Hi Gail [Morgrage of Goffstown, NH],

I was thinking of you yesterday as I made a trip to Ayutthaya [January 9, 2011]. I was thinking how you and my classmates from GHS 1963 might react positively and negatively - and this speculation has grown into an essay.

I took the train as Chunky already had the car in Ayutthaya.

Pro: Train cost 80 cents to go about 80 miles and takes about 30 minutes longer than driving. Thais travel for free! They all had to have a ticket, though. I bet I was the only paying customer all day. There is mobile connection all the way and the scenery is nice, mostly rice fields, but you do go by a protected ruin crawling with monkeys. Neat.

Con: Train is full, not particularly clean, but relatively smooth. The last step to get off the train has to be a yard down. Fortunately I remember how to land and roll like a paratrooper.

We (Chunky’s 15 year-old daughter who runs the shop when Chunky goes shopping for more clothes) and I walk about a quarter mile through a quiet street with bicycle rentals, youth hostels, and restaurants down to the King’s River (The Chao Phraya Thai: แม่น้ำเจ้าพระยา) where we have to take a ferry across.

Pro: On a beautiful day this is very picturesque and the Thailand that people who stay at Le Meridien-type hotels never see. It’s also the Thailand backpacker kids fall in love with for the rest of their lives. The ferry cost 10 cents. You get to see river barges (and they are large – some Thais live on them and rarely get off ) – again, picturesque like a thousand-piece puzzle

Con: The dock is rickety, steep and full of missing boards and ropes where you could come a cropper and go headlong into the river. The ferry itself is not much better. Getting on and off is tough as the big boats create wakes big enough to swamp us.

After the ferry, it’s up another dock and down a couple quiet blocks as neat as those on the other side and then a ten minute walk to Chunky’s shop.

Pro: You’re now on a major street full of Asian bustle.

Con: Look out! Cars, busses, trucks, bicycles, etc are everywhere. Crossing the street is as perilous as the ferry crossing. Once to the other side of the street, you have to walk through a night market which is often in grid-lock with pedestrians. A night-market is either open during the day and disappears into carts and pickups at night – or- just the opposite. Take your pick. I end any description of Thailand by giving two opposite views and saying: take your pick.

The night market is almost always set up on the sidewalk. You walk by people cooking with a two-foot high open flame at your elbow and tons of other shops selling junk (plumbing supplies, obligatory knock-off watches, Buddhist relics and medallions – everything). When you edge past a guy crushing peppers for Thai salad, your eyes water and your vision gets wavy from the thick vapors. As these markets are covered (it often rains here and the sun can be hot, you knew that right?), it’s hard to figure out just where you are. You almost have to get out on the street and look back. Going out on the street, however, would not be a good thing to do.

Chunky, her oldest daughter and I go to Bangkok in a van while Bew, the teenager, runs the shop.

Pro Van cost $2 for a forty minute trip. Driver drives in Bangkok everyday and knows where he’s going. Van is a 16 person van with A/C and it is pretty nice. You do catch glimpses of the iconic buildings of Bangkok from the elevated roadway.

Con: Van is packed, stops along the way to let people out or in, and is death-defying. On one hand, you could say the driver knows what he’s doing, on the other hand, as he weaves in and out of four lanes of traffic at between 60 and 100 mph you think, you’ve got to be kidding,

We get on the sky train and hoof-it to the whole-sale clothes district.

Pro: The sky train is neat! It runs down the middle of many main drags and is, in many ways, one of the best things about Bangkok. We go just one stop, get off, and walk on a promenade under the main track above. This walkway goes for a mile at third-floor level with some of the glitziest shopping malls in the world on either side. It’s just neat. I think Chunky wanted to take me to see where the new sky-train runs straight to the new airport. It’s all neat, I think.

Con: Getting on a packed sky-train is everyman for himself. They don’t have pushers as they do in Japan to get everyone on, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. At street level, again we have to walk through a night market and the walking is slow.

In the market proper (and there are many of them in this area called Pratunnam) we go down some steep steps to the basement. It’s worse than Filene’s basement (I admit I never have been in Filene's basement, but . . . ). It’s tons of little shops (like Chunky’s) only they do wholesale/retail. The two girls are like rats on steroids in a shopping maze.

Pro: Even in the most hectic, darkest alley of Bangkok you can find a Starbucks or a look alike sandwich shop. Chunky sits me down at a table, buys me a small cup of ham soup that’s delicious and – “poof” – disappears. The girls don’t shop together in the same way that horse players don’t sit together at the track – they don’t want to end up with the same winners and losers, I guess.

I use to be claustrophobic in these places, but I am adapting, a little. I watch literally hundreds of people dragging Santa Claus-size plastic sacks full of clothes. Most are women in the same business as Chunky, but it’s a curious mix of people. I like the transvestites (ladyboys) usually traveling in small groups and probably a foot taller than their female Thai counterparts. I also like teenagers (boys and girls together) who are just looking for the most outrageous costumes they can find, and I like the 60ish western tourists who are obviously no longer shopping but trying to find their way out. This is not easy and another reason I stay put until Chunky comes and gets me. I tend to dislike on sight the Middle Eastern and Central European men who are obviously just buying anything to take back home and sell. These guys are not very polite, think they are kings of the world, but . . .

Pro2: When after an hour and a half they return, we take an elevator to the food court on the fifth floor. Now, some up-scale Bangkok food courts are great (Clark [Bagnall] and I had a Greek salad in one of them that I thought was wonderful), but some are pretty unspectacular. This one looked unspectacular, but we ate very well for under 7 dollars (for the three of us). And although the line of shops looked like fast food places, these shops cooked everything from scratch. Chunky always orders (about 3x too much). She came back with some (egg rolls) spring rolls. They didn’t taste like the usual spring roll, so I asked her if they were shrimp (I do not eat seafood here). She said no, they were mushroom and peanuts. Delicious. I also had pork-fried-rice which obviously had not just been thrown together. It too was great. There was also an exhibit of original paintings – some sort of contest – and some paintings were striking.

Con: There was an open karaoke stage at the end of the room. At three on a Sunday afternoon a handful of kids and Thai men my age got up to sing. Not good, but not too loud either. The Thais like music of any kind loud, who knows why.

We go back to catch another van back to Ayutthaya.

Pro: none.

Con: We took a tuk-tuk, the three-wheel, sort-of enclosed, two cycle engine taxi that I hate with a passion. Not only are you open on all four sides to traffic exhaust, zipping trough traffic like a small food fish next to giant predator busses, but they accommodate Asian size folk. Getting into one is like trying to get into a 29” CRT TV box. They also cost as much as a Toyota taxis, but these normal taxis usually don’t want to go where we wanted to go because of traffic and possibly the time of day. You don’t jump in a Bangkok taxi; you always ask if he’s willing to take you where you want to go. (These Bangkok real taxis are good. I recommend them.). I don’t think there’s any traffic rule written that tuk-tuk drivers obey with any consistency. The van ride back was, again, death-defying.

We pack stuff (pretty much all her shop merchandise) and take it to the weekend market. Chunky and her daughter(s) run a stall here at night. She has metal racks (set up Saturday am) and within a few minutes has the place powered up with lights and clothes.

Pro: This place is about three-acres of shops (sometimes just blankets on the ground), selling – you guessed it – everything. There must have been 10,000 Thais here. The number’s a guess but walking against the tide of people coming at me no matter which way I was going put me in mind of a scene from Brave Heart where two armies run full tilt into each other in battle.

I got a fair shwarma from a bearded Muslim and his abayah clad family who were very busy but, much to my dismay couldn’t speak a word of Arabic. Sell shwarmas and can’t speak Arabic. Jeezeum.

There was a guy selling remote control airplanes. He had an F-22 Raptor dive bombing the crowd. I wanted to watch it, but looking up is not a good idea when you’re in the midst of a medieval battle. I did get a fleeting glimpse of a crescent moon being chased down by Venus, a moon-white owl silently crossing its path, and an amazing F-22 Raptor piercing the firmament like Hester Pryne's needle sewing the letter A on the bosom of her dress. It took me fifteen minutes to find the pilot and watch as he landed/caught the plane in the back of his pickup (He didn’t even bother to stand up): a flame-out, dead-stick glide over a couple thousand heads that ended as softly as a ball of string that had run out of string. Neat*.

Chunky probably netted around $50 in two plus hours (her shop-keeping teenager had netted about $25 while we were in Bangkok). Deducting travel, food and drink, I’d say she was on the up side of $50 for the day.

Watching them strike the shop was like watching professional (well semi-professional) roadies work. Seeing that I had had a couple/four beers with my shwarma, the best thing I could do was to try and stay out of the way. We all agreed on this.

Cons: I don’t like being in re-enactments of medieval battles, especially when I’m wearing a ratty Wyoming sweat shirt that makes me look foreign enough for both armies to want to kill. I didn’t see any other westerners at the market. They probably wouldn’t be caught dead here . . . unless they already have been, you know, been caught. Hmm

Chunky’s daughters, both dressed in the foxy “fashions” she sells, piss-off after things are set-up and get going. Chunky says they are “shopping” but they don’t buy much. Just what they’re shopping for remains an open issue in my mind. It ain’t model F-22 Raptors, I bet. I should say that there are Thai night clubs ringed all around the market. I hope to report back to you on this scene in a later update.

The oldest daughter comes back with a plastic-sandwich bag of food. This sexy girl is using a small wooden pick to eat small pieces of something about the size of one of her false eye-lashes. She offers one to me and when I look closely – as I always do with Thai food – it looks like a small caterpillar. No, wait, it is a caterpillar! Yikes!

Well, after dropping everything off at Chunky’s oldest daughter’s Ayutthaya condo, we drive home. It’s eleven PM. Chunky says why don’t you get some sleep? I say I can’t sleep in cars unless I’m driving, but I might as well be playing George Burns to her Gracie Allen. She has a cold and I’m feeding her tissues in the dark. She tells me she left her wallet in her daughter’s shop. What was in it? I ask, thinking how much money. Everything, she says.

I look out the window and wordlessly think of you, Gail. Would you have survived this day? Maybe. If you did survive, you’d be laid out on your bed by now too tired to get your pajamas on. There would be little black crosses in your eyes and your head would be turned to one side and your tongue would be lolling out in a manner that even I would recognize as not a good. But you’d have a smile on your lips.

As for the Thais, they happily throw everything in God’s world into a pot, a heap, a clothes shop, and trust that in the end all will be well. Unlike scientists who think the material world exists because after the big bang there was one more real atom than an atom of black anti-matter, the Thais think good and evil are like two cosmic blocks which are seamlessly fitted together like the blocks at Machu Picchu or the Great Pyramids at Giza. They are a perfect match. If there was anything the size of a bug left over, the Thais would just pop it into their mouths and swallow. Case closed. Maybe they’re right, maybe not, but in the meantime you gotta love them for being so uniquely different and wish them luck.

In the dark, I turn back to Chunky and slowly ask, “Everything?”


* I know I over use the word neat. Wow might be a better word (for the F-22) or even elegance as in the sense of a math proof (for the Sky Train), but in the Thai world where an unplanned mess is something seen as socially acceptable if not desirable, neat has an echo of the difference between East and West. “ Neat, neat, but different,” as the Thais might say. Take your pick.

All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood