I have been to two capitals of the Asian countries this week and the only thing they have in common is exactly that - they are both situated in Asia.
I arrived to Bangkok late Tuesday night and the first major difference that stroke me was the airport of Bangkok. I have never seen such a beautiful and impressive airport and I felt like I was walking in a gigantic future spaceship. The one in Delhi looks like it could need some restorement, as could the rest of that city. After some hassle in the airport, where some woman tried to convince me to go to a really expensive hotel with a really expensive taxi and a man saved me in the last minute by telling me where the public taxis were, I managed to get a cab to the hotel that my two friends from home, Maj and Jacob, had told me to go to, because they had reservations there. My two country men arrived to Bangkok next day in the afternoon and I was there to pick them up.
We are staying in a hotel where the only people there are Danes. Yes, I also think there is something strange in travelling to the other side of the planet and then you go and stay in a hotel full of people from your own little country.... But it was part of the small package that Maj and Jacob had bought to get here and the room is with AC and not too expensive, so what the hell.
Generally, it is something I have to get used to about Bangkok. There are massive amounts of tourists here, and many Danes as well, a bit too many for my taste in fact. Although there are tourists in Delhi, people would still look at you curiously on the street and here, they really couldn't care less about some white person with red skin (the sun is much hotter here!). In some ways yes, I have to get used to not feeling that special anymore after being a celebrety everywhere I went for 6 months, hahaha.
Bangkok is a funny mixture of two fused cultures: a highly modern extremely westernized metropolis with lots of grand sky scrabers, fancy cars everywhere (there were absolutely none fancy cars in India), a traffic which flows relatively well, huge stylish shopping malls with all the same brands as at home, McDonalds, Starbucks Coffee, Pizza Hut etc. The young people are very stylish in short skirt and high heels for the ladies and expensive shirts or trendy T-shirts for the boys. Although, you could find young people weary jeans in the bigger cities in India, you would never find them wearing short skirts and high heels!
The other part of the mixture is traces of how Bangkok must have been like exclusively before the massive influence from the West: massive markeds on the streets where people are selling food in stalls, prepared over fire in oilcans, many different spicies in big open bags, small tables and chairs on the street where people eat their food, cooked off the street. One of the things that stroke as a major difference is that Thailand is NOT a vegetarian country! Everywhere you can buy fish in whole pieces, lying on icecubs or a whole plucked chicken, hanging on rows in the dead beaks. The malls sell all kinds of meat from pigs and beaf (something I have not seen for 6 months obviously), fish and chicken.
The first night we had dinner on a street restaurant where you could point on a huge frog with its skin riped off and asked it to be boiled or fried. We passed on the frog though, but Jacob tried the octopus.
There is a China Town in the city where everything is written in both thai and chinese and lots of funny things are sold from China.
Yesterday, Maj and Jacob convinced me to go for a Thai boxing match. No, I didnt know what Thai boxing was either, but it turned out to be like regularly boxing with the slight alternation that it is permitted to kick the other person in the stomach as well as the head. I was reluctant in the beginning because the tickets were of a 1000 baht (rupees and baht are more or less the same, app. 150 Dkr) and the thought of paying that much money to see two thai men go crazy on each other, wasn't exactly appealing. But well, this would be my only chance ever to see something like that, so I agreed and it really was a memoriable experience. They were 8 fights altogether each of 5 rounds, and by the end of the battles, Maj and I found ourselves cheering for either the blue or the red-shorts man, clapping at a good hit or praising a match as good. A bit scary that you get caught up with it so fast, but the atmosphere in the stadium was amazing. Fully packed and the Thai audience was shouting like mad men, probably because many of the were gambling several hundreds of baht on the out come.
In a day or two we will be heading south of Thailand to experience the famous exotic beaches and doze off by the coast of some island.
Although I am experiencing all these exiting new things and seeing a very different country than India, I am always thinking of my Indian kids and I really really miss them. I would still love to catch a plane back to India and a train straight to Falna and Bali. I am always thinking of what they might be doing now, or how they are, and what they are suppose to do when their Annual Exams come in two weeks. They have gone very deep and even the spendor or Bangkok cannot make their clear vision fade from my mind.
