Wonderful, Chaotic, Cosmopolitan, Rainy, Bangkok
This is it! I’m back in the United States. I can’t believe it. But it the meantime, I’m going to be chugging out these blog posts, before I forget all of the crazy memories that the trip has given me. You can read my other posts here.
We had no intentions of heading to Bangkok on this trip (asides from our pre-trip itinerary). We were happy with visiting Northern Thailand and avoiding the rainy season that much of Southeast Asia has from June-October. Alas, we did in fact make it to Bangkok. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea, fueled by a combination of “why not”, medical tourism, and a need to make it out of Indonesia before our visa ran out. However, we arrived at the height of rainy season, and Bangkok has legendary flooding. (It’s rumored that much of the city will be underwater by 2050 due to climate change and sea level rise. The flooding does nothing to quell that belief).
After an incredible monsoon-style rainstorm, the water was midway up my legs as I plowed through the street en route to eat my favorite Thai meal, Basil Chicken. Sopping wet, I enjoyed my meal, and headed back to the hostel, with the water even higher than before, though the rain had stopped. One woman was sweeping the water to no effect, presumably out of frustration. Every Thai person we saw who looked at us gave us a smirk, mostly laughing with us and the unfortunate situation. This included a tongue-in-cheek “Welcome to Thailand!” and an “Enjoy Flooding!!!”. I guess that was our Baptism into Southeast Asia’s de-facto capital city.
Bangkok is also a huge hub for medical tourism — that is, going to another country to get cheaper healthcare. We took advantage of this by getting some medicine and getting our teeth cleaned. The routine teeth cleaning was 1000 baht ($33) which was much cheaper than it would be in the United States. I imagine some savvy people offset the cost of a Thai vacation by stacking it with all of their medical checkups for the year.
Bangkok is probably most famous for The Grand Palace, and while it was cool, it was sorely overcrowded. Sure the architecture was grand, it was nothing we hadn’t seen before, the signature Buddhist art and depictions were similar to other, less grand temples.
Finally, we did a cooking class, shopping at a local market and learning to create four Thai dishes: Chicken Coconut Soup, Pad Thai, Massaman Curry (one of my favorite dishes on the trip) and Mango Sticky Rice. I will say while it was a lot of fun, the cooking class was geared towards enjoyment rather than rigor, which was for the best. I’m not sure I could perfectly replicate them now, but I will try when I’m back stateside.
One thing I learned that Thailand has their own types of ingredients — Thai garlic is different than regular garlic, along with Thai Cilantro, limes, and Thailand uses 3 different types of basil depending on the dish. It made a lot more sense why Thai dishes were so flavorful and just a bit different than the taste palette I am used to. I hope I can find a way to source the ingredients back home.
Transportation in Bangkok
One thing that I was interested in looking at in Bangkok from an Urban Planning Perspective was the transportation situation. Historically, Bangkok was known for some of the most legendary traffic jams in the world, with no decent public transportation options to avoid the chaos. The Government invested heavily into a dirty, intrusive network of elevated highways that ended up only creating worse traffic instead of allieviating it. This is known as induced demand- that is, if you build more of something, more people will use it. If you add a highway to reduce congestion, more people will respond by buying cars, and living farther from the city, and that congestion will simply be quite quickly replaced, reaching a new equilibrium of traffic (see basically every highway extension ever, or at least the Atlanta Beltline, I-405 Extension, Palmetto expressway expansion, etc.)
In recent years, Bangkok has responded by finally investing in rail transportation. They have 2 elevated BTS rail lines, and 2 separate underground MRT lines (both act as metros, but are run by different companies). They also have an airport line to Suvarnabhumi airport (Southeast Asia’s de-facto international hub), and lofty expansion plans for more lines in the future. The flip in investment seems to be working. The traffic jams are not quite as legendary, but more importantly, many people are able to commute with public transit and avoid the ever-clogged mess all-together.
That’s just about it for our time in Bangkok. Our next stop was the infamous Thai Islands of Ko Samui, Ko Pha-Ngan, and Ko Tao.
