Getting Bangkok

Like night and day: Rama VIII Bridge, Bangkok

One afternoon in January 2002, Rachel and I arrived at Bangkok's Hualampong train station, en route from Don Muang airport and ready to begin a five-month stint as hilariously unqualified ESL teachers in the city. In the first of what would be a series of failures to understand the realities of Bangkok, we set out, laden with all our luggage, to walk from the station to the backpackers' district of Banglampu, halfway across town. It had looked like a walkable distance on our maps, but we hadn't factored in the steamy and sweltering climate, the suffocating pollution, the roaring traffic, and the madly congested sidewalks. Nor had we read the map correctly.

We arrived in Banglampu that evening in a state of total exhaustion, only to find that every single room in the neighborhood was already occupied. We finally found a squalid little cell at the Apple Guesthouse, a downmarket hostel lurking at the end of an alleyway beside a canal. The room was so bad that it drove us to find an apartment the very next day, before we had found jobs - and, thus, before we knew what part of the city would make a sensible place for us to live.

We carried on in this fashion for what must have been a couple of months, beating our heads against the proverbial wall as we refused to change our expectations of what Bangkok should be - a city organized along familiar lines. We made ourselves miserable trying to live this way, as the city failed to meet our unrealistic expectations at every turn. We wanted to go for walks, but walking more than a couple of blocks was impossible. We wanted to sit in parks, but the parks were exposed to the heat and, for some reason, often featured irritating music blasted over loudspeakers. We wanted packaged sandwiches without weird sugary spreads, bottled water that was easy to open, and daily commutes that weren't consumingly difficult. We wanted New York in Southeast Asia, even as we snobbishly insisted that the easier, more "western" parts of the city were inauthentic and best avoided.

Eventually we learned to roll with the place - how to order noodles from street vendors, (far better than packaged sandwiches anyway), how to read the bus maps and how to catch the express boats, how to spend a pleasant Sunday evening at the movies and in our favorite bar, where to find yoga classes and free aerobics lessons and English-language newspapers, and how to dip occasionally into the backpacker scene for a change of pace. Bangkok became a city again: still maddening and contradictory, as all cities are, but coherent and functional according to its own logic. It was like the Zen koan:

At first mountain is mountain, river is river. And then, when we go into deep zazen, mountain is not mountain, river is not river. And then, returning, we can say, "Ah! From the beginning, mountain is mountain, river is river."

Happily, coming from India, it's clearer to us than ever that Bangkok is Bangkok, and that's a good thing. It seems cleaner, more orderly, and less polluted than we remember it - maybe it has improved on those counts, or maybe we're noticing the contrast from Indian cities - and, in comparison to many of the places we've been lately, it also seems noticeably friendly and progressive. And the food is as good as ever. Alas, the Dallas Pub is gone, but so it goes.

So it's kind of funny to feel so happy about being in Bangkok. Since we left in 2002, we've remembered the city as a challenge we had to overcome - now we have the pleasure of experiencing it in a different way.

It's not all a matter of context. The Bangkok I remember in 2002 was scattered with the concrete skeletons of skyscrapers begun before the 1997 financial crisis and abandoned in its wake. The Bangkok of 2009 seems to be weathering the current crisis, and on the skyline, cranes have replaced the empty shells and new towers are rising again. Times are hard in America, but Bangkok seems to be flourishing. Of course, it was always flourishing in ways we found it very difficult to see back when we expected it to be something other than what it is.