that would lead to the tsunami of technology. I remember a weird brick cellphone that was cool because the buttons glowed green. I remember kiddie laptops that had programs featuring dancing monkeys doing math equations. I remember the tamagochi, the sinister precedent of the imagined relationship we would later develop with bits of wired plastic communicating with us through a series of ones and zeros. I also remember the snippets of music and fashion, the cultural tatters wafting in the breeze of yesteryear – the time when it was still okay for people older than 14 to make music. Sinead O’Connor crying stonily into the camera. Women who aren’t blonde wondering what’s going on. Plaid shirts. But more importantly – The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more specifically, their great cultural commentary piece, “Under the Bridge”.
Let me begin this post by clarifying something: the Paleo Diet SUCKS (for my former opinion, go here) After months of wandering past endless shining displays of processed carbohydrates, shielding my misery behind a serene-but-hungry facade of dietary superiority, I eventually had to consider the possibility that, like paleolithic man, I too was on the brink of extinction. If not by starvation then certainly by more sinister means (for who can really carry on living without bread. Might as well not).
bangkokbird 