Great Danes

I recently returned from a weeklong trip to Denmark, and Homunculus is here to say: them’s country has gots it going on. There is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.

To compare and contrast:

When you get off the plane in Bangkok (which, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, operates like a Swiss watch), you wend your way through the airport’s hallways before being dumped into an enormous pile of bemused chaos, also known as the passport control area. It is a shit show of Bangladeshian proportions. Think the DMV, minus the aid of deli-line numbers. For 10-15 minutes you veer uncertainly between serpentine masses, which may or may not be lines, before settling into a definite spot in a queue -- which may or may not be twice as slow as the adjacent one -- for the next 45 minutes.

In Copenhagen, by contrast, I got off the plane and walked twenty yards to a kiosk manned by two guys who looked like this:

God I miss Stefan Edberg.

The blond family in front of me was processed in about thirty seconds; I was done in ten. I had my bag ten minutes later, and three minutes after that I was on the subway for a short ride to the city center.

The rest of the trip went just as smoothly. Everything in Denmark runs on time, and everyone speaks flawless English. The streets and buildings are pristine. More people bike, it seems, than drive; I heard one car horn my entire week there.

It had been seven years since I'd visited Europe, and after three years of extensive travel in second- and third-world countries, I have to say, Denmark was a pleasure. The section on Scandinavia in the international chapter in America the Book sums it up nicely: “Scandinavia has blended cold, hard Teutonic efficiency with European social liberalism to create five of the cleanest nations on the planet. You can literally eat off the sidewalk in Copenhagen.” That's true. I did.

Not everyone there is blond, but, well, a lot of them are. Here are some pictures I took of blond people:

(And here is what these girls will look like in 20 years, if my trips to the bars in the touristy area were any indication:

)

Coincidentally, on the day I returned there were two major articles about Denmark and how much it kicks ass (what are the odds of that?). Thomas Friedman wrote his column about the Danes' ecological ingenuity, and this piece in the Washington Post explores the now-repeatedly-reproduced statistic citing the Danes as the happiest people on earth. Having seen it firsthand, I can corroborate everything in those stories. I would say that being there made me ashamed of my country, except that I was already ashamed of my country before I went. Then again, as my new Danish friend replied after I forwarded her the piece from the Post, at least we still have Paris Hilton. True that. We'll always have Paris.

A (now) open letter to "The World Leader in River Cruising"

Here is a message I sent today to Viking River Cruises®. In the pull-down menu, I categorized the missive as "Other":


Dear Viking River Cruises® -- "Exploring the World in Comfort"®,

Over the past eleven months, you have sent me 24 postcards, 19 full-size, full-color brochures, and, yesterday, an informational DVD extolling the sine qua non virtues and (year-round) limited-time-only savings of "the world’s leading river cruise line... by far." I don’t know what I did to deserve such treatment -- perhaps I raped a poodle in a previous life -- but I can assure you it had nothing to do with ever signing up for your mailing list.

I am thus writing to say: Please stop. First of all, I’m a grad student with a household income of approximately negative $25,000 a year; I cannot afford a Russian hooker in Far Rockaway, Queens, much less a Russian river cruise. Secondly, the 19^th full-size-full-color brochure was no more convincing than the 18^th. Besides wasting your time and money, you have, with the junk mail you’ve sent to me alone, laid waste to enough trees to (ironically enough) build a riverboat. (That you are based in Woodland Hills, CA only makes such ecological irresponsibility more egregious.)

In summary, you are the most annoying company in the world... by far. (The Men’s Wearhouse is a distant second.) I have already told everyone I know to never take a Viking River Cruise®. If you do not want me to start also telling people I don’t know, cease with the junk-mail carpet-bombing operation at once.

Much appreciation in advance,

Homunculus J. Reilly
"Customer" #1145086482

P.S. River cruises suck.

My Father's 20 Rules of Life *

1. Always be the second-fastest car on the road.

2. West Coast road and highway signage is superior to the rest of the country’s.

3. New Yorkers are bad drivers because they get their license later than most others, and it is always better to learn things when you’re young.

4. Never play a New Yorker who challenges you to a game of ping-pong.

5. Never play poker with someone who has more money than you and isn’t afraid to lose it.

6. When leaving the house, always have something with you to read.

7. The size of a hotel’s swimming pool is directly proportional to the luxuriousness of the hotel.

8. If you’re in an electronics store and need help, find the pear-shaped and/or Asian guy.

9. Dutch people are tall. Also, they are more like Americans than any other nationality (excluding, perhaps, Canadians).

10. Real estate prices aside, the San Francisco Bay Area is the greatest place to live; if you can afford it, there is no reason to live anywhere else.

(10a. But if you're not already here, please stay away -- traffic and supermarket lines are bad enough as it is.)

11. Eat your fiber. And start young. Also, organic is not a fad.

12. Every disease is at least partly contagious, even those that are considered “genetically programmed/predispositioned” and/or “environmentally triggered.”

13. Always, always carry it on if they let you.

14. Drugs and prostitution should be legal. Immigration should not be. Gasoline and cigarettes should be taxed through the roof and then the clouds. California should be two states. The highways should move, not the cars.

15. Always double-check the bill -- restaurant, credit card, whatever -- before paying it.

16. Doctors are bad businesspeople.

17. Republicans are bad people, period. If you vote Republican, it’s because you are either selfish, stupid, or both.

18. Unless you’re a police officer, a criminal, or a biathlete, there is no reason to own a gun.

19. The further east you go from California, the more people smoke: East-Coasters smoke more than West-Coasters, Europeans smoke more than Americans, and the Japanese smoke more than anybody.

20. It’s not a morning without a glass of orange juice.


* Caution: May not apply to life in the 21st century.

Converted Asiaphile

[Note: This was written in early August.]

Last week I got back from a really nice five-day trip to Hong Kong and Macau. In an unexpected way, the trip primed me for my imminent return to the States -- it turned out that in many ways Hong Kong was more like America than it was like Asia (or the parts of Asia I’ve been to, anyway). I was on the double-decker bus from the airport to the hotel, admiring the mostly empty three-lane highway and flawlessly programmed LED telling me exactly where I was and where I was going next (in both Chinese and English), when it occurred to me that it was my first time in a fully developed country since I’d left home ten months earlier. Everything in Hong Kong made sense; everything worked. It was nice walking on clean streets and maintenanced sidewalks. I liked that my street map matched the street signs. I liked that there were street signs. Those refreshing contrasts with Bangkok nearly made the trip on their own.

More than anything, though, the success of the trip reaffirmed my newfound affinity for travel in Southeast Asia. Before landing in Bangkok, I was never much interested in the region; it was far down the list of places I wanted to visit, much less stay. I certainly never thought I’d end up living here. I’d always been (and remain, to some extent) an avowed Europhile -- even now I find more romance in intimate cobblestone streets and 500-year-old piazzas than the supposed “exoticism” of strange-smelling Eastern fruits and packed Asian bazaars. But my various travels of the past year -- I’ve been to Cambodia, Laos, and all over Thailand, in addition to last week’s trip -- have converted me. Southeast Asia has a new fan.

For one thing -- actually, this is the biggest thing -- the region is so much cheaper than Europe. This advantage, I need not tell you, cannot be overstated, and it never gets old, no matter how rich (or poor) you are. If you’re a backpacker on a tight budget, you can travel comfortably on $15-20 a day. That can mean a two- or three-month vacation instead of the standard three or four weeks. If you have slightly more disposable income to work with, like I do, that means being able to afford pleasant sit-down dinners and hotels that would go for $100+ a night in Europe. It also allows for an occasional splurge or the uncommon joy of not paying attention to the prices on most menus. (I’ve lost count of the number of times my friends and I have enjoyed enormous, multi-dish feasts (beer included) without paying attention at all to the prices of the items, and come out at the end with a total bill of 500-600 baht ($13-15) for three or four people. “Ridiculous,” we always say, as we throw down the cash. It must be the way the super-rich live and eat in New York and London. Life, we’ve learned, is often remarkably easy -- ridiculously easy, one might say -- when money is no object.) If you’re relatively well off, you can live like royalty in Southeast Asia. My parents, who travel well but are by no means ostentatious, stayed in one of the finest hotels in all of Thailand (so fine, in fact, it had to call itself a “hideaway”) -- complete with private pool, 24-hour personal butler, and infinity-edge pool overlooking the ocean -- for the nightly cost of an upper-middle range Manhattan chain.

Most Southeast Asian countries are also easier and safer to navigate than other similarly cheap regions like South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Thailand’s roads are top notch, and from what I’ve heard, Vietnam’s and Malaysia’s are getting there. And in all my travels, I never once heard a story of someone getting attacked or mugged. Finally, there are the famously warm and laid-back people (or “locals,” as they’d be called if this were the second-rate guide book it’s rapidly beginning to sound like). “The Thais,” goes one saying, “are the nicest people money can buy,” and based on my own experiences and second-hand accounts, I feel comfortable applying the maxim to the rest of the region as well. There’s truth in the cynicism of the quip, but there’s a lot to be said for a smile, even one slightly tainted by the faint image of dollar (or baht) signs behind those smiling eyes. Because along with potential added income, those eyes glimpse other things when aimed at foreigners. Gone are the days when white tourists are exotic just for being white -- my parents still tell the story of the time they went to Japan in the early ‘70s, and the people/locals constantly approached them to marvel at and grasp my mom’s long blond hair -- but there’s definitely a curiosity there, a seeming amused interest in our lives and language. It’s a special treat, and one not imparted by fast-moving Europeans who cannot tell, or are too busy to notice, that you are different.

My trip last week was the last one I’ll be taking during my stint in Asia, which is fast coming to a close. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to travel internationally again, but it’s a good bet that my next trip will be in Southeast Asia. I’d recommend the same to anyone.

5 Things the Thais Fuckin' Love

The guidebooks tout Thailand as a land of paradoxes. Pick up a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and you can bet good money it will discredit unsavory generalizations and emphasize the complexities and nuances of Thai culture. But really, don’t they do that with every country? In any guidebook introduction, you can find something to the effect of: “It’s easy to believe the hype and buy into the many stereotypes surrounding [insert name of nationality] and their country, but in fact [insert name of country] is a study in contrasts, a nation too richly diverse for stereotypes and broad generalizations.”

That’s true, of course. And yes, Thailand has its share of paradoxes. (For example, the relative priggishness of the media -- sex and violence are edited out on TV; cigarettes are blurred out -- vis a vis the notorious red-light districts that the government and police so willingly turn a blind eye towards. Right outside the windows of hotel rooms whose TVs censor Nicole Kidman and Jude Law making love on HBO are prostitutes pestering farang men and go-go bars featuring teenaged girls shooting ping-pong balls out of their hoo-haws.) It follows that any fair analysis of Thailand (or any country) should disdain with broad generalizations (all generalizations are false...) and instead delve into the contrasts, complexities, nuances, and paradoxes of its richly diverse population.

But what fun is that? And the Thais are nothing if not fun. (How’s that for a broad generalization?) Besides, I’m not fair and I’m not an analyst -- I’m just a neophyte blogger and ex-pat with seven months’ worth of experiences and observations to share. And little is as revealing about a group of people as a few generalizations and stereotypes about what those people enjoy and value most. I thus present here a few broad, unnuanced, stereotypical generalizations about five things Thai people fuckin’ love, in ascending order of how much they fuckin’ love them.

They fuckin’ love...

5. Shitty Thai pop. Before I arrived, I expected the popular music scene in Bangkok to revolve around shitty American pop. It was a natural assumption to make. You hear so much in the news about how, as Western economic models and individual liberties expand into developing countries, so too does Western culture, especially its pop culture. “They may not like our policies,” Americans like to croon, “but they still love our music and movies.” Stories about Arab rappers and Rolling Stones’ concerts selling out in China dot the nightly news. It follows that I fully expected to be assaulted, in every club and bar in Bangkok, by Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, and other clones I am already too old and unhip to name.

Turns out Thailand has its own brand of shitty pop. In lieu of former American Idols and other similarly packaged glam performers, my ears and good taste have instead been assaulted almost daily by equally generic and uninspired Thai vocalists. Sure, I’ve heard enough Black-Eyed Peas over the past seven months to last me a lifetime -- I will henceforth and forever associate “My Humps” with Thai strip clubs -- but the majority of awful songs that play on any given night in the clubs are still by Thai artists. (I use the term “artists” loosely.)

This discovery was both pleasant and disconcerting. On the one hand, I found it heartening and charming that they don’t just eat what America feeds ‘em. There’s a lot of national pride in Thailand; it’s nice to see the populace -- a proverbial little guy on the world’s stage -- adopt something their own. On the other hand, well, the music sucks. Most songs are just recycled versions of the most generic, unoffensive fluff that plays on American soft rock radio, with Thai lyrics in place of English. I wish I could think of a better adjective, but “cheesy” suffices. (To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it is the cheesiest bunch of cheese that ever cheesed.) The Thais only went partway in creating their own musical identity; what they’ve actually done is take all the worst aspects of Western pop music and accentuated that crappiness. (To quote Bart Simpson, “It’s craptacular.”) And yet the Thais, man -- lemme tell you: they eat it up. They fuckin’ love it. They mouth the words in food courts and scream out in unison their favorite parts on the dance floor. All you can do is cover your ears and smile. As for me, well here’s something I never thought I’d say: one of the things I’m looking forward to about returning home is being blasted by Gwen Stefani in bars and having nothing but Coldplay on the radio all day long.

4. Pork. It’s what’s for dinner in Thailand. No need for ad campaigns about “the other white meat” here. In Thailand, chicken and pork stand on equal ground, above all other meats. Beef is scarce and relatively expensive. Lamb is all but impossible to come by (except in Lebanese restaurants and on Soi Middle East). Duck is only eaten in Chinese restaurants. Most of the meals served with steamed rice at the outdoor a la carte establishments are various combinations of chicken and pork (sliced, minced, shredded, sausaged) with vegetables. Half of McDonald’s “burgers” are made of pork (including the much-hyped “Samurai Pork Burger!”). A restaurant on Sukhumvit called O’Brians [sic] claims that one of its most popular dishes is Pork Cordon Bleu [sick]. I’ll take their word for it.

A few months ago I asked one of my students, a boy who had spent several years in California, where I could find a good burger in Bangkok. He told me that Sizzler actually served the best burger he’d ever had, in Bangkok or anywhere. It was big and thick and juicy and delicious, he said. “Sounds good,” I said. Then he casually added that it was also made of pork, not beef. “Oh,” I said, trying not to look disappointed. But of course I was: when I’m in the mood for a good burger, I want a real burger, not a “pork burger.” If it’s made of pork, it’s not a burger; it’s a piece of pork -- no matter how big, thick, juicy, and delicious it may be.

Pork, which is incongruously called moo in Thai (shouldn’t it be oink?), has clearly avoided the stigma it so cumbersomely carries in the States. For one thing, there aren’t too many Thai Jews around. For another, Thais, like most Asians, don’t seem to have the same hang-ups that Americans do about what animals their meats used to be when they were alive. To the Thais, once it’s been skinned, sliced, and cooked, it’s not a pig anymore; it’s just food. Incidentally, this is also the reason most Thais won’t think twice about shelling out 20 baht at a street stall for a bag of deep-fried crickets. (Mmm... insectilicious...)

Last week my friend Shawn and I ate lunch at one of the ubiquitous outdoor establishments, which serve noodle, soup, and rice dishes for 20-25 baht apiece. The décor is decidedly minimalist -- you eat in 95-degree heat, on flimsy plastic chairs and foldout metal tables, with toilet paper serving as napkins -- but the quality of the food, the price, and “only in Asia” atmosphere outweigh the drawbacks. Shawn, who is American, told me that he doesn’t eat pork, which struck me as a particularly unfortunate practice for someone living in Thailand. “Are you Jewish?” I asked him.

“Naw, man. I ain’t Jewish,” he said. “I just don’t dig on swine.”

“Why not?” I asked him. Shawn explained to me that pigs are filthy animals. According to him, they sleep and root in shit. “I don't wanna eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense to disregard its own feces,” he said.

“But sausages taste good,” I implored. “Bacon tastes good.”

“Sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.”

“How about dogs?” I pointed out that dogs eat their own feces.

“I don't eat dog either,” Shawn said.

“Yes, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?”

“I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they're definitely dirty. But a dog's got personality. And personality goes a long way.”

“So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he'd cease to be a filthy animal?”

“We'd have to be talkin' 'bout one motherfuckin' charmin' pig. It'd have to be the Cary Grant of pigs.”

Then we both laughed.

3. Sleep. This one kind of goes hand-in-hand with something Thai people don’t like: namely, work. I’ve had some disagreement on the exact extent of the phenomenon from some of my fellow ex-pats, but our basic impression of the hours of the Thai work day, based on unscientific random observational sampling (i.e., hanging out all over town instead of working ourselves), is that it starts around 10:00 and ends at 5:00, with a two-hour lunch from noon to 2:00. For those of us keeping track -- and I always keep track -- that’s five hours a day of work. I’m exaggerating a bit -- most office jobs here officially start at 9:00 and give one hour for lunch -- but here’s what I do know:

If you get on the sky train between 9:00 and 10:00, it’s packed. Prepare to know what five strangers just had for breakfast. On the few unpleasant occasions I’ve had to be somewhere by 9:00 a.m., however, the sky train has been nearly empty. I’ve also learned (the hard way, as these things are always learned) that if you get on the elevator in my building on the 28th floor (where I work) at noon, the elevator will stop approximately 26 times before getting to the bottom. (Each time it stops and the doors open, the people waiting inevitably just peer into the already-crammed elevator, giggle, and wait patiently for the next one.) If you wait just 15 or 20 minutes longer for lunch, until 12:15 or 12:20, it’s no problem. How everyone is already hungry after two hours of work, and three hours after breakfast, is beyond me. (Ostensibly it has something to do with something else the Thais fuckin’ love but which is not on this list: eating. They do it all the time, at all hours of the day and night.) And the lunch establishments are running full-tilt till 2:00 or 2:30. All of which leads me to conclude, based on my considerable powers of deduction (oh, what one learns as an SAT teacher...), that Thais work about five hours a day.

What do they do the rest of the time? Among other things (“other things” being eating and shopping), they sleep. Now, I like my sleep as much as the next guy -- okay, I like my sleep more than any guy -- but I generally limit mine to a nightly nine hours, plus two- to three-hour naps on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. The Thais, though -- they make me look like an amateur: they don’t even need a bed. At any given time in the afternoon, it seems like half the construction workers on the street are asleep. And when I say “on the street,” I mean it literally. You walk around and you see carpenters and painters just sprawled out, dead to the world, in the middle of sidewalks (sidewalks that, ironically, are in dire need of repair). They lie there, still as two-by-fours, unburdened by fear of soi dog, cockroach, rat, or death by stabbing by three-inch heel. Apparently, after the two-hour lunch comes the two-hour siesta.

Ditto for cabbies. Walk by a parked taxi and look inside. Chances are, the driver is asleep at the wheel, his seat tilted back. Same with a good fraction of the city’s bus passengers. It’s like scanning the coach section of an airplane in the middle of the night on a transcontinental flight, and amusing in the same way: heads leaning on shoulders, faces pointed to the sky, mouths agape. Except that these nappers are achieving their somnambulant acrobatics in broad daylight, in filthy, un-air-conditioned buses that are idling in noisy traffic. I gaze at them, bemused and amused. Then I go home and take a nap.

2. Malls. They say that while the rest of Thailand worships the Buddha, Bangkok worships the baht. And the city’s numerous shopping centers are Exhibit A in that claim. From night bazaars and endless rows of vendors crowding sidewalks and hawking knockoffs, to the mind-blowing Chatuchak weekend market (which I once heard is the largest outdoor market in all of Asia), Bangkok epitomizes the breakneck consumerism of 21st century Asia.

For my money, though (as it were), it’s the beautiful new malls, not the bazaars and street peddlers (which have, after all, been around for centuries), that most embody the “new Asia” you’ve heard so much about on NPR and CNN. If I had to take a visitor -- you, let’s say (to my all friends reading this: hint! hint!) -- to the one place that best captures Bangkok, I wouldn’t take you to the Grand Palace or the wats on the river; I’d take you to the Emporium. There you would see thousands of Bangkokians, content as clams, milling about, chowing down in the food courts, cell-phoning, SMSing, and spending, spending, spending -- for hours at a time and at all hours of the day. Try saying the same thing about your local mall (not counting December, which, incidentally, it might as well be in Bangkok the rest of the year -- picture your city’s biggest mall the day after Thanksgiving and you’ll have some sense of what the malls here are like every day of the year). Siam Paragon, a monstrous conglomeration of high-end name-brand shops, complete with the largest aquarium in Asia (they billed it, in the marketing blitz running up to the opening, as “The Glorious Phenomenon”), opened in December, after several years of construction. For point of comparison, it often takes that long to get a small street paved. Adjacent to Siam Paragon are two nearly identical -- and nearly identically named -- indoor malls, Siam Center and Siam Discovery Center; across from it, the much-needed outdoor mall, Siam Square.

As offensive as such egregious consumerism may be to traditionalist senses, the Thais’ love of their malls is completely understandable, and, to anyone who’s visited Bangkok, not really surprising. The easy lighting, the modern architecture, the cleanliness, the spaciousness, the air-conditioning -- the malls are just flat-out, all-around undeniably pleasant places to be, egregious consumerism be damned. They basically serve as Bangkok’s version of city parks: effectively public spaces where the locals can escape the noise, pollution, and weather (heat, humidity, rain, or all of the above) that pervade most other parts of the city. When my parents visited in February, to break up a long day of sight-seeing we took refuge from the 90-degree heat in a lovely mall food court. Several months ago, when a Thai man asked out a female co-worker of mine -- a 26-year-old female co-worker of mine -- he suggested the mall as the venue for their first date. (In response, she suggested someplace with fewer teenagers.)

To say I don’t like to shop would be a gross understatement, but I’ve enjoyed my mall time here. I probably hit up the local malls two to three times a week, usually just to people watch or grab a bite to eat; still, I’ve spent more time shopping (window and real) in my eight months here than in my entire life before this combined. Call it what you will¾the height of superficiality; the encroachment of Western values on ancient Eastern cultures; an anti-social and unproductive use of time. I call it living as the Thais do. When in Rome, head straight to the Gap.


And the number one thing Thais fuckin’ love...

1. The King. How much do Thais love their king? It’s difficult to overstate this one. Probably more than their malls, sleep, pork, and shitty Thai pop combined. Certainly more than any other country loves any single one of its countrymen or -women. Indeed, I could probably prove, using some sort of citizenry calculus, that the Thai king is in fact the most beloved human being on earth. A bold statement, to be sure, but one that can be supported by indisputable mathematical corroboration. To wit:

If you were to calculate an individual’s “belovedness” rating by taking the number of people who love that individual times the average amount of love harbored by said lovers, and subtract from that product the square of the total hate engendered by the individual (the square of the hate the better to penalize those who have done something hate-worthy) -- i.e.,

Belovedness Quotient = {(# of people who love Person X) x [(sum of individual “love quotients”) / (# of people who love Person X)]} – {(# of people who hate Person X) x [(sum of individual “hate quotients”) / (# of people who hate Person X)]}

-- then the king of Thailand would have to be the most loved man in the world, hands-down. There are 60 – 70 million people in Thailand, virtually all of whom adore the man and none of whom have even a single negative word to say about him. That’s a pretty high Belovedness Quotient right there. Try saying the same thing about [insert name of any country’s political leader or figurehead here]. See what I mean? Even Oprah or Tiger Woods don’t come close. Maybe Jesus. But He’s dead.

Come to think of it, the Jesus comparison is a pretty apt one. His Majesty the King is ubiquitous here. (Or at least his picture is. The king himself holes up most of the year in his various palaces scattered throughout the country.) Taxi drivers keep his portrait on their dashboards, just as the cabbies in Ethiopia (the most dominantly Christian place I’ve ever been) keep drawings of the Madonna and/or Jesus on their dashes. Most restaurants and small shops have the king’s portrait hanging on their walls. His likeness adorns school house walls and flags on major roads. One prominent office building sports the king on one side -- mural? billboard poster sheeting? frescoe? -- his 50-foot bespectacled phiz gazing benevolently down on Sukhumvit Road. (In most of these renderings, the king is decked out in royal or pseudo-military garb; in none of them is he smiling.)

Loving your king is even a fashion statement. Seemingly half the population sports bright yellow rubber bracelets that say, in both Thai and English, “LONG LIVE THE KING.” I now wear one too. Last week, for the 60th anniversary celebration of the king’s coronation -- this king, known as Rama IX, is the longest sitting monarch in the world -- almost everyone in the city wore yellow t-shirts for all four days of the long weekend, in honor of the “king’s color.” You haven’t witnessed loyalty until you’ve seen eight million Asians hurrying around town in various shades of yellow. Yet the strangest, most uniquely Thai demonstration of support for the king has to be what occurs before movies. After the trailers and before the feature presentation, everyone in the theater rises as one to “pay respect to His Majesty,” as the words on the screen instruct. An elaborately produced montage then commences, complete with (crappy) special effects and background orchestration (the king’s anthem, I’m told): there’s King Bhumipol in the 1960s, aiding impoverished Thai villagers; and here he is saving the environment; and that’s him shaking the hand of a sick child whose life he just saved. It’s one of those surreal “only in Thailand” peculiarities you can’t read about in Lonely Planet, and which infuses travel abroad with the charm and surprise it too often lacks.

Much of the love is a just a function of a genuine and unquestioned respect for the monarchy as a whole. (Take note, Britain.) It’s a federal crime, for instance, to badmouth the royal family. (What happens to anonymous bloggers who use the word “fuckin’” in a sentence that mentions the king can only be imagined. A century in Thai purgatory, perhaps?) And when I asked a Thai friend whether the movie theater thing would happen regardless of who was on the throne, he guessed that it probably would. (There’s no way to be sure, of course, since this king has reigned since well before any of my friends here were born. Probably since before there were movie theaters in Thailand, in fact.)

At the same time, there is undeniably a special affection and reverence for this king in particular. Despite his official position as a mere figurehead -- the most important member of what is essentially a symbolic monarchy -- he has apparently put his symbolic capital to good use over the years. Forgive my ignorance of the details -- I’ve read more about bar girls than contemporary Thai history -- but I believe the king stepped in during several occasions of political unrest, even quashing one bloody coup in the 1970s. I think he has also been quite active about bringing ecological awareness and education to Thailand. His deeds have earned him esteem in all circles; Bangkok’s urbane intellectuals and the uneducated villagers in the provinces alike -- no matter how much they know about him, all Thais admire him equally. During last week’s celebration, the following banner headlines ran across the front pages, in bold type and all caps: THE WORKING MONARCH, THE BELOVED KING, SIX AMAZING DECADES, KING BY EXAMPLE. And that was just one paper in two days. Editorializing? You bet. But is it compromising journalism if every single person reading the paper already believes it? (Do you agree or disagree? Write an essay of no less than 2,000 words explaining why. Be sure to draw on First Amendment Supreme Court decisions and allude to the rise of yellow journalism in the second half of the 20th century…)

In some respects, the deification of the king goes too far for my egalitarian tastes. The road closes and all traffic comes to a halt if the king’s third-cousin, twice-removed comes within a mile of a major road. They could probably increase the country’s GDP several percentage points just by letting the royal family sit in traffic like everyone else. A few weeks ago, as I walking home from work, I was pushed to the side of the sidewalk by a police officer and told to stand still. Confused, I looked around. The road was clear; the other pedestrians had stopped as well. A minute or two later, a small motorcade zipped by. Everyone continued on as if nothing had happened. Me, I was a tad miffed that my day had to come to a complete (if brief) halt so that someone else -- someone in less of a hurry than I was, I’m sure -- could enjoy one more privilege of the privileged life. Royal people are, after all, just people -- a fact the Thais seem to have either forgotten or cheerfully ignore.

Mostly, though, the Thais’ adulation for the king is refreshing. How many countries have someone whom they’re so proud of, much less a leader? Several months ago, when the prime minister of Thailand found himself entangled in a corruption scandal, the populace responded with a vengeance, demonstrating for weeks until he resigned. The king, meanwhile, remained where he’s always been: on the throne, a rock, more beloved than ever before. No other nation can say the same about its leader, symbolic, political, or otherwise. The British royal family has degenerated into a tabloid joke. Other countries’ symbolic monarchies are anonymous at best, scandalous at worst. In America, we’re left with our celebrities and sports stars to worship, and they inevitably let us down. Who can live up to such hype? No mortal, surely. But His Majesty the King Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, of the Kingdom of Thailand is no mere mortal, if his subjects’ feelings about him are any indication. For 60 years he’s been living up to the hype, serving his 60 million admirers with grace, stability, and altruism. Being someone the Thais fuckin’ -- really fuckin’ -- love.

The Big Easy

[Note: Most of this was written on Wed., March 1, 2006.]

I’m writing this first entry from the distilled comfort of a plush Starbucks chais, in the well air-conditioned, brightly lit Ploenchit shopping center on Soi 2 off Sukhumvit Road, in Bangkok, at 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. I don’t have work today. I woke up at noon (11:59, actually, which, in the same way that $9.99 sounds like a better deal than $10.00, seems less pathetic than 12:00), not because I stayed up late or needed to catch up on my sleep but because I could. I returned on Monday from four days of relaxation on Ko Samui. Tomorrow I work from 10:00 – 12:00, then have three days to recover before leaving for another island, Ko Pha Ngan, on Monday morning. I will spend five days there, two at a swish resort (at about $50 a night) and three amongst partying backpackers, topless Swedish girls, and beachside bungalows, before returning on Friday night so that I can teach a class on Saturday.

So goes life as an ex-pat in Thailand. For the last two months, this is how it’s been: four hours a week of work (and getting paid for the “minimum” 50 hours per month anyway); drinking on Tuesday nights; awaking whenever; four-day excursions to the beach, to Cambodia; afternoon naps and all-day international film festival movie binges. You can see why I haven’t had time to get around to this blog until now.

In Thai, Bangkok translates loosely as the “City of Angels.” After four months here, however, I can make a pretty strong case for assigning Bangkok the nickname of a different American city: It is, more than New Orleans ever was, the “Big Easy.” On first glance, or even first visit, Bangkok appears to operate with the same organic frenzy of many of the world’s major megalopolises. It’s a “crush of humanity” and “assault on the senses” (as the countless tourist guides and travelogues might describe it), with honking horns and clicking high heels, stifling fumes and charcoal-hot food stalls blocking the sidewalks, buildings (and building) for miles in all directions, and people everywhere, everywhere -- chattering, smoking, cell phoning, laughing, hawking -- all day and night long, every day of the year. The legendary traffic -- along with the heat and the hookers, one of the only features of the city I heard much about before arriving (“Awful traffic,” my grandmother and parents’ friends would tell me, shaking their heads as if discussing a friend’s nephew who is in rehab) -- is, alone, enough to grant Bangkok “chaotic urban” status. (On their tour here a few weeks ago, my parents were informed that Bangkok has the third-worst traffic in the world, which, for anyone who has spent even one day here, is a surprising piece of trivia only because of the word third. First and second on the list, in case you were wondering -- and of course you were -- are Mexico City and Cairo.)

Upon closer inspection, however -- inspection, it should be repeated, that is being carried out by someone who works half as much as he did back home and still earns more per hour than many doctors here -- Bangkok offers, more than anything else, a cush respite from the stresses of life in the West. The farang flock here in droves, from every Western corner of the world -- America, Britain, Germany, Australia -- lured and then kept here by the warm weather, cheap goods, amazing food, and girls who are easy in every sense of the word -- easy on the eyes, easy with a smile, easy to amuse, easy to impress, and, well, just plain easy. (Why be coy? The girls themselves certainly aren’t.) A friend of mine here told me that there are about a million ex-pats in Thailand. Three-quarters of them must be in Bangkok. 750,000 ex-patriots in a city of about 7-8 million -- that’s one of every ten people. On Sukhumvit Road, where I live, it’s probably one in five.

It’s easy to see why. The Thais are friendly, welcoming, open-minded, and quick with smiles as warm as the beaches in the South. The food deserves its reputation -- it’s fragrant, fresh, healthy, spiced to perfection with an array of local herbs. As for the climate, yes, it’s too hot here, but constant sweating is still preferable to most (albeit not me) than winter in Berlin or Glasgow or New York. (I haven’t donned a sweatshirt since I got off the plane, five months ago.) But any discussion of the easiness of ex-pat existence here must begin, surely, with the lifestyle a Western salary in a developing country affords us. For all the talk of the inflation that has occurred here over the last 15-20 years, most things are still absurdly and irresistibly cheap. You can get a delicious, nutritious meal on the street for 25-30 baht -- that’s about 75 cents -- and a beer in a bar for a little more than a dollar. A perfectly good t-shirt or pair of boxers will run you about two dollars at a market, depending on your bargaining skills. Pirated CDs and DVDs go for $2.50 apiece; a movie in a lovely Cineplex theater, $2.00. It’s the one thing in Bangkok that never gets old. And while it’s true that many ex-pats aren’t incommensurately wealthy, even my farang friends who earn Thai salaries seem to coast by rather comfortably. Just go to any Starbucks or hotel bakery, where prices are comparable to what they are in the States: most of the clientele is white. Generally speaking, the only people in Bangkok who can routinely afford Venti lattes, rock concerts, and Italian dinners are tourists and ex-pats.

And then, of course, there are the women. Famous and infamous both, Thai women mostly deserve the reputation that now fully precedes them. They’re not all gorgeous. That’s a myth. (One that, in retrospect, I’m not sure why I believed before I came. I had this image of a land of genetically perfect beauty queens, which, of course, doesn’t exist anywhere. Except Sweden.) But they are all thin, which by itself separates them from half of all American women (who are also, it’s worth (chauvinistically) adding, automatically eliminated from beauty-queen-status contention by this fact alone). Thai girls also all have soft flowing hair, beautiful complexions, trendy tight-fitting clothes, and light-up-your-hour smiles made even more winning by flawless teeth. (Perfect genetics or great dental plans? I haven’t asked.) Most relevantly, Thai girls are more approachable and then more easily charmed than their fuller-of-themselves and fuller-bodied Western counterparts.

All of which accounts for the very noticeable prevalence of white-guy-Thai-girl couples in Bangkok. Walking down Sukhumvit Road and its sois, it seems as if every other farang male is accompanied by a devoted (and generally much younger) Thai female holding his hand. The men are invariably overweight, bald, and sporting European soccer club jerseys. The women are skinny and fresh-faced, if not outright beautiful. Most of these couples are the ephemeral sort -- sex tourists or single-minded ex-pats (a.k.a. “sexpats”) and the bar girls they picked up the night or the week or the month before. I, for one, find the phenomenon endlessly fascinating. You watch the scene and the questions inevitably flood in. She barely speaks a word of English. Apart from the intermittent romps in room 2802, could he possibly be enjoying this? Or, That is one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen outside Arkansas. Could she possibly be enjoying this? (Incidentally, the answers to these two questions are, respectively: intermittent beats the hell out of never; and: does a McDonald’s counter girl like serving fries?) (Actually, in all seriousness, it appears -- emphasis on appears -- that the women really don’t mind. They flirt, giggle, and sound out complete English sentences with egalitarian élan and charm -- that is to say, regardless of the age, infirmity, or unattractiveness of their men of the moment.)

The phenomenon isn’t limited just to bar girls and their concupiscent clients. I’ve lost count of the number of perfectly respectable middle-aged men I’ve met -- in short, guys who wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be described as sex-pats -- who visited Thailand, fell in love, and ended up staying. I’ve also met guys who aren’t so much falling in love with limitedly intelligible young maidens as they are actively seeking it. I even met one who admitted it. His name was Danny. We were in the same TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) training course together. Half the class was there, ostensibly, because they had landed in Bangkok, run out of money, and now needed a way to earn some back. I think they had been pulled straight off Khao San Road by the company running the course. (“Hey you! Yeah, you with the tattoos and bead necklaces. You look English-speaking and shoeless. Wanna teach English to hot, young, impressionable, plaid-skirted Thai girls? The hiring criterion is that you speak English. …”) One Thai woman who ultimately got her certificate barely spoke English herself. I was there for the certification, the only way I could obtain my work permit. Danny, he told me, was there to meet chicks. More precisely, he was there to get his certificate so that he could teach English and meet chicks that way. But not the kind found on Cowboy or Soi Zero. He said he wanted to meet the respectable kind, and I completely believed him.

Danny was a software engineer from the Northwest who spent half the year as a private tech consultant and the other half in Thailand, as an aspiring ESL teacher and wife-hunter. He was in his early forties, moderately overweight, mildly intelligent, and personable in that slightly awkward way that makes you wish he wasn’t as outgoing as he was. He also had an awful sense of humor -- cheesy and unapologetic in its sheer dorkiness. Awful. During breaks, I would sit in the lobby and read. Danny would wander from classmate to classmate, looking for a victim more patient than the last to chat up or crack a joke to. Usually, towards the end of his wanderings he would amble up to me and ask things like, “So, you like to read?” Yes, I would answer. “I love to read too,” he would continue. “I read everything I can get my hands on.” Uh-huh, I would respond, nodding politely, and wonder, but not really, why such an avid reader spent all his free time in a constant quest for insipid small talk.

But I’m just being a dick. Basically Danny was one of those perfectly nice, generally harmless, transparently happy people you hope to God never sits next to you on an airplane. During one lunch, I found myself in the same cafeteria as Danny. He asked if he could join me, and I said yes because I couldn’t say no. We exchanged the standard one-step-beyond-introductory questions -- What do you think of the course so far? What was your life like back home? -- before inevitably arriving at the subject of how we each ended up on the other side of the world. I asked Danny why, if he had a good job back home and few prospects here, he chose to spend half of every year in Thailand. “Well, to be honest,” he responded, “I’m sort of looking for a wife.”
I said something like “I see,” or “Oh yeah?” or maybe I just raised an eyebrow and kept chewing.

“I don’t know. I don’t really like American women,” he continued. “I’m a little bit shy and they don’t seem to like me. They’re not very nice to me. I find Asian women more approachable, less snobby.”

More like less choosy, is what I was thinking. But in fact I found Danny’s childlike candor charming. His goal, along with the supporting rationale, was the same as that of so many other guys who also preferred Asian girls (or even Asian-American girls, back home). The only difference was that Danny was willing, or ingenuous enough, to admit it.

To me Danny epitomizes the Bangkok ex-pat ethos, if not the Bangkok ex-pat himself; it’s a subnation of men and women (mostly men) who stay here because -- quite simply, and to discard with euphemism -- they can’t hack it anywhere else. Can’t afford that downtown high-rise apartment you’ve always wanted? Move to Bangkok. Only wanna work twenty hours a week? Try Bangkok. American women don’t like you? Come to Thailand! And if you can’t earn your way into the upper decile or find a beautiful girl who likes you in Thailand, I’m here to tell you, buddy: it ain’t happening anywhere else either. It’d be wise to take heed the inverse of Sinatra’s famous apothegm about New York: if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. It’s a phenomenon my friends and I have dubbed the “Bangkok Trap,” and the result is a city with the biggest ex-pat population in Asia, many of whom never plan to return home. In the end, Bangkok ruins you not as New York does, with its unwinnable rat race, but rather with its accommodating languor and tantalizing combination of first-world amenities at third-world prices. It chews you up this way and then spits you out, returning you home spoiled and lazy and unfit for Western life.

Two of my fellow teachers, one of whom is approaching middle age and the other of whom is already there, are perfectly content to spin the proverbial hamster wheel as long as that wheel is here. When they arrived, they had planned to stay a few months. It’s five years later now, and here they still are, teaching test prep, chasing Thai girls, smoking weed and hitting the bars on weeknights, living the dream. Call it the Un-American Dream. Another colleague of mine, a young woman earning a salary that would barely keep her afloat in any major American city but which made her rich here, could hardly bring herself to leave despite a job that had gone sour and a group of friends that had turned on her. (That’s a story for another day’s blog.) She told me that she still considered the States her true home, but that it was hard to give up the lifestyle her salary allowed her here. She finally returned home to Chicago four months ago. Rumor has it she now plans to return. The Bangkok Trap strikes again.

If I sound a tad judgmental in my assessment of the easy life, that’s because I am. I can’t help it. It’s the neurotic Jew and Protestant work ethic in me, combining individualistic forces and rearing their collective ugly head. More to the point, it’s the American in me that I can’t seem to (or perhaps don’t want to?) shake -- that entrenched and constant desire to always be both on the move and moving forward. Ultimately it will be my ability to reconcile these two competing ideologies -- not so much East vs. West or Zen vs. Judeo-Christian as Type-A-striver vs. Type-B-backpacker-slash-beach-bum -- that will largely determine how happy I am here and how well I adjust when I get home. Should I sign on for extra hours at work, some curriculum development, which would bolster my resume, or should I spend those hours napping and reading my book out by the pool? Should I go to the beach, or should I take a more “cultural” trip, one that will fascinate and edify and make me a more interesting person, a more dangerous writer? How many more structureless days before the torpor that has overrun me like a virus becomes a character trait rather than a temporary side effect of my environment? Will I bring it home with me? Will I be spoiled, lazy, and unfit for American life, to be judged unfairly by others like me? Would I be content casting aside my Type-A-striver values, buying up some property on Ko Samui, and living out the remainder of my days in a breezy beachside bungalow, as that Vietnam vet we met last month did?

No. No was the simple conclusion I reached during my third consecutive day of Type-B doing-nothingness on the beach in January. I was enjoying my book and the thrice-a-day naps, but I needed more. More action, more conflict, more direction. More “on the move” and forward movement. The American in me craves goals and achievement -- concrete, striven-for destinations to go along with the journey. For better or worse, I need to have something to show for my time. Witness this essay, composed at the expense of time that could have been spent exploring Bangkok’s canals or talking to locals.

In December, a friend and I were lounging out by the pool at our gym. It was a sunny, breezy day -- clear-skied, about 85 degrees. And it was 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. We were both done with work for the day, and neither of us had to go back in until the following evening. I was reading The New Yorker; he was about to take a nap. “This is the life, isn’t it?” he said.

“Definitely,” I agreed. But now, as I’ve said, I’m not so sure. Yes, I worry about the consequences of so many lazy Tuesdays. On the other hand, they certainly have their appeal, don’t they? I wouldn’t mind falling into the trap for a while, as long as I had a way out.

It may not be the life, but it’s certainly an easy one.