bangcock

So Maya and I are in Chiang Mai, Thailand, right now. We just got here after spending 6 frustrating, annoying, and very occasionally awesome days in the mad metropolis that is Bangkok. Maya's and my current mindset surely contributed to our issues there - the books that we've read on the subject of taking long trips like ours warned us that around the 2-month mark, most travelers start to tire and feel homesick, and as we've headed into the second leg of our journey, that has definitely proved to be the case: We're fucking beat, and a day rarely goes by during which one or both of us doesn't say, "I just want to go home." That said, Bangkok really was a pain in the ass. Since I'm feeling wiped out - and suffering from a bit of writer's block - here's just a quick rundown of the good, bad, and the ugly of the Bangkok we experienced:

Crazy and cool that its not just a myth: Kathoey, a.k.a. lady boys, a.k.a. Thai transvestites, really are everywhere. There are beautiful, completely convincing ladyboys hanging out and/or working at snazzy bars, clubs, and restaurants; there are chubby, stubbly, completely unconvincing ladyboys walking around the streets, arm-in-arm with their (real) girlfriends; and there are even teenage schoolgirl ladyboys brushing by you along the sidewalk in their school uniforms, which look very much like Catholic school uniforms, making for a truly amazing image to western eyes.

Seriously disgusting and disturbing that its not just a myth: "Sexpats" (humorously - and not totally inaccurately - described by wikitravel as a "Fifty-plus, bald, beer belly, stained shirt, lovestruck expression and a hairy arm wrapped around a girl too young to be their daughter") really are everywhere, too. Along our way through town, Maya and I saw all too many older white guys - most dressed not so much like the comic-book-store owner on the Simpsons, as the above description suggests, and more like Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice - walking around with a noticeably younger and slutily-dressed Asian chick. Ewwwww.

Fucking annoying that it is a myth: Thailand being the "Land of Smiles"? That's the country's nickname and its rep - smiling is the rule; people are friendly; frowning, arguing, and making a scene in public are taboo. So, as our time in Thailand approached, Maya had been telling me that I should get ready to smile a lot if I want to fit in there (if you don't know already, I'm not generally a big smiler). Well, no worries there, as it's turned out. The staff at our guesthouse is made up of 4 of the grumpiest, grouchiest women we've ever met anywhere (the only nice woman there doesn't speak a peep of English). The tuk-tuk and taxi drivers have almost all turned out to be assholes - metered taxi drivers routinely refuse to use their meter, while tuk-tuk drivers will literally drive away from you without so much as a word if your fare offer doesn't meet their expectations. Vendors at Chatuchak Market, which, like any Asian market, is supposed to be all about the bargaining, have refused to bargain with us (for bootleg metal T-shirts, which we had to have). It's as if they have come to see white foreigners as little more than walking wallets for the picking. And there is a strain of discrimination in the workings of the city - at some of the sightseeing locations, there are different entrances for foreigners and for Thai people; at some of the religious sites, where you are supposed to remove your shoes before entering, there are different places for foreigners to leave their shoes and for Thai to leave their shoes; and at the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, where we watched a string of Mauy Thai fights (more on that in a second), there's a separate section marked off for foreigners (though we ignored the sign and sat with the natives)! Well, I call bullshit. "Land of smiles," my ass. I'm not smiling. I'm fucking pissed. And Maya's probably even more pissed.

Possibly the cheesiest road in the world: Khao San Road. Think Bourbon Street, then add a stand at every half-block where young Asian women sit braiding dreadlock hair extensions to the scalps of tie-dye-clad pseudo-hippie tourists. Add carts selling grilled meal worms and beetles. Add fratboy-stuffed bars where bands play acoustic covers of that Umbrella song by Rihanna. Add hundreds of stands selling the most retarded "joke" T-shirts you've ever seen...

(Speaking of which,) Embarassing to be associated with, and perhaps the explanation as to why Bangkok seems to be so mean to its tourists: Bangkok tourists are the cheesiest we've met so far. In our guesthouse alone, there was some cheesy goateed-and-ponytailed European dude who wore, 2 days in a row, a T-shirt with "The Goodfucker" emblazoned on it in the font and logo of The Godfather trilogy. There was another dude wearing a T-shirt with "iPood" on it with a traffic-sign-style illustration of a person on the toilet, vomiting and, yeah, presumably, pooing. The tourists who weren't wearing retarded "joke" T-shirts like these, were wearing horrible linen ethnic clothing. And then there were all the French families travelling with their kids, who they left to play in the common space in their dirt-and-I-can-only-imagine-what-stained underwear. Oh, the manatee...

Strange and kind of creepy: How much the Thai love their king. There are huge posters of the dude everywhere, and in the markets, there are stands that exclusively sell photos of him - baby photos, kid photos, teenage photos, family photos, and on and on. Before a movie starts at the movie megaplex in the mall, they play a short trailer featuring the national anthem and rainy scenes of the Thai landscape with images of the king tumbling across the screen in raindrop shapes; sitting in the theater as this played, Maya and I looked at each other, then she (very intelligently, it turned out) looked back to see the rest of the audience (all Thai) standing reverently. Afraid we would be lynched if we didn't, we stood as well.

Awesome but brutal as all hell: Muay Thai at Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, which we watched on our second night in the city. The stadium was as ghetto as it gets - dirty concrete bleachers/steps crawling with small cockroaches, the air buzzing with mosquitoes, the second and third seating levels separated by a chainlink fence. We sat in the second level where we were surrounded by the wildly shouting and gesticulating locals, just about all of whom were obviously gambling on the fights (just about all the other whities had paid the big bucks for the "ringside seats," which meant they got none of the true vibe of the matches and got to crane their necks up at the ring to see any of the action). We befriended a tattoo-covered little punk-rock Thai girl who was sitting next to us, and she talked us through some of the action, explaining that when the crowd shouted along with the fighters pounding on each other, they were basically shouting for the dude they had bet on to, "Hit!" Hit!" As for the fights themselves, 4 of the 7 we watched ended in knockouts, and in 3 of those, the knockouted dude managed to stand and walk out of the ring under his own power; one of them, however - a particularly lanky fighter, who couldn't have been older than 16 and whom I couldn't help but pull for, since he was the obvious underdog - went down cold and was carried out on a stretcher.

Awesome but shocking and kind of frightening: The monitor lizards in Lumphini Park. One day we went for a walk in what is basically Bangkok's Central Park. We were walking along this relaxing lake, over a bridge, when I noticed something big and reptilian crawling around near the walkway in front of us. "What's that?" I said to Maya. She squinted ahead. "Is that an alligator?" she responded, aghast. I looked closer. "No," I said, "I think that's a monitor lizard," showing off how many nature shows I've watched on TV. We crept closer, and it was indeed a big monitor lizard, no shorter than 4 feet long, creeping around, completely uncaged and uncontrolled. We got to within 10 feet of it, watched as it flicked its long tongue out, tasting the air...

...and then slid into the lake, and swam away. It didn't swim far though, exiting the water 20 yards away or so, right next to a Thai man who was napping on the grass by the shore - I was sure he was going to be lunch, but the lizard just positioned itself in the sunlight and sat there contentedly. We took our own seats on a bench in the shade and watched the strange scene. Next thing I knew I heard a loud rustling from my left, Maya let out a shriek and lept up onto her bench. Two other monitor lizards - a massive one, maybe as long as I am tall, and a smaller one, about the size of the original specimen - had scurried out from a nearby brush to within a few feet of us; the larger one, presumably male, seemed to be pursuing the smaller, presumably female (but in Thailand, as I said earlier, you can never be sure). I joined Maya, standing on the top of my bench. We watched these lizards, which eventually crept into the water like the first. To end this absurd tale, as we walked around the rest of the park, we discovered that there were ridiculously large monitor lizards hanging out everywhere, and none of the Thai people lounging in the park seemed to give a second thought about them. Monitor lizards must be like Thai squirrels, I guess - except big, scaly, and with possibly venomous saliva.

Totally awesome but totally sick: The Siriraj Museum of Medicine, which includes a museum of forensic medicine and a museum of parasitology. This place seriously put what had been the sickest museum Maya and I had ever visited - the Mutter Museum in Philly - to fucking shame. Just a few of the ridiculously gruesome artifacts we encountered (as we walked around the place, our jaws on the floor, along with numerous Thai families complete with little kids)? The actual head of a man who had been shot through the brain, preserved in a jar and bisected so you could see the path that the bullet tore through his skull and gray matter. Walls and walls of glass cases containing just about every body part you could imagine, all taken from people who had died various violent deaths - from tongues with bullet holes in them to a digestive system blackened and burst after its owner drank acid. Jars and jars containing all stages of fetuses, including one with an enlarged, alien-like head - small piles of candy and toys sat in front of these jars, left for the dead babies by museum visitors. The preserved watermelon-size scrotum of a man who contracted the Elephantiasis parasite, which swells its victims' anatomy - particularly the genatalia - to grotesque proportions. A long hall of blownup photos of death scenes, including those of children who had been blown up by Molotov Cocktails, crushed by machinery, or mangled in traffic accidents (many looked just like chunks of ground beef with hands and legs sticking off of them). A large clay urn in which, as the photos hung above it revealed, a boy had been cooked to his death. The complete preserved naked body of the Chinese serial child-killer and cannibal Si-Oui. For more in-depth description of the place with some pics, click here. Seriously, if you're ever in the 'hood, you gotta check this place out - it'll blow your mind.

Gaudy as all shit and tourist-swarmed as all fuck: Wat Phreaw Kaew and the Grand Palace. I thought it was like being at Disney Land - but without the rides.


Pretty fucking cool: Wat Po, which houses a massive 46-meter-long, 15-meters-high (you do the math) reclining Buddha.


Best random discovery: Battle of the Bands outside of the Bangkok CentralWorld mega-mall. We were just walking through some markets in downtown when we heard the crunch of a loud powerchord, and following the sounds, we found a huge stage setup right in front of the mall with hundreds of Thai seated and standing in front. A Thai metalcore band was rocking onstage. When they finished two songs, they walked to the front of the stage, and a panel of judges in a tent gave their critique (in Thai, unfortunately). We stayed for four more bands - a power-pop band, a Cranberries-like girl-fronted alt-rock band, an cringe-worthy emo band, and a totally hilarious funk band with a saxaphone player, a DJ, and a frontman-guitarist in a cowboy hat and a leopard-print jacket who pulled out the most painfully earnest facial expressions as he did his best Anthony Keedis impression. (The guy actually reminded Maya, and me, after she pointed it out, of this guy we call "Bidet." Jade and Lamb, and Anna, you know who we're talking about.)

Worst random discovery: The Thai horror movie we saw at the CentralWorld movie theater. The Spirit World. Do not, I repeat, do not see it.

Hair-pullingly frustrating: Trying to find true metal shit in Bangkok. Before we arrived, I had looked up what metal bars and stores there were in the city on metaltravelguide.com. It looked like there were a lot - bars called Immortal, Metal Zone, the Rock Pub, and Chaos City, and a record shop called Metal Quest - so Maya and I were pretty psyched. As it turned out, most of the places didn't end up being at the addressed listed on the website, and the ones that did - Immortal and the Rock Pub - fucking sucked (Immortal, though it was covered in metal band posters and stickers, played hip-hop and lame radio rock; and Rock Pub, when we went there, was completely empty, except for us and the 7-person staff, and was playing AC/DC and Poison concert videos on a big monitor). What made this all the more irritating was that all the local kids in Bangkok seemed to be wearing metal T-shirts - one night on Khao San Road (where we went haplessly hoping that Immortal would be playing metal) we saw Thai kids hanging out in Pantera, Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, White Zombie, Napalm Death, Skinny Puppy, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, and Avenged Sevenfold shirts! Out of desperation, I finally emailed the webmaster of this Bangkok-based metal webzine, siammetal.com, asking him where, oh, where were all the metal clubs, bars, and/or stores. He wrote right back, explaining that there weren't really any clubs or bars (and agreeing with me that Immortal and Rock Pub sucked), but that there were some metal record stores, including Metal Quest, which was, according to him, at a completely different address than on metaltravelguide.com. A few days later, Maya and I went to Metal Quest, which ended up being a tiny shop with no sign on the top floor of a mega-mall! I bought two CDs by Thai metal black-metal bands (the store only had three CDs by Thai bands), and we talked to the owner - a super-nice, awkward metal dude with limited English skills. He confirmed that the Bangkok metal scene kind of sucked - the only upcoming show was a big death/grindcore fest called "Bangcock," which is going down 3 days after we leave Thailand - and when we asked about all the kids in metal shirts, he explained that it's just a fashion thing, that a few popular emo bands have members who've worn metal T-shirts in videos and in concert, and so their fans have followed suit. But they don't listen to the music, he said with a resigned sigh. We had noticed that most of the kids we'd seen in metal tees had completely over-the-top emo haircuts, and we pointed out that to the Metal Quest dude. "Yeah," he agreed, making a diagonal slash across his forehead to indicate the kind of angular cut we meant. We all laughed. Not only had the Bangkok metal scene been excruciatingly hard to find, but all the kids who had seemed to be part of the scene had all turned out to be posers; at least, when we finally found a true metalhead, we could hate on the same shit together: metalheads hating lame emo pussies really is universal.