Bangkok Overview

I traveled to Bangkok with Di Yin and her parents from Monday, March 15, 2010, through Thursday, March 18.

Bangkok is an interesting city and different from any other I've been (Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Siem Reap, and Malaka, to list those in Asia). I enjoyed exploring it and what makes it different. I'll remember three main features. First, the street food and street shopping is vastly more present in Bangkok than anywhere else I've been. Second, the city layout and its transportation system are quite varied, making it necessary in the normal course of events to take river ferries in addition to, for instance, elevated trains and taxis. Third, the famous temples and palaces have a distinctive, different flavor than anywhere else. More on each of these later.

Bangkok is a mostly developed city. It's certainly more developed than Siem Reap (Cambodia) but less developed than Shanghai. The roads are paved and major highways, many elevated, criss-cross the city. There's a complex transportation system. There are some air-conditional malls and restaurants. But, it's not as clean as, say, Shanghai (nearly fully developed) or certainly Hong Kong or Singapore or Western cities. (And the places in Bangkok out of sight are particularly bad: the back alleys near canals have sizable piles of garbage.) Also, as in Shanghai, people obey traffic signals, but lane dividers are treated as easily ignored suggestions.

People I met were polite, like those in fully developed countries. For instance, when boarding the subway, people let everyone off first before attempting to board. In addition, the people boarding form lines, and obey the line order. Indeed, queues anywhere are respected. Also, when the train or bus appears full, people don't attempt to push on (even if there actually is room). Finally, if someone is blocking the narrow (due to the street carts) sidewalks, people tend to wait rather than pushing the person aside or exclaiming angrily. These behaviors regarding the train are nothing like Shanghai and are, in fact, perhaps more polite than those in many Western cities (e.g., London, New York).

Food
Bangkok is a street food city. Sure, there are restaurants in many places, but street stands are nearly omnipresent in every part of the city. They're perhaps an order of magnitude more present than in New York City, the city I think has the most street food carts of any other city I've visited. Incidentally, I know I talk a lot about food hawkers in Singapore, but these are grouped into food centres and the feel is entirely different. For one, eating on the street just isn't as comfortable as in a hawker centre. Also, the variety in Bangkok on one street isn't as great as in a Singaporean hawker centre, but obviously the food in Bangkok is much easier to find because so many streets have stands.

But as for the food itself, I was a tad disappointed. Perhaps it's because the bay area has many good quality Thai restaurants, but most things I ate I've had better at home. It's also partially (but only partially) a difference in tastes: many dishes (mostly noodles) were a tad sweeter than I'd prefer (which wasn't particularly bad for me, as I generally like sweet than more than most people I know). Even accounting for the sweetness, the quality difference remained. That said, the food wasn't bad; in terms of how much I appreciated it, I think it might be comparable to the average Thai restaurant in the bay area.

The selection of food wasn't as I expected. What surprised me the most was that the most common street food stand was for Chinese-style noodle soup! The locals seem to eat it (and soup in general) a lot. Personally, I can't deal with hot soups in such a hot climate. Regarding other differences, I was also surprised to see few curries; I had expected to see many of them, given their omnipresence at Thai restaurants in the states. In addition, I spotted many colorful kuehs (sweetened rice cakes) that I saw often in Singapore. In retrospect, as these spread from Malaysia, which borders both Thailand and Singapore, I shouldn't have been surprised to see them. Finally, one feature of Bangkok food that I definitely appreciated: there were stands of freshly cut fruit everywhere. Freshly-blended juice stands were also easy to find: great for hot weather!

Incidentally, I noticed Thai people generally eat with just a fork and spoon, with the spoon in the right hand and the fork used to push things onto the spoon. There's no knife and no chopsticks.

Transportation
The transportation system is a bit of a mess. There's an elevated train system, called the "skytrain" by tourists, and also an underground metro system. The elevated and underground systems connect occasionally; the one connection place we used required quite a walk (half outdoors in the heat) between them. But these systems don't reach a good fraction of the city, especially the Old City and Chinatown. Those are actually best reached by boats that run up and down the river. There are also cross-river ferries that we sometimes found necessary. Furthermore, we also found taxis necessary sometimes, as the up-and-down-river boats stop running around dark. And none of these connect to the international airport -- for that you need a bus or a shuttle. Finally, there are some modes of transit we never tried: water taxis (so called long-boats) that are quite expensive, tuk-tuks (though who'd want to travel in an open vehicle on a road, breathing the fumes), and motorcycle taxis.

I found navigating the transportation system easier than I imagined given its variety and enjoyed the opportunity--nah, need--to try many of these options. Needing to take the boat everyday was fun. Nevertheless, even if it weren't true, I felt as if I needed more time than I should've to get places (maybe because the boat doesn't go as fast as I wish it could, and the transfer times between modes of transit is longer than I'd hope).

Pollution is bad. It feels similar to how Shanghai feels during the summer.

Language
Language was sometimes difficult. Bangkok is a tourist destination so some people speak English, but it also does significant non-tourism business as well, meaning most people never learn. (Contrast this with entirely-tourist-focused Siem Reap.) Thus, guest-facing employees at our hotel speak English, as do the people who run the tourist boat and the people at ticket offices for tourist destinations. On the other hand, people who drive buses or captain the public ferries don't speak a word. Only rarely do street food people speak more than a couple of words. In the spectrum of being able to use English to get around, Bangkok is easier than Shanghai and Beijing but less easy than Hong Kong, Siem Reap, Singapore, Oslo, and Bergen. I can't compare it with Barcelona because I never tried to use English there.

Weather
The heat, at least when I visited in March (the beginning of the hot season), was tough. We'd end up sticky from walking around. I found it harder to bear than Singapore's heat, which surprised me. (The temperatures are rather similar, with Bangkok perhaps a couple of degrees C hotter, at highs in the mid-90s F.) I think it's because everywhere in Singapore--or at least everywhere tourists go--have air-conditioned venues (malls, subway stations, etc.) that are easy to jump into if one needs a break. This isn't the case in Bangkok.

Political Unrest
While I was in Thailand, there was a series of large protests by a group known as the red-shirts. (These continued and escalated for the next few months.) Some commentators worried about the protests turning violent, although they did not while I was there. We decided to plan our outings so as not to visit places where the protesters were; this turned out to be no big deal, as they weren't near the most famous tourist sites. (They were near a few tourist sites, places with names such as the Democracy Monument, but none of these were high enough on our list of places to visit so that we didn't even get around to considering visiting any.) I appointed myself the reader of news to keep track of the state of the protests. However, I needn't have worried: if I hadn't been reading the news, aside from a note from our hotel warning us about traveling (both for safety and simple traffic reasons) to certain areas where the protests were happening, I never would've realized anything was going on.

Sites
Unlike other times I travel, I'm not going to make a list of sites I missed that I should see next time because, while we saw a lot, we missed even more, including some top tourist destinations. (For instance, there are about eight districts that tourists visit; we didn't set foot in / see a single sight in four of them.) It'd be much better to consult a guidebook from scratch rather than make a list of the numerous sites I didn't get to see in Bangkok, which includes famous temples, museums, monuments, and markets.

Misc
Interesting fact: Thailand is one of the few (the only?) country in its region (south/south-east Asia) that wasn't at some point a colony of a Western power.