A street vendor selling fruit and veg in Ari. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Living in Bangkok is a very different experience to visiting it, and after our first week we started to feel less like tourists and more like inhabitants of the sprawling metropolis. We moved into an apartment in Ari, a residential Thai area. It’s upmarket but still feels more adventurous than living in expat central round Sukhumvit. We’re staying in a small block of 15 apartments around a swimming pool. It’s very homely and ‘traditional Thai style’ with lots of shade and pot plants everywhere. We’re surrounded by quiet leafy lanes, populated with villas and garden restaurants. It feels a bit like a Thai equivalent of the more villagey suburbs of London like Highgate or Hampstead.

The streets near the Skytrain are lined with food stalls, selling fruit or fried noodles. Scattered among them are occasional folding tables covered with lottery tickets. There is also a cobbler and a middle-aged man with an old-fashioned sewing machine, patiently repairing an endless succession of garments. The ready availability of fruit here is a welcome contrast to Manila and, along with my twice-daily swims, allows me to maintain the semblance of a healthy lifestyle while eating spicy soup noodles every night.

Each of the street stalls is in fact a small trailer with gas canisters pulled by bike, moped or sometimes by hand. Owners of the larger stalls set up folding chairs and tables along the roadside to create a makeshift restaurant. Late at night, they take all this down and do their washing up with large plastic bowls and hosepipes, emptying the dirty water out into the gutters. One night, after the stalls had gone, I noticed that the pavement was actually marked out into small areas with painted lines like a car park. Presumably the stall owners pay rent on their space to the local council.

My first few weeks at work have been busy but interesting. I’m helping China write a proposal for a new website, while working on a digital strategy for Thailand and training their team on writing for the web, using images and email broadcast. I’ve also been on two project visits, to a slum community and a shelter for homeless boys, which will be the subject of next week’s blog.

My new colleagues are all very friendly and welcoming. Like Filipinos, Thais have two names – formal and informal. Some nicknames are in English, while others are in Thai. However, where Filipinos favour terms of endearment like ‘Love’ and ‘Baby’, Thais seem to prefer a fruit theme, hence ‘Pear’ and ‘Cherry’. So my Thai colleagues Natnapin, Pimsai and Waraporn are known respectively as ‘Kwan’, ‘Pear’ and ‘Yui’. Waraporn, or Yui, is always laughing at me and the daft things I do, like turning up for a meeting on my first day with a ‘Mission Banana’ notebook I’d bought at 7-Eleven with a cartoon monkey on the front. “I think that’s for school children,” she laughed.

Fantastic voyage

The canal boat – you either love it or you hate it. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

In the morning, after waking to the hooting and clattering of tropical birds (‘Baroo, baroo, baroo,’ one bird calls loudly at 6am every morning), I grab a quick swim and get a taxi to work. I’ve been brushing up on my taxi -Thai, such as ‘lieow saai’ (turn left), ‘lieow kwaa’ (turn right), ‘dtrong bpai’ (straight on), ‘hai chah long’ (slow down) and ‘jawt’ (stop).

My journey home is more local-style and provides a fascinating daily glimpse into the changing face of Bangkok. Leaving the office at around 5:30 pm, I hail a tuk-tuk and negotiate a ride to ‘Pan Fa, ta rua’ (the local boat dock) for ‘see sip baht’ (40 baht). Bangkok’s tuk-tuks are similar to the ‘tricyles’ of Manila, but with the passenger seat behind the driver rather than alongside him. The tuk-tuk weaves through the traffic, bypassing the bottleneck around Siam Commercial Bank by driving on the wrong side of the road and dodging back in between cars if something comes the other way. Reaching the intersection at Pan Fa, the tuk-tuk cuts suicidally across six lanes of traffic and drops me at the boat dock. ‘Khob khon kap,’ I say, handing over two 20 baht notes and relieved to be in one piece.

After grabbing a couple of spicy chicken skewers at the street food stalls, I make my way down to the boat dock. The canal boats are basic affairs with wooden benches and tarpaulin sides. They only stop for a brief moment at each dock while passengers scramble on and off. As soon as we’re all on board, the boat sets off and two teenage girls in face masks and pink crash helmets scamper along the outside of the boat, collecting fares from passengers. ‘Ratchathewi,’ I say, holding up three fingers to indicate the number of stops. My fare is nine baht (18 pence).

When the boat comes to a bridge, the roof is winched down and the girls on the sides duck low. I suspect their crash helmets are intended to protect them should they misjudge this and get a face full of fast moving concrete. To start with, the canal is lined with small houses and a tidy path, but this soon deteriorates into a slum, with shanty houses piled on top of each other right up to the edge of the canal. The slum owners have annexed the canalside path and turned it into a back yard. At the weekend, the railing is covered with clothes hanging out to dry on metal hangers, like a downmarket, second-hand fashion stall. The clothes are interspersed with pot plants, the occasional bird cage and even a fish tank, lashed to the railings with a well-tied rope.

Unfortunately, the canal is also clearly used as a rubbish dump and sewer by the slum inhabitants, and as a result the water can get very smelly. Passengers live in constant fear of splashes from boats passing the other way. On her way to a job interview, Joyce was deeply traumatised when she got a generous splash of water full in the face. ‘If I’d had time, I’d have gone home and showered,’ she recalled with a shudder. Despite this, the canal boat is my favourite part of the journey. I feel almost like a local, squeezed cheek-to-cheek between my fellow commuters as the sun sets, creating orange ripples on the water and reflecting off the metal roofs of the shanty houses. The canal boat’s dubious charms are lost on my local colleagues however. ‘I took it once four years ago,’ Cherry told me, adding emphatically, ‘Never again.’

In olden times, the canal was the main transport route through the city – a kind of pre-industrial express way. The few remaining nineteenth century villas have gates opening onto the canal path, which would previously have been their main entrance. 

I get off the canal boat at Ratchathewi (prounced like the French vegetable stew ratatouille), walk through an underpass where a drafts board has been set up with bottle tops on an old table, and past the remains of a demolished, graffiti-fringed housing block. Enterprising teenagers have cleared the rubble from one end and turned it into an improvised football pitch where they engage in nightly sporting contests.

Just past the derelict lot, I climb a flight of stairs to the Skytrain and enter a different world, a bit like the moment in a movie when someone discovers a portal to a fantasy world in the back of a wardrobe or some other improbable place. Suddenly, the street stalls are replaced by smart outlets selling iPhone accessories, the pink-helmeted teenagers by an electronic ticket machine and the canal boat itself by a state-of-the-art, air conditioned train with TV screens playing adverts for make-up and motorbikes. I’m used to London’s hundred-year-old underground so the Skytrain feels almost futuristic to me. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the year here is 2554, as Thais count from the year of Buddha’s birth rather than Christ’s.

I sometimes reach the Skytrain station at 6pm, when the national anthem is played in all public places and everyone has to stand still to pay homage to the King. At Ari, I get off the Skytrain and walk for 10 minutes through the hot, humid streets and evening hustle and bustle of the street stalls, to our apartment block where I get out of my sweaty, smelly clothes and go for a refreshing swim in the pool.

Year of the Rabbit

Lizz, Esther and Joyce (left to right) in Chinatown. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

Last week was Chinese New Year (I’m told we should call it Lunar New Year out of respect for non-Chinese who mark the occasion), so on Saturday we went to Chinatown with Lizz,who I used to work with at UNICEF UK, and her friend Esther. We missed the dragon show but the streets were still festooned with red lanterns and packed with both locals and tourists. We explored the narrow back streets, which I was excited to discover stood in for 1960s Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s classic movie ‘In the Mood for Love’.

I’m a big Wong Kar-wai fan – his movies were the subject of my MA dissertation and first publication. On my first trip to Hong Kong, I dragged Joyce and her parents around looking for the location of scenes from ‘Chungking Express’, including the titular Chungking Mansions. ‘Why does he want to go there?’ Joyce’s mum asked her, perplexed. ‘It’s just full of gangsters and fake Rolexes. The Big Buddha statue is much nicer.’ Joyce sighed. ‘It’s a movie thing,’ she explained.

In Bangkok’s Chinatown we stumbled upon a traditional Chinese temple down one of the back streets, where people were burning incense and buying offerings of fresh vegetables, presumably to mark the Year of the Rabbit. ‘Last time they were selling meat and eggs,’ Esther said. ‘That was the Year of the Tiger’.

We ended the weekend at Chatuchak Market, looking for things to buy for our flat. Having spent most of December giving away all our wordly possessions, we’re now having to repurchase many of them, albeit at substantially lower prices. Chatuchak is a bit like Camden Market multiplied a hundredfold. It’s a huge, sprawling behemoth of a place, selling everything from arts and crafts to clothes, pot plants and pets. There’s even a stall somewhere selling baby alligators. With over 5,000 stalls and 200,000 visitors a day, it’s easy to get lost. The stall owners are well aware how bewildering it is, so they all have business cards showing their location in the market, numbered by section and soi (street). In the evening, the character of the market changes and it takes on a party atmosphere. Most of the stalls close and bars open up with live bands or DJs spinning dance tunes late into the night.

A DJ playing funky tunes at Chatuchak market. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

The author, demonstrating the rolling ball action in a dragon’s mouth. © Joyce Lee/2011/Thailand

Like déjà vu or a half remembered dream, Bangkok strikes me as both familiar and unknown. The hustle, bustle and good-natured chaos of Banglumphu (the old town and backpacker district) reminds me of Manila. Among the glitzy, air-conditioned skyscrapers, malls and skytrain of Sukhumvit, meanwhile, we could easily be in Hong Kong or Shanghai. In between are the temples, saffron-robed Buddhist monks, monarchy and Sanskrit writing that are inimitably Thai. The city is in a mid-point of development. It has left behind the huge, sprawling slums of Manila but the streets are still gridlocked, lined with hawker stalls, and home to stray dogs in feral packs and street children selling flower garlands. “It’s like Hong Kong fifteen years ago, before they made the street stalls illegal,” Joyce says.

I’m here on a 12 month contract with UNICEF’s East Asia and Pacific Regional Office. My job is to help develop websites and other digital activities like email and social media for UNICEF offices in the region. I’m focusing on the middle-income countries, such as Thailand, China and Malaysia. While UNICEF’s main business in these countries is still delivering programmes in health, education, child protection and the like, they also have an opportunity to fundraise from an emerging middle class that is wealthy, online and looking for projects to support.

I came out a week early with Joyce (my fiancée) to find a flat, sort out practical matters like banking, and get a feel for our new home. For the first week, we stayed in a guest house in Banglumphu. The district is full of foreigners (called ‘farang’ in Thai), bars and restaurants with shisha pipes, and travel agencies offering cheap rides down to the islands or to the hills up north. Images of the King are everywhere, from calendars in shops and cafes to giant portraits at road intersections and on government buildings. While staying here, we went out for cocktails on Ko San Road, the famous hippy mecca. It reminded me of the dance village at Glastonbury festival, with pumping trance music, t-shirt stalls and glow-in-the-dark gadgets. Unlike Glastonbury, however, it also features beggars displaying their missing or broken limbs, in an uncomfortable reminder of the darker side of tourism in a poor country.

It’s now the middle of winter, which in Thailand terms means it’s cool for a few hours in the morning before the mercury rises to 30 degrees at midday, after which Bangkok swelters through the afternoon. I quickly learned to walk on the shady side of the street with the locals, rather than on the opposite side with the sun-starved European tourists. On a hot day, the smells of the street intensify, alternating between sweet and foul. One minute it’s all incense and green curry, the next you’re caught off-guard by the stench of drains and pollution from vehicle exhaust pipes.

Thai people are charming – full of smiles and polite bows, their hands clasped in a prayer-like symbol of greeting. At first they can come across as a bit shy or deferential but once you get to know them they’re full of warmth and humour. We made friends with a woman called Joy in our local travel agency who decided that Joyce was her idol. “I want to be more like you,” she declared. “I am always shouting and arguing with my husband but you two are so soft with each other.” On another occasion we came in to find her on her break, watching a YouTube video of a fat man in a bikini doing a belly dance. She collapsed into giggles and turned it off. “It’s OK, I’ve seen it many times before,” she said.

Keith, Carlene and Joyce share a joke at the river boat pier. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

We’ve been brushing up on our Thai etiquette. The Lonely Planet, my indispensable travel bible, warned us that Thais are very foot-phobic. So it’s important to take your shoes off before going indoors, to always walk around things rather than stepping over them and never, ever to point your feet at people, Buddha statues or the King’s portrait. When sitting down, you need to tuck the offending appendages behind you, pointing harmlessly away from everyone.

We’ve also learned to eat with a spoon and fork. Unlike the UK, where a fork is for shoveling food into your mouth, here you eat with the spoon after pushing food onto it with the back of the fork. Thai people used to eat with their hands, like the Malays across the southern border, but in the 1880s King Rama V visited Europe and came back inspired by ideas of western architecture and cutlery.

As well as the ethnic Thais, there are lots of Chinese here and a few Indians. The Chinese are typically rich businessmen. Very few speak Cantonese or Mandarin but they have kept other traditions like eating with chopsticks. Our guesthouse owner in Banglumphu was old Chinese man who got very excited when he met Joyce (who is from Hong Kong) and proceeded to say hello and count to ten in Cantonese. Beyond that, however, his Cantonese was about as good as mine.

Food is central to Thai culture and it is truly fantastic. My early favourite was steamed sea bass in lime and chilli sauce. You can eat out for as little as 40 Baht (80 pence) so it’s very tempting to do so every lunchtime and evening. You do need to develop a strong stomach, however, and even the ‘special chilli-con-carne’ I developed as a student had not prepared me for a twice-daily intake of jalapeño peppers. There are some local delicacies I have yet to try. While eating at a riverside restaurant one evening, we saw an old couple in a wooden canoe paddling along the riverside selling dried squid to diners. The woman smoked the squid over hot coals, while her husband rolled them through an iron press to flatten them out.

The reclining Buddha – happy but not for the reasons you might expect. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand

By coincidence, our friends Carlene and Keith were in Bangkok for the weekend, on holiday from the US, so on Sunday we went out with them for a day of sightseeing. We got the riverboat downstream from Phra Athit pier. Unlike the Thames, the river at the heart of Bangkok (Chao Phraya) still has shoals of large fish in it that come up to the surface at dusk to catch flies. There are also clumps of reeds that drift down from rural areas upstream. The west shore of the river is less developed, with old wooden houses, temples and open land.

We got off at Tha Tien, a crowded pier with noodle stalls and souvenir shops pressed up against the river’s edge. From there, it was a short walk to Wat Phra Kaew, home of the famous ‘Reclining Buddha’. The temple was very Chinese-influenced, with sloping, tiled roves and statues of Guan Yu, the Chinese patron saint of honour and justice who is revered in Hong Kong by police officers and triads alike. There were also stone dragon statues, but with an interesting innovation compared to their counterparts in the Middle Kingdom – the stone balls in their mouths had been carved to come loose and move around their mouths. Both the balls and the inside of the dragons’ mouths had been worn smooth by being rolled around by generations of curious visitors.

Inside the temple was a giant, gold statue of the ‘Reclining Buddha’. The temple must have been built around the statue, which is so massive that you can’t see the whole thing at once. The Buddha lies on his side, his head resting on his hand, with a languorous, almost sensual smile on his golden face. In fact, he is depicted at the moment of death and his pleasure is the anticipation of imminent nirvana. At the other end of the statue, the Buddha’s massive feet are covered with intricate patterns and pictures of horses and elephants in mother-of-pearl – which seems a bit odd given Thai people’s aversion to all things foot-related.

The temple walls are covered with murals in which scenes of everyday life are intermingled with epic battles and scenes of calm contemplation. Buddha figures painted with gold leaf appear throughout, in sometimes improbable places. On one wall, an army is storming a fortress with elephants, while on the back of one great beast a Buddha figure sits smiling and calming playing a sitar.

The air was full of the smell of burning incense and the sounds of the temple were almost musical. A deep booming gong was accompanied by a higher tinkling sound which turned out to be caused by a constant stream of worshippers filing past a line of metal pots and dropping a coin into each one in turn. Around the temple, people prayed, burned incense, pasted small squares of gold leaf onto Buddha statues, or dipped a lotus flower into a bowl of water and touched it to their foreheads. It occurred to me that although the religion and philosophy of Buddhism is very different to the Catholicism of the Philippines, somehow the ritual and ceremony ends up being remarkably similar.

As we left, I noticed hundreds of coloured roof tiles piled up outside the temple for restoration work. The underside of each tile carried a message, presumably from a donor. Most were in Thai but occasionally there was one from a tourist such as ‘Wat’s up?’ from Bruno in Australia, who was clearly a bit of a joker – ‘wat’ is the Thai word for temple.

After lunch we caught a boat to Wat Arun, another temple on the other side of the river but hundreds of miles away in terms of its influences, which were much more Indian. It comprised several tall tapering towers with rounded tops, guarded by demons with green faces and tusks in full battle armour. The temple was covered in multicoloured ceramics, including flowers made from broken plates. Its spires rose vertiginously, with staircases that climbed to the third level, getting progressively narrower and steeper at each level. “Please don’t make me go up there,” implored Carlene, who doesn’t have the best head for heights. In the end she came with us, white knuckles on the railings, and was rewarded with stunning views across the river with tiny boats plying the piers far below and skyscrapers rising over the Central district to the east.

On the way out, we passed a series of statues of farm animals. Someone had left a coffee cup on the plinth of a pig statue and the stone animal had his head turned towards it, looking for all the world as if he was contemplating whether or not to take a sip of the steaming liquid.

The stone pig considering his options. © Andy Brown/2011/Thailand