Gone again
Dec. 24, 2011
That's what I'll be this time tomorrow.
I'll be winging my way to Bangkok, via Chicago and Tokyo, and will be due to arrive around 11 p.m. local time on Boxing Day. That will be about 11 a.m. on the 26th back home.
Larry, who has been teaching in Thailand, is taking care of arrangements in Asia.
We'll be at the Nantra de Comfort Hotel in Bangkok until the 29th, when we go to Chiang Mai. The name of the hotel there is the Safe House Court. I assume it is an old CIA site.
We'll be coming back to Bangkok on the 4th, and I leave for Newark, by way of Tokyo and Los Angeles at dawn on Jan 7. I expect to be home before midnight the same day because I pick up 12 hours on the clock coming back.
I expect to see elephants, jungle, heavy vehicular traffic, a penis shrine, and tons of other wonders, possibly a temple full of monkeys.
Harry
Beatrice
Dec. 24
Have a great time. And while you’re in Bangkok do think of me in “The King and I” and see how accurate/inaccurate portrayals of court life were.
Jack T
Dec. 24
A penis shrine?
Christmas and Boxing Day up in the air.
Dec. 27, 2011
NOTE to all: You should have had this yesterday, or at least early this morning. I tried sending it several times over the past day or so, but my regular e-mail seems to be unavailable here. I thought at first the fault lay in the hotel's Wi-Fi system, but it seems to be a problem or a limitation with my usual Internet service. I can log in but can't get to e-mail, address book, or anything else, so I have set up an alternative Gmail account. I'll send today's installment later tonight or tomorrow morning Bangkok time. So there's another lesson learned from travel: Set up a Gmail account before your next trip to Southeast Asia.
Hello, all.
Here's Harry not quite literally on the road again.
The past 27 hours or so have been confined largely to airplanes and airports. This has been hilarious good fun and the farthest I have ever traveled in a day. Or ever before in my life, for that matter.
Thailand is a perfect 12 time zones away. You don't get farther away than that without coming back again. I'm not, however, quite as sophisticated a traveler as I need to be.
EWR 6:10 a.m. Terminal C. Continental check-in. There must be a hundred people in line. Christmas morning. Why aren't these people home with their families? This would be a buzz kill, but it's still too early even for me to have a buzz on. The wait, as it turns out, lasts 15 or 20 minutes. Very good.
With what came next, I found that I am not yet a seasoned-enough air traveler to take some surprises with equanimity.
6:30 a.m. No reservation in the computer. Here's the confirmation, Ma'am. Yes, it says Continental Airlines in big letters across the top of each page, and the flight number is CO463, but the agate type says it is operated by United. That's Terminal A.
Terminal A 6:50. OK. Not so many people here, but oops, the line isn't moving much. There are only four stations to book bags.
7:10. Whoa. See an attendant: you are too late to check in. (There was a kid in line in front of me who had already missed her flight. She was waiting to see what the airline could do for her.)
7:20. Whew. Have a nice flight, sir.
Gate B16. 7:30. No plane. 8:00 flight leaving at 8:15.
It was fine after that. No waiting on the runway, even though the plane had lost its place in line. It seemed to make up time because we got to Ohare just after 9:30 local time.
One of the cool features of Ohare is a display of neon tubes over a stretch of people movers. The lights flash on for a while and then flash off. This is the kind of stimulus that triggered the lady's epileptic seizure in "The Andromeda Strain." It can also induce trance states, I'm told. That may be true, because I began to think how standing still instead of walking on the people mover would be like viewing the crown jewels in the Tower of London. But with a difference. Queen Victoria's tiara isn't at Ohare.
The effect of the lights seems to linger. (Or maybe it's too little sleep: I got up at 3:45 this morning) I later realized that, just as on an escalator, if you walk at the right speed in the opposite direction on the people mover, you can stay in the same place forever, or at least until you give up, even though the floor under you is moving. I would have tried it, but the place was too crowded to do that discreetly. And of course, this is an airport where you must not do anything indiscreet these days. It’s Christmas morning. Why aren't these people home with their families?
It's about noon back home, almost 11 Chicago time. I have eaten a few cashews. I have walked on the people mover under the faux northern lights. No beer yet, but probably soon. So far it's a good day.
Next stop, sometime in the future (or maybe the past), Tokyo Narita airport. This will be my first time crossing the Pacific. The closest I came before was almost 40 years ago, when we had to circle over LAX a few times while guys on the ground with binoculars tried to see if the plane had deployed its landing gear. The loop we traveled took us out over the L.A. harbor a few times.
I got seat D in the last row of the plane out of Newark and also in the 747 out of Ohare. In the big plane, there is no window-side seat in the back, so I got to sit next to the life raft, where there was more floor space. I could get up and move around whenever I wanted.
After a few hours in the plane, I was thinking that we'd be over the Pacific soon, and there might be whales down there. Or at least sea bass.
But during the 13-hour flight, between movies, the map of progress comes on telling us in metric and American traditional units how high we are, how far we've come, how far to go, ground speed, stuff like that. The great circle from Ohare to Narita goes over Alaska (There could be polar bears down there. Maybe Sarah Palin.), across the Bering Sea (More whales? Polar bears swimming? Inuit in kayaks?), and then over Siberia (What does Siberia have? Ermines? Dead Trotskyites?). It's like the route the Indians took, only in reverse. Faster too.
A lady on the plane has a white toy poodle in a canvas carrier. She let it partway out for a minute, the dog looking understandably dazed, and then stuffed it back inside.
My first glimpse of Asia when the clouds parted was the ice pack of Siberia. Ermines, hell. There isn't likely to be anything down there. Dead Trotskyites, maybe.
By good fortune, I looked out the window by the life raft just as the plane was quitting the southern tip of the Sahkalin peninsula of Russia and then a few minutes later crossed the north shore of Hokkaido in Japan.
I was moderately punchy when I landed in Tokyo, I had less than an hour to change planes. What happens if I miss my connection? Will I have to sleep on a cot at the airport? I did that in a different airport last December when it snowed in Amsterdam. Will I be stuck at Narita till my return flight comes back on Jan. 7? That doesn't sound good. I go to passport control. No way I'm getting through there any time soon,
A lady comes by with a sign about "tight connection Singapore." Not my flight, but she looks at my boarding pass for Bangkok and sends me with the other short-time folk directly to security. By the time I get to the gate, my name's on a list. But they just wanted to see that I had a passport.
The next leg, a little over seven hours, was uneventful. Not that nothing happened. It's just that I was too tired to notice. I got up now and then to walk around, I passed out for brief spells, I read an Agatha Christie novel.
Larry met me at Bangkok's airport. The three-letter code for the place is BKK, but the actual name is so long I can't remember how to spell it.
We took a taxi to the hotel, the Nantra de Comfort at 125/4-7 Sukhumvit 55 (Thonglor) North Klongton Wattana 10110.
The quart of tequila made it through three transfers of luggage just fine. It is very tasty. So is the Thai beer. We had a cold supper at a table in the alley by the hotel—a Cantonese standard called chiah sieu (roast pork), sliced roast duck with shaved ginger, and crispy pork (fried so the fat is crisp).
So I finally got here. More or less in one piece. Today's photo celebrates my ability to walk upright after all that time in airports and airplanes. It's called Harry (a little worse for wear) meets the immigration authorities.
I'm out of beer. I have to go to sleep soon. Good night to all.
Harry
John T
Dec. 27
Kimberly and I had a similar problem coming back from a short visit to West Palm Beach Fla. Our flight papers said United but we were told to go to Continental (apparently they have merged starting in Oct 2010), then we were told to go to US Air, which worked. We were told US Air took over some of the United routes.
Alan
Dec. 27
I was just reading this and started to freak when I read the part about going to Continental when you should have gone to United. That is exactly something I might have done, and I started to think about the consequences. If I was with Linda and missed a flight, it would be unlikely I would have lived long enough to arrive home.
We flew back from Denver on Christmas Day, but it was at 11:20. The airport was quiet and there were empty seats everywhere in the plane. It was old fashioned air travel at its best.
Beer, Food, and Shrines
Dec. 27
OK, Harry has been busy, and as you may guess, so have been many bartenders.
After having dinner in the alley and watching the cats and cockroaches for a while, I came back to my room and think it was almost 5 a.m. local time before I went to sleep.
It may have been after nine that I got up. The first adventure of the day was cash. Like a greenhorn, I forgot to tell the bank I was going to be out of the country. So of course, my debit card wasn't working in Bangkok. Larry says, no problem, we'll call the bank on Skype, which I did from the hotel lobby. I gave them personal information and answered a few multiple choice questions based on my checkered past, and that was that.
Next stop was the English language bookshop run by an expat pal of Larry's where I bought colorful maps of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Then we got onto the Sky Train, the elevated rail line, and headed for the high-rent district, specifically a street called Witthayu, which houses the British and Swiss embassies, for instance, and the Nai Lert Park Hotel, where the penis shrine is. According to one of the guide books I read, the hotel had at one time been part of the Hilton chain. The Hilton company, this story says, objected to having a fertility shrine filled with beribboned lingams behind its parking lot and protested. The property owner promptly killed Hilton's lease, and now I think the Nai Lert Park is a Swissotel.
Of course, few will believe me, so the shrine, naturally enough, is the subject of today's photo. If it is offensive, I can only offer this excuse: Consider the source.
There is a colorful shine, mind, in front of almost everything here—hotels, shopping malls, and houses.
Although I'm in Thailand, I was in not one, not two, but three ersatz English pubs today. Chang Export is very good. Chang Classic is even better (I'm drinking that, yes, from a bottle as I write this). Chang Draft is OK. The locally brewed San Miguel, which I tried on Larry's recommendation, is excellent. I had some non-Thai beers, too, including Hoegaarden (from Belgium, the blond ale navel of the world) and Fuller's London Pride (from England, the dark ale navel of the world).
The food here is unbelievable. We had something (I don't even know what it's called) at a street market near the Victory Monument. Apparently the Thais beat someone at some time. Maybe the French. The monument is in the middle of a traffic circle and the market is around that. Lots of food, plastic novelties including toys and combs, and other stuff. The first food we had was fried, and green inside, maybe from spinach. You poke it with a stick, dip it into a sweet soy sauce that comes in a bag which has a tendency to explode on one's trousers, and eat it.
We had a bowl of green chicken curry, red (maybe) vegetable curry, and some other kind of sweet curry, all of which cost a dollar each. We also had a green papaya salad that was so hot I had to order white rice to cool off my tongue. Larry had ordered the salad "pet mak" (hot? very!). I was sitting at a picnic table blowing air across my tongue. That was a hit with the locals.
Dinner—after more beers, of course—started with a soup that had noodles, peanuts, chiles, shrimp, and the cook knows what else. I forgot the name of it. Larry knows, and can also tell you why it is not the strict traditional version. Then we went to another vendor who served us something else with noodles, chiles, and that cook knows what else. Larry also knows the name of that.
Larry, can you fill in my gaps of knowledge?
By the way, people in cars often threaten to run you over when you cross the street here, but hell, I know how to jaywalk in New York.
Bangkok is fast-paced and reckless, reminding me of New York and Buenos Aires. It's far more anarchic than London, Prague, or South Bend. I am expecting, however, to get home safely with my knees fully intact.
Now, as Santa Claus says when he has too much to drink, happy evening to all and to all a good night.
Harry
Tourism in Thailand
Alan
Dec. 27
Linda liked the picture, but I'm not sure she is going to let me build one in my bedroom,
Beatrice
Dec. 27
Make sure you say only good things about the royal family.
Tourism in Thailand
Dec. 28
I went out to see the Emerald Buddha and the Reclining Buddha today. Both sites are overrun with people, most of them tourists, but these are among the things you have to see when you come to Thailand. Like the Charles Bridge in Prague.
But what do I care about crowds? I hope I'm never in a hurry. I don't know for sure where we went but we took two trains on the elevated line and then, best of all, a boat up the river to the Grand Palace stop. The palace houses the Emerald Buddha. It is tiny, covered in green—maybe real emeralds, for all I know—and the altar and other figures seem to be covered in gold. Maybe. What do I know? I'm a farang here. We had to take our shoes off. Larry had come prepared, in loafers. I was wearing my usual hot-weather shoes, a pair of bucks. They have laces, but they come on and off efficiently.
At the palace, we were told there were no weapons allowed, so I had to surrender any AK-47s and pistols that I had. My pocket knife was OK. Well maybe. I didn't tell them about that. Soldiers and policemen at the palace were instructed not to show their weapons. This was confusing. There were guards with rifles, but maybe they were pop guns.
We were having so much fun that we wanted to show some respect at the palace and buy the king of Thailand a beer. He apparently wasn't home. so Today's photo is as close as I came to "Harry meets the king."
The temple of the Reclining Buddha is fun, but very crowded. I think Larry and I made the circuit through the place in 10 minutes or so. That was all right.
This—so far—was the big adventure of the day: Getting back. We were looking— No, no, Larry was looking and Harry was following—for the place to catch the boat. It would take us back to the transit hub that would take us to Chong Lor (our street). In the process of looking for the boat stop, we went through a local market. There were vegetables, all kinds of dried shrimp, dried fish, and fermenting fish that would become a fragrant sauce. Other stuff too, I'm sure, but I can't remember it all. We walked on the wet concrete floor and caught the odors of the place.
This is a shot of Larry in the market.
Then we found the pier for the boat and drank some Chang beer and ate fried sweet potatoes. "Chang" in Thai means elephant.That's what it's like here. You drink some beer, eat some food, wait for the boat.
At one point, I was sitting there with a mild buzz and thinking about an old friend of mine, Jack Ryan. Jack was over 70 when I met him, and he worked for me at Fairchild as a copy editor. We were talking one day about places and how the pictures never seem to be enough. Jack, who in his youth had been a deck officer in the merchant marine, said there was a certain smell about a place. As you can tell, I never forgot that.
I was thinking about it because there is a smell about Bangkok. Everywhere you go there is the tangy fragrance of food in the air. Also the scent of uncontrolled engine emissions, The buildings are covered in soot. The sky is bright, but at some angles has a gray cast.
We are headed for Chiang Mai tomorrow afternoon.
The Palace et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
Dec. 28
The previous message was written in haste and, I realize now, ignored much that was important.
The view of the city from the boat is fantastic. The temples, as I had expected from watching Jean-Claude van Damme movies, have antlered roofs, and they rise up over the slums along the banks. The boat passes temple complexes, the headquarters of Thai Royal Navy, and rows of sagging structures that may be boathouses or may be homes hanging over the water. There are cylindrical and square high-rises, some on huge stilts, that make up the skyline.
Much of all this carries a patina of black soot, which probably consists largely of the exhaust of the tuk-tuks. These are the three-wheel open taxis that run on two-stroke engines like those that power a lawn mower. When the driver cranks one up, you can see an opaque plume of smoke puff out of the pipe. I'm thinking, if we could get these things to run on hashish instead of gasoline, the world would be a lot mellower place.
When you get near the palace, you are one of maybe ten or a hundred thousand people headed to the entrance. A guy may come up to you to chat: "Where you from? Where you going? The palace? You can't go there now."
At some point he takes out a little wallet and shows you a badge that, he says, identifies him as a policeman. The palace isn't open yet, but he can take you for a tour on a tuk-tuk to kill the time until it opens, because he's a nice guy. I'm glad that Larry had been to the palace once before and met this guy's cousin, or his mentor, or someone who had the same story. I think now that the policeman may have been less than truthful. I might have spent ten bucks for a three-hour tour, and anyone who has seen "Gilligan's Island" knows that can turn out to be dreadfully akin to watching paint dry.
Sure, I've heard that ten or a hundred thousand people going in the same direction can't all be wrong. But I know better. Forty million French people, for instance, thought de Gaulle was handsome. Maybe all the cops drive tuk-tuks as a sideline. Gosh, what do I know about law enforcement in Thailand?
I became convinced that the pitch was a scam when the second plain-clothes policemen tried to hand us the same story.
The palace grounds were crowded with people wanting to be good guests and buy the king a beer. But as I said yesterday, he wasn't home. Nonetheless, I'm sure that, being a king, he appreciated our good intentions.
I got to take off my shoes and put them on a shelf to go into the wat of the Emerald Buddha. No photos allowed there. But that's all right, you can find better on the Internet than I would have been able to get. The Emerald Buddha may be a little bigger than the infant of Prague. The surrounding figures are a little different, but it's the same overall idea of a revered image set high up and surrounded by gold for good measure. You are supposed to show respect. You kneel on the floor and never show the soles of you feet to the Buddha. I managed to do it, but also realize I'm not 16 anymore. Getting down on the floor was hard enough but getting back up was a challenge.
A lot of people must have been stiffer than I am because didn’t try to kneel at all. They stood in a crowd at the back of the temple and murmured. Some westerners were making a good show of sincerity by pressing the flats of their hands together, fingers up. There was an overriding buzz of murmurs from the curious. Meanwhile, a family in front presented an offering in a basket, which was received by a policeman, who was in uniform. His tuk-tuk may have been parked in back. I don't know.
There was also a monk in saffron at his devotions in front of us. The guy's powers of concentration must be marvelous. He seemed not to notice the constant buzz in the air.
There are monks in saffron just about everywhere. And they are highly respected. Just about every Thai man becomes a monk at some time in his youth, even if it is for a few months. The picture is not a joke. It really is a detail from the sky train.
The Temple of the Reclining Buddha was even more crowded than that of the Emerald Buddha because there was less room inside. I managed to get a couple of shots, but they are basically to remind me that I was there.
This is from the Buddha's toes looking toward the head.
The food continues to be fantastic, and so does the beer, so I may not remember everything.
People set up food stalls anywhere they can fit them on the sidewalk. You can get anything from grilled bananas to complete curries. Frequently there are huge plastic-wrapped bundles nearby, sometimes even tents. Some of the vendors may live as well as cook on the street. Of course, that should not have come to me as a complete surprise, because we all remember what Walt Disney told us: "It's a Third World, after all."
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