bangkok

heh, damn.. i’m on the net again. i hope i don’t spend too much of my trip at net cafes, but i just have this intense need to write down absolutely everything i see so i don’t forget.

after an uneventful flight, i arrived in bangkok. i thought for some reason that my flight would come in around 7pm… but in reality it landed after midnight. doh! so i’m at the airport and it’s hellza late, and i start wondering what the chances of me finding a hotel at this hour is. uh oh.

so i take a psycho-cab from the airport to bangkok. it really doesn’t seem like there are any traffic rules here, cause we sped down the road at about 1 million miles an hour, dodging traffic, and narrowly avoiding other cars. the cab guy offered to find me a hotel, and even though i assumed he would make me stay at a more expensive place, it was getting late and i just wanted to make sure i got a room. the hotel guy tries to tell me that the cheapest room he has is 1200B (30$) but after threatening to leave i few times, i got a room for 400B (10$). i expected the room to be full on ghetto.. but it was actually pretty decent.

even though it was 1am by then, i figured i wanted to go out.. at least to just see a tiny bit of bangkok. let me tell ya, bangkok is nuts. i went to kho san road (the main backpacker hangout in the city). the street was still totally bustling at this late hour. tons of people walking everywhere, music blaring from clubs and bootleg cd stands, and hundreds of food vendors trying to sell their stuff. it was pretty hard to figure out what most of this food was. a lot of it just looked like a bunch of stuff just thrown together w/ a sign written in thai to explain what it was. one of the stalls was selling scorpions. not only that, but it also had a huge pile of roasted grasshopper, larvae in all different shapes and sizes, and cockroaches. i wasn’t brave (or drunk) enough to try anything like that, so i walked on. got my first meal in thailand: pad thai for 10B (25cents). also, in the midst of all this, there was a baby elephant walking around. baby elephants make the coolest squeaking noise ever.

the other thing about bangkok is that everyone is trying to sell you something. prostitutes literally grab at you trying to carry you off somewhere. other people try to make you rent tuk-tuks, get rides w/ them, or offer to take you to “boom-boom ladies”. it’s really tough cause i’m not used to being rude to people i see on the street. but unless you just blatantly look the other was and ignore them, these people wont go away. several of them followed me for a whole block. others try to shake your hand. if you make the mistake of shaking it, they just latch on to your hand and don’t let go while walking with you where ever you go. it’s nuts over here.

so now it’s 3am, and i think i’m gonna head back to the hotel. starting to wonder about this whole traveling alone stuff. i mean, how do you meet people? just wander up to strangers? thats never really been my style…

-vlad