One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble...

I feel like I'm going to fill this whole post up with the very repetitive sentence:  "Oh!  Oh my god, I saw *insert item here*"

So instead, here's some pretty neat things I've seen in the last couple days in point form:
- a truck full of freshly picked pineapples
- coconut trees
- little lizards, and now VERY big lizards!
- Pigeons (they truly are everywhere)
- a bird with blue wings
- and I finally found cats.  They're not very friendly.

There, now that THAT'S out of the way...

Bangkok is overwhelming.  Polluted, and noisy, and some street corners smell so badly that it's all I can do not to cover my face with my hand and avoid the gag reflex.  I've dry heaved a few times, I'm ashamed to admit. Nobody smiles when you smile at them.  But when the people are genuinely nice, they really do shine.  So far, I've got bad things and good things to say about Bangkok, which is really where I was hoping to end up.  If I had bothered to write a post yesterday, you would have gotten a different outlook from me. 

The pollution is making me sick.  My throat and lungs hurt, and it hurts to breathe.  I sneeze a lot.  The noise and the overwhelming number of people and cars gets to me - by midafternoon, I'm ready to call it a day and not talk to a single soul for the remainder of the evening.  The temperature is so hot and humid, I think it enters a realm where numbers have no meaning.  I imagine it's around 35-40C during the peak of the day, but really, after 25C, temperature has no meaning.  Hot is hot.  At 3AM this morning, it was warm enough to break a sweat.  And I see people walking around in business suits, socks, and jackets here!  Acclimization is a wonderful thing, and I certainly don't possess it. 

Unlike those of you who were baffled by my lack of shorts on this trip, I am glad for the pants, even though I swelter.  My skin would burn.  Even so, clothed in flip flops, pants, and a t-shirt, every iota of my skin is covered in sunscreen, and two days in, my feet look dirty they're so tanned.  That's with sunscreen, folks. 

Bangkok is hot.

My journey yesterday from the hotel into town was...eventful.  I took the shuttle from the hotel back to the airport (it seemed easiest) and at the behest of an australian gentleman I bumped into, I decided to take a taxi into town to find my hostel (which I had booked not an hour before online) ...after squirming out of a scam from the taxi driver (I made him use the meter), we headed off into traffic.  Actually, traffic is what more mundane people would call it.  Coming from Canada, the cars on the road here are not traffic.  They are chaos.  Five lane roads with six lanes of traffic, passing on the inside, outside, and ANYside of cars, motorbikes ignore the rules of the road entirely, and crosswalks are a quaint feature, which frankly, I have yet to see being used properly.  I don't like to jaywalk if there are any cars on the road, and I'm slightly terrified of regular traffic, let alone this - the only way to cross the road is to run weaving in and out of traffic, and hope you don't get hit.  It's...fun.  Yeah, we'll call it that.

Anyhow, the taxi driver then decided, since he was completely out of fuel, to let me sit in a 30 minute line-up to get gasoline, with constant reassurances that "I happy, you happy" ...and his description of traffic as "car, car, car, car, car" - I did make him shut the meter off for most of this, mind you, he sneakily turned it back on when I wasn't looking.  I wasn't about to argue for the sake of 10 baht.  That's like...1/3 of a dollar.  Then, our experience with 'traffic' ...I finally made it into my hostel.  He was very rude to me, because I paid him 240 baht instead of 241 (I didn't have a single baht - actually, are they pennies?  I don't even know how thai call their coins) ...though he originally told me he'd take me for 400 (a price which I simply refused.)

The hostel isn't bad - it has two nice terraces that I spent all of my time while I'm here, on.  A small man-made pond with goldfish of varying sizes, a little kitchen to heat up basic food items (let's face it; I haven't eaten much since I arrived) ...a rooftop garden with a few chairs.  The rooms are supposed to have AC, but last night sure didn't feel like it.  I can get 1.5L of water for 20 baht, which is the cheapest I've seen it so far, and that's nice.  I'm in a mixed dorm of 8 people, because I wanted to be cheap.  Who pays for accommodation these days, anyhow?  If it wasn't for the flooding, I'd be couchsurfing right now. 

Actually, speaking of - the city definitely looks like it just went through a flood, but with the exception of some low-lying areas near the airport, and a few roads, I haven't really seen anything.  Many of the shops have cement or sandbag barriers up that you have to walk over in order to get into the store. 

I'm learning that I don't actually like thai food, at least in the form of street vendor.  Most of it smells putrid, and involves meat and a stick, and I'll be damned if I know what the meat is.  The streets are hot, too - which compounds the smell.  The SOLE exception to this so far that I've tried is a little thing wrapped in a banana leaf, which looks quite gross, but I think is bean wrapped in rice, in either coconut, or banana, or something...it's sweet, and delicious.  I don't know precisely what it is, and I don't want to, but it's tasty, and I buy one every time I walk past the corner it's on. 

There are tons of fruits I've never seen before, and I've been trying them left, right, and centre.  Yesterday, I had an orange, a pale white pomegranate (I didn't know they came in other colours!) and a fresh pineapple.  Not, from the supermarket fresh, but FRESH.  Off the tree, fresh.  It was delicious.  Today, I bought a dragonfruit, a custard apple (it looks really weird...I hope it tastes good) and a mango that looks different than other mangoes I've had at home. 

I've also found cats (cat radar) and leave it to me to find Bangkok's organic store.  I may or may not have been in there a while. 

Due to general not-feeling-well-ness, I fell asleep at 7PM last night, and stayed asleep until 3 (when I woke up feeling really sick and couldn't fall back to sleep) ...so I've been up since 3AM.  I went on the rooftop and took some night photos for about an hour, then tried to sleep again and couldn't, and gave up at 6AM, ate breakfast with some swiss folks who gave me impeccable directions on how to get to stuff - by the way, little tiny bananas are super rich in flavour!  Way better than regular bananas.  By 7AM I was on the streets and wandering around. 

Tried to go to the Royal Palace (I took the Skytrain and the Metro) ...but the water ferries aren't running yet because of the flooding, so I just aimlessly wandered in the heat until my feet were blistered and my head was spinning.  I don't handle heat well. 

 (He followed me, and so when I turned around to take his photo, he sat down and posed)

To spar myself the worst of the smog, I went to Lumphini Park, which is this palm-treed, coconut sprouting paradise in the middle of metropolitan Bangkok.  But at 11 hectares, or whatever it is, it was nice to escape the worst of the noise and pollution.  And the craziest - it has GIANT LIZARDS.  One does not expect to nearly step on a 4 foot lizard when walking around a park.  Then again, one doesn't often walk around parks with coconut trees, either.  I took a few photos of them, but being so large, I was a bit wary - especially when one of them starting being all agressive at me.  It was kinda scary.  I thought they were komodo dragons, but it turns out I'm wrong.  Thanks to Google, they're Monitor Lizards, a slightly smaller, slightly less deadly relative to the komodo dragon.  Yep.  Monitor Lizards, people. 

Later on, I met an Englishman (I do this often, it seems) and spent an hour walking around with him until our paths diverged - I never even learned his name - and I went and saw the Golden Buddha.  3.5 tons of gold, in Buddha form!  I haggled for the first time too.  I bought a wooden/paper sun parasol, and I talked the woman down 20 baht!  I was so proud of me, until the realization hit that I probably could have gotten it for less.  I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I've always wanted one, so I imagine I'll keep it until Tim shows up (I forsee photo opportunities!) and then post it home.  I found some ginger tea, too.

I feel like I'm forgetting a million things, but things are just so overwhelming here that there's no way I'm going to remember to retell it all.  All I know is, if, or when I come back, I'm bringing a TON of money.  The shopping centres here are spectacular.  And Air-Conditioned.