Category: General

When they think of the Pacific Theater in WW II, most Americans picture vast stretches of blue ocean, criss-crossed with aircraft carriers and kamikazes, speckled with the occasional jungle bloodbath on tiny islands like Guadalcanal or Saipan.

But Japanese ambitions went west as well as east. On December 8, 1941, as American sailors were still battling the flames at Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Thailand. Three days later, Burma. While America was still reeling, the Japanese forces were consolidating their grip on southeast Asia and preparing to attack into India.

This left them with the logistical problem of supplying and defending these relatively remote places, particularly as naval setbacks started to render oceanic lines of supply vulnerable.

In June of 1942, the Empire began an ambitious project to connect Bangkok to Rangoon by rail, linking two existing supply networks.

In slightly less than a year, the railway was complete. It was an astounding project in almost every respect–the number of miles, the primitive conditions, lack of tools, and local environmental factors presented unheralded engineering challenges. The terrain was no picnic, either. More than 600 bridges had to be built to cross rivers and chasms along the way.

One of those bridges was to become famous.

Pierre Boulle was a Free French fighter turned author after the war, and he had a story to tell about a maniacal English colonel forced to build a railroad bridge by his Japanese captors.

English and Australian forces had been captured in large numbers in the fall of Singapore. Many of them had later been forced to work on the Burma Railway, and one of those 600 bridges, Boulle thought, would make a plausible setting for his story, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

The novel is a work of fiction and Boulle is sometimes held to too high a standard for historical accuracy in telling a tale that was always more about personality than history. But Boulle’s experience as a POW was largely spent in a Hanoi jail cell, which gave him a fine appreciation for the brutality of the Japanese and the dynamics between captor and prisoner, but little engineering practice.

But by consulting a map he could see that the Burma Railroad largely followed the route of Khwae Noi River. Thai spelling being what it is, this ended up being Kwai (although, pronounced as English would seem to dictate, that actually means “water buffalo” instead of “tributary”) and Boulle assumed that the bridge he was modeling the construction of –Bridge 277–crossed it.

But in fact that particular bridge crossed a river called the Mae Klong.

After the success of the book and the film, the Thais realized they had a tourist bonanza on their hands, but the name of the river was inconvenient for promotional purposes. With a certain Asian practicality, then, they simply renamed the Mae Klong “Khwae Yai” which means “Big Tributary” and sounds close enough to “Kwai” for farang purposes.

The construction of Bridge 277 hadn’t been intended for the purpose of attracting tourists, however. In fact, more than 100 of the Japanese military officials involved in the Burma Railroad project probably wished that it would have remained unheard of, since they were prosecuted for war crimes committed during its construction. Thirty-two were sentenced to death for acts far more horrific than any Boulle’s detailed.

The track of the road was littered with corpses when it was finished. More than 110,000, most of them impressed Asian workers, perished during the year-long project.

The lion’s share of the attention, and the major draw for Westerners coming to the town, however, are the POW victims. Twelve thousand Allied prisoners of war perished along the line. Nearly seven thousand of them lay buried in the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.

The cemetery is right along the main street in Kanchanaburi (another 1,693 rest in a smaller cemetery on the outskirts of town), unmissable.

A walk among the gravestones tells the tale of an army that all but evaporated after early defeats. Headstones reveal 30 year old privates and corporals, long-service men enlisted in the regular army during the calm interwar years when promotions came slowly, if at all. Captured after their first battles (ignominiously lost, in many cases, against Japanese forces only a third of their strength), many of those old men had almost no chance at surviving a long war in Japanese custody.

There is little rhyme or reason to the brutal deaths they suffered at the hands of the jungle and their captors, but one pattern emerges as you wander the grassy graves. There are improbable clusters of headstones all dated from June of 1943, approximately halfway through the project.

June is the rainy season here, and Japanese engineers, under time pressure, refused to slow construction work to allow for the realities of the jungle. The surging water table affected already poor sanitation in the camps, and a cholera epidemic quickly broke out up and down the line. In one camp alone, there were 219 deaths from 315 cholera cases in a one-month period.

Unlike the austere, dramatic rows of graves in American military cemeteries, the graves at Kanchanaburi are low and tucked close together and colorfully decorated with lovingly maintained flowers. A few understated plaques explain the conditions and circumstances of the line. Tourists walk quietly in the warm, humid air. A few leave flowers and notes: still paying respects to fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who died there.

The scene at the bridge itself is far more raucous.

For some reason, perhaps conditioned by the scenery of the movie and the harsh reputation of the railway’s construction, I had expected the bridge site to be outside of town, in heavily forested, mountainous terrain. But instead, you could see it right from our hotel. The Japanese engineers were no dummies–the crossing site is in the flatlands, easily accessed from both sides.

Where there are tourists in Thailand, there will be street vendors, and the town-side of the bridge is more like a street fair than a war memorial. Monica bought some fries to tide her over until dinner.

Although the bridge is still in use, there are no restrictions on wandering across it, and everyone does. In a concession to safety, several platforms are built off either side for frightened tourists to rush onto when a train appears.

Monica and I started across near dusk. In real life, no ad hoc Allied commando squad attacked the span, but American bombers took out two sections from the air in 1945. The rounded girders are the originals, while the straight segments are replacement sections installed after the war.

Before we had got even a third of the way across, a train showed up.

The deficiency in the safety arrangements became quickly apparent as the platforms filled up rapidly and we were left with nowhere to go.

The trains move slow and honk like they are heralding the apocalypse but there is no outrunning them. Attendants wave flags and let you know it’s coming, but you are pretty much left to your own devices to figure out what to do when there is nowhere safe to go.

Since neither Monica nor I are particularly hefty people, we opted to hug the rail and hope for the best.

There’s about a two foot gap between the rail and the side of the train, it turns out, but it feels more like six inches when the engine comes at you. Mindful of random gear sticking off the side, I kept my eyes low and focused on what was coming, but Monica, in my lee, as it were, was free to interact with the passengers who were leaning out the windows right over our heads.

She waved and held up her french fries. A man leaning out to take some pictures reached down and grabbed one for the road.

As the last car came alongside, I noticed something dripping from the bottom.

Leaking hydraulics? I wondered.

But as it came closer, it became clear the the liquid was coming out by design, not accident, and it certainly was not hydraulic fluid. One big tube and one little tube coming out of the bottom of the train were dribbling, in varying quantities, onto the bridge deck, and as they passed I felt it splattering on my legs and shoes.

“What was that?” Monica asked as it got her, too. “Wait… gross!”

Apparently someone had elected to use the facilities on board while everyone else was out gawking at the scenery.

“Yep,” I said. “Exactly. Let’s walk on the other side of the tracks, shall we?”

I felt like I took the whole splattering remarkably in stride–after all, poop splattering is hardly novel to someone who regularly works on marine sanitation systems–but something in my tone must have indicated otherwise to Monica. She stepped across the tracks then stopped, turned, gave me a look that said Stupid farang, what did you expect? and said, “It’s Asia!”

It is, indeed, Asia.

I really enjoy Bangkok, but I want to see a little more of the country while I am here. This past weekend, I took care of a little bit of that with a road trip to Kanchanaburi, about three hours west of Bangkok.

Although the name itself isn’t familiar to most people outside the country, the place it is associated with is known worldwide: it is the site of the Bridge on the River Kwai, made famous through Pierre Boulle’s book and later the David Lean Movie starring Alec Guinness and William Holden.

Also nearby is the gorgeous Erawan National Park, a forested, hilly area with a gorgeous waterfall complex, numerous trails, and limestone caves.

I’ll cover both of the destinations in later posts but the process of getting there and back gave me a long, rolling look at the Thai countryside and smaller towns that I hadn’t experienced before, not to mention the Mad Max carnival ride that is the Thai road system.

Kanchanaburi is too close to fly to, really, and the train takes all day to get there so I had planned to taken one of the many dedicated tourist passenger vans that run between there and Bangkok before Monica realized that she had a three-day weekend coming up (the Buddhist holiday of Magha Puja) and could come along.

It turns out it’s probably best that I didn’t; as we were driving past one of the vans out on the road, she mentioned conversationally that they were unregulated death traps and that a major crash last month had the country up in arms about them.

When I sat down to write this post, I decided to look up news about the crash she was talking about and it turns out to be pretty much impossible: there are so many stories about fatal van crashes it’s hard to pick out any single one that seems particularly more horrific than the rest. Here’s one example, though.

Anyway, I have to admit I wasn’t feeling that much more secure going in Monica’s little Toyota Avanza. She’d been hit by a motorcycle the night before. No one was hurt and the damage to her car was mostly cosmetic but, she admitted, it might have been her fault.

I couldn’t see how fault could possibly be established in the chaos of Bangkok traffic, but I hoped that outside the city might be a little more sedate.

First we had to get outside the city, though. The first hour or so was mostly spent in stop and go Bangkok traffic.

It cleared so gradually I couldn’t tell exactly when it happened. Like American cities, Bangkok sort of just thins out at the edges, suburbs becoming indistinguishable from small towns blending into farmland becoming unpopulated scrubland.

I’d post pictures, but at the speeds we were traveling, it was really all just a blur.

As the road opened up, so did the throttle. We seemed to go about 75 mph as long as traffic allowed, regardless of the surroundings: small town main street or open road, there was no difference. I kept looking around for speed limit signs and kept track of how many I saw on the entire 400 kilometer trip.

Speed Limit Signs: 6
Drivers Paying Attention To Them: 0

Many of the roads are physically divided, which is all that prevents even more astounding road fatality rates. The lanes are all too narrow by American standards, but that’s all right since no one pays any attention to lane markers anyway.

There’s no such thing as following distance. Everyone is about three feet off the bumper of the vehicle ahead of them, regardless of speed.

Drivers seem to take their mind off this stressful state of affairs by spending a lot of time talking on the phone or texting as they drive.

I had an enormous number of questions I thought of to ask as we made our way out into the countryside but I sat as quietly as possible so as to avoid taking even the slenderest portion of Monica’s attention off the road. She apologized several times for various near misses, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. It’s just the culture.

The Lonely Planet guidebook I brought with me explains all this as an outgrowth of the Buddhist conception of predestiny. Conventional aspects of road safety are all but irrelevant in the face of your karmic debt load. If your number is up, it’s up.

This is a world away from the defensive driving techniques taught in the U.S. What it most reminds me of, in fact, are some of the tactical driving techniques that police are taught. Aggressively establishing position, last-minute braking, rapid but controlled swerving… it’s the only way there aren’t constant pile-ups here.

Well, there are constant pile-ups here, actually. But it’s astonishing that there aren’t more. Their techniques work, as long as everyone is on the ball, just like on a racetrack. It’s not so much that it’s all fantastically reckless as that there is simply no margin for misunderstanding or error.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this makes Thai drivers excellent signalers. You can’t count on the guy next to you to let you in, so you had better let him know you are coming and brazen it out. And you’d better be flashing your brake lights or tapping your horn if you don’t want to eat the grill of the guy behind you when you’re slowing down. I have only heard a handful of honks made in anger–mostly it’s just light blips, a “hey, I don’t think you see me, but I’m coming through that gap at 80 miles an hour, so back off!”

It takes a great deal of energy as the driver but as a passenger it’s just plain nerve-wracking.

I was relieved when we stopped for lunch about 3/4 of the way there.

You’ll never starve in Thailand. There are restaurants every 15 feet or so along any given stretch of Thai roadway, few with any apparent signage or clear differentiation from one another. Thai cuisine has a solid reputation among travelers–“the food” was consistently one of the top reasons I heard for visiting when I was talking to people in the States about it–but I was a little curious how the locals went about choosing the best places. Was it just whatever was closest, or was there some signal I was missing?

I asked Monica about it when we had come to a safe and complete halt.

“I’m starving,” she said by way of explanation.

So, whatever was closest.

The place she picked was, like the rest, just an open-sided hut with a few tables scattered around. There are no menus–you just wander over to the pots and point at what looks good.

None of the pots were being kept heated and so none of them looked particularly good to me but I picked out a couple of stew-like pork dishes with rice and we sat down to eat looking out over a muddy pond and open fields.

The dishes seemed to consist mostly of highly spiced bones and gristle and I pretty much just stuck with the rice. Monica’s choice didn’t seem much better (it’s worth noting at this point that Thais typically eat family style; whatever is ordered is considered community property, so you either pick together or share what you chose).

As we left, we passed the proprietor chopping up beef on a bloody, fly-covered chunk of wood.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great choice,” Monica said.

Back on the road, I enjoyed the unusual variety of vehicles that we were sweeping past at high rates of speed.

Like much of Asia, Thai truck drivers are given to decorating their rigs in bright and kitschy color schemes, often with glittery bits glued on for emphasis. I don’t know the purpose of this, if not simple pride of ownership, but a positive side effect is that it increases visibility.

Some bus companies take it to a whole new extreme though.

Not only are the colorful murals eye-catching, but there are all manner of loudspeakers and lights, flashing like fire engines and blasting rock music out the sides at all hours. And, for whatever reason (perhaps because his rotund physique bears passing resemblance to that of certain Buddha figures?) most are adorned with small, inflatable Michelin Man figures. This photo is a rather sedate example. One truck we passed had so many of them tied across the front that the driver could barely see out the windshield.

Apparently these are simply regular old charter buses–I thought the anime influence might mean they catered primarily to Japanese tour groups but Monica shook her head.

“Japanese,” she said, “too conservative.”

I wondered, then, what they must make of the local driving conditions?

But we arrived intact–and, to alleviate any concerns at home, made it back to Bangkok in one piece afterward as well.

It’s taken me a little while to get settled in here, but I’m pretty comfortable now.

I got a condo in the On Nut area off AirBnB for the first month of my stay. I’d read that there are much better deals to be had by just looking around on the ground once you get here and from what I can see that is true–signs advertising sublets in this same building that I see on the street are a hundred dollars or more cheaper per month.

But I was just as happy to have the arrangements all worked out before I got here, since I didn’t want to try negotiating all of that for the first time while jet-lagged and confused, and the place is still very inexpensive by American standards.

It’s probably also small, but, then, I’m used to living on a boat. So the little studio seems palatial by my standards.

It’s close to a BTS stop (the Bangkok sky-train line) and several shopping centers. Although the BTS station is in easy walking distance, there’s a regular bus that runs from the condo to the station… an understandable amenity when you get sweat-soaked from walking a block. And a little golf-cart shuttle goes from my condo building over across the canal to another building closer to shopping.

I say “close to shopping” but really there is shopping everywhere. There’s a mall right across the street, new and modern, with one of the ubiquitous 7/11s in it and a variety of restaurants, banks, and other services. And tucked into nooks and crannies where you would never expect them are little stalls, shops, and restaurants.

There are several construction sites nearby (more condos going up, and a new school), but tucked in next to them is a really neat little open-air restaurant that I never realized was there until yesterday. You can see it from my window once you know where to look. But it’s just another random collection of tarps, shanty-structures, and footpaths unless you happen to know what it really is.

I’ve gotten used to juggling the air conditioning to keep the place tolerable without wasting electricity, and acclimated enough that I actually just leave it off except during the hottest parts of the day or while I’m trying to sleep. There’s a nice breeze at this level on most days. I still haven’t gotten used to the view, which is (if one ignores the busy construction site in the foreground) terrific.

Morning, before the heat settles in like a steaming, wet blanket, is the only sensible time to go outside and do things, but the Thais don’t seem to see it that way–very little is open before 10 o’clock (except, of course, the ubiquitous 24/7 7-11s). So I get up, have some breakfast, and write for a while before taking shower #1 of the day.

Although Thailand is a well-known producer of some excellent coffee beans, it’s strangely difficult to find decent coffee here–Nescafe seems to be the gold standard. On the other hand, they, by default, dump a ton of sugar and creamer into anything you order, so it’s pretty much to my taste anyway.

Breakfast varies. This morning it is “Vanilla Cereal” which is basically oatmeal with rice in it. Thai food is cheap but portion sizes are small–two sachets of the stuff is about half what I would normally eat. You would think I would be losing weight, but although I’m certainly eating less and my appetite is a lot lower than normal, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I chose this condo in part because it has a gym and pool. So most days I wander down to take advantage of that, incentivized because the gym looks out on the pool, which is often populated by ladies with very skimpy bikinis on even in the middle of the day.

The TV only gets channels over the air, which are all Thai, but some of them have SAP programming in English (usually the news) that I watch sometimes. It also has a USB plugin, though, so I can watch movies or shows downloaded from my computer.

Staying hydrated is a challenge and I have to force myself to be drinking throughout the day. Municipal water isn’t safe to drink so you have to buy bottled water, which gets old after a while. Fortunately, there are a lot of excellent fruit juices to be had, many of which I cannot identify, but they are all so heavily sugared that the actual fruit content is probably a very small percentage of the whole.

The view from the condo is good, although humid mornings sometimes lead to a dense smog crowding out the buildings and hanging low over the nearby canal. I check the air quality website before opening the windows on days like those.

Going out to see some of the tourist sites keeps me from getting into too much of a rut, but it’s really easy to just sink into neighborhood life here. The amenities are equal to anything available in the States and often less expensive. I could live a fairly complete life in about a three-block radius.

I have finally been able to identify differences between neighborhoods, but there is still little of the specialization that you find at home. There are shops and street stalls selling every conceivable thing almost everywhere you turn, anywhere you go here. There may be differences between the alley to the west and the alley to the east as far as the context and flavor of what is available, but it’s indiscernible to my Western eyes. And the same is true across the breadth of the city. I went to a large market on the other side of the Chao Praya the other day… pretty much the same as all the large markets over here, if a little more rustic and less overrun with tourists.

I haven’t even been here a month yet but it’s easy to see how people come here and stay forever. The culture is friendly and accommodating, life is inexpensive (in all the senses of that term), and things are just generally comfortable. I assume life is different below the poverty line, and many people clearly are, but if there is foment on that account, it is not obvious to an outsider. There is much about the place that remains mysterious, but I don’t get up in the morning to find myself surprised by any cultural oddities or circumstances. It is, however, fascinating, and perhaps endlessly so.

 

I pulled my most bluntly obvious “stupid farang trick” so far the other night.

I try to plan my days a little bit, maybe a bit more than at home, since I’m alone here and otherwise it would be easy to just sit around working all the time. Today was a workout day, which usually means I will stick around the condo for most of the day, since going out is its own sort of workout and I don’t need two-a-days.

But I decided I would go out to eat dinner, at least, since I’m struggling a little with menu planning on my own and meals are getting slightly repetitive. There’s a nice, smallish, but very modern mall across the street with a lot of restaurants and a 7/11. I hadn’t tried any of the restaurants yet and I needed some more juice, so it seemed like a good close destination.

After wandering around looking at menus, though, nothing really jumped out at me. So I decided to wander across the bridge toward On Nut and make my first foray into exotic Thai street foods, then swing by the Big C on the way home to do the shopping.

Phase One went fine. I wandered by a place where an old guy was cooking up pork on a stick and ordered two. They were delicious, though, mindful of the many warnings about uncooked vegetables (especially on the street), I skipped the little mini-salad that came along with it.

I was a little nervous about how my stomach would react, so I wanted to head back toward toilet range right away. I took probiotics for a week or so before coming over to adjust my gut flora and thought it had been working well. Then I had a couple of donuts the other day (of all things) that sent me scurrying for the head.

So I beelined it to the Big C after eating to do my shopping. It was busy, after work shoppers thronging the place, but not crowded.

Mindful of the salad I had just thrown out and that my general avoidance of greenery (apart from the vegetable ice cream) has left my vegetable intake a little light, even for me, I swung through the produce section and grabbed a carrot. Such a carrot! This was one of the smallest in the bin!

I bagged it up and went to the checkout stand, which was my error: unlike in the US, they don’t have scales at the cash registers. Apparently, you have to have someone in the produce section weight it for you, put a price tag on it, and then the cashier knows what to ring up.

Since I hadn’t done that, the line came to a crashing halt while a minion was summoned to run the massive carrot (she had to use both hands!) back to the produce section to perform the ritual weighing and stickering. While I smiled weakly and tried not to look anyone else in the long line behind me in the eye.

All of this occurred without any communication other than gestures, since the cashier didn’t have any English and my enormously limited phrasebook Thai doesn’t cover vegetable shopping malfunctions.

The store staff and customers handled it pretty much the same is it would have been handled in the States if I had been some clueless foreigner gumming up their evening: a little unenthused eye-rolling but essentially with patience and good grace.

But just before all that happened, I witnessed the plastic bag obsession taken to a new height. The woman in line in front of me was buying a new mop. Sensibly, in my view, the cashier didn’t try to waste a bag on such an unwieldy object, but put it right down on the counter. The woman quickly spoke up, gesturing at the mop. The cashier grabbed a plastic bag and handed it across to her and the woman preceded to bag up the mop head… which was already encased in protective plastic.

On the way home, I found out what happens at that uncontrolled pedestrian crossing at rush hour, when traffic is heavy but there are throngs of people needing to cross the street. It turns out they stick a cop out in the middle of the street, obviously the shift sergeant’s least favorite guy, with a flashlight and a whistle, and he blows like hell and steps in front of cars to create breaks for the pedestrians to get across.

Whether it was because of my goof or just because it was a nice night out and people seemed particularly friendly, I decided to pull out my first “Hello” in Thai on the way home.

My victim was a middle-aged guy I passed on the bridge. “Sawasdee!” I trilled in my best impression of the YouTube example I dug up.

“Howcoiaroihaciobmbmbm!” he said back.

Out of the four people I passed and greeted, not a one of them said anything even remotely close to what the guidebooks say. Is it the local equivalent of “Hiya!” or “Howdy?” Or are they taking advantage of my smiling incomprehension to curse me for a foreign devil?

I don’t know, but obviously the guide books leave a lot out. My most successful interaction was with a security guard who said, “Hello, sir!” But when I said hello back and asked him how his night was, he just smiled, like I just smile when I don’t understand what the hell they are saying, either.

I’ve been a pretty bad tourist here in Thailand so far.

One of the basic courteous things you can try to do anywhere is pick up even a little bit of the local language, make an effort to meet the locals on their own turf. But the Thai language (actually, I understand that it’s more of a regional dialect that has spread nationally, but all that is more complicated than is worth getting into) is tonal, like Chinese… it’s not just the sounds that make the meaning of the word, but how those sounds are pitched. And anyone who has ever heard me try to sing (to whom I apologize now) knows that I am utterly tone deaf. So I’ve been leery of venturing even a simple “S̄wạs̄dī” to say “hello.” It might end up meaning “Your wife is a dung heap” or something if I butcher the sounds.

Part of the problem is that I hate to look like a fool (which, considering how life has gone over the past couple of years, is obviously a lost cause). So I spend a lot of time trying to figure things out before trying them, instead of just diving right in, getting it wrong, and learning from the experience. The guide books are not much help in these basic interactions. I smile and nod wherever I am, but I haven’t been able to determine what exactly is expected or customary yet. Do people say hello at the gym? To a clerk in 7/11? In the elevator? I don’t know if it’s just the presence of myself, an observer, affecting the experiment or not but I don’t see the customary small pleasantries that I am used to. Or maybe they are more subtle and I’m just missing them. Either way, I feel less a fish out of water when no one else seems inclined to converse, either.

There are many minor things that I have picked up fairly fast, though.

Something I learned quickly was that, if there is a clear bottle of water in the shower and you should like to brush your teeth there (the tap water being unhygienic for this purpose) and happen to take a swig of it, you may find that it is actually vinegar and rather unpleasant to fill your mouth with (although undoubtedly perfectly sanitary).

Then there are other little things, like the fact that all the light switches are upside down–you flick them down to turn them on, up for off, the opposite of the way I have been flipping switches for my entire life.

But something I haven’t been able to avoid diving into is the food… a man’s gotta eat!

I guess I could stick to Western foods easily enough. They are not rare here. There are McDonalds and KFCs and Pizza Huts all over the place. And some of the stuff in the grocery stores is recognizable to the Western eye. But I can get all that stuff at home. Might as well try some of the local delicacies while I’m here.

The biggest problem, for me, is fish, which I can’t have. But it’s a staple here, and while some of it is obvious (mostly because it is, in fact, just a whole fish), other stuff is ambiguous and the labels are impenetrable. So unless it’s clearly labeled otherwise, in English, I avoid most stuff that is in balls or sheets or is not obviously some recently detached part of swine or fowl. This rules out 90 percent of stuff on the street, unfortunately.

In other respects, I’m a little more adventurous. I decided some ice cream might be nice in this heat. They have mint chocolate chip, a wide variety of sherbets, everything you’d find in a Safeway at home. But they’ve also got stuff I’ve never seen before. One of these looked like a kind of vanilla that had some colorful chunks of unidentifiable fruit in it, lemons and limes maybe. The English part of the label just said “ruam mitr.”

It turns out that ruam mitr is usually what they call a vegetable stir fry here and so the colorful chunks were actually corn and green beans. But it tastes all right and I’m getting my roughage, I guess.

Apart from the weird vegetable ice cream, I’d heard a lot about how utterly foreign the culture here is, but so far I haven’t seen it. Riding the train into town from the airport reminded me of nothing so strongly as riding the streetcar through the International District in Seattle: a mixed crowd of multi-ethnic folks mostly busy staring at their cell phones.

People at malls and on the street chatter and smile and nod and do their daily things just like people everywhere. There are certainly unexpected sights: shrines tucked away in random corners and alleys, little old ladies praying on the sidewalk, a row of monks sitting in lawn chairs in the mall parking lot while people bring them bags of food. But it’s not objectively any nuttier than, say, crazy street people or drug dealers hanging out at Third and Pine in downtown Seattle. I certainly feel safer here than I do there.

Together with that sense is the lack of pervasive sirens you hear in Western cities. I’m only reminded of their absence by the rare occasion that I hear them, such as at this very moment, when an ambulance is flickering off into the distance on the nearby expressway. But I might hear one or two a day, at most. I don’t have an explanation for it; I’d think, considering the lack of building codes, high-risk traffic scenarios, and generally low importance that Thais seem to place on self-preservation that emergency responses would be rather more common here. But perhaps not.

Maybe because I just came from Phoenix, which has traffic accidents on an epic scale pretty much nightly, I haven’t found traffic here to be all that shocking. Yes, motorcyclists ride freely down the sidewalks, and it’s not unusual to see neatly dressed businesswomen perched precariously on the back, sidesaddle-style. And traffic signals, lanes, and street directions seem to be more or less optional. Theoretically, they are supposed to drive on the left, but mostly they will drive wherever there is open road.

But although the drivers are crazy, they’re not inconsiderate. There’s an uncontrolled pedestrian crossing between my condo and the nearest Big C grocery store and the rules for crossing there are really no different than jaywalking in the West… you look for a gap or make eye contact with oncoming traffic and then play chicken by edging out into the street to see if they’ll stop. Often they do. But I try to time my crossings together with a large herd or a little old lady who might, presumably, engender greater respect from oncoming traffic than some random farang.

Another interesting thing is that all this seems to translate into sidewalk protocol as well, in that there seems to be none. In the US, driving on the right seems to carry over into almost all situations where you are dealing with any oncoming traffic (and mariners will recognize this as part of an even more traditional stricture in the nautical rules of the road)–whether it’s going up an escalator or walking down the sidewalk, politeness dictates you stick to the right.

But there’s no pattern here that I’ve been able to discern. You might imagine keeping left, like traffic, would be natural, but it doesn’t seem to be. Even in malls and public places, the direction that escalators run seems to be more or less random.

These all seem like little things to me, minor oddities that aren’t necessarily even as pronounced as the differences within the U.S. between, say, the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South.

The random shanties erected in apparently random places, and the squalor that goes with them, are notable I suppose. But again, seeing makeshift living arrangements in odd urban spaces isn’t exactly a rarity in Seattle these days, either. It’s not as pervasive, but I can hardly claim to be shocked to find a family living under a tarp in an alley. And one thing I haven’t seen yet is anyone sleeping in a doorway with a shopping cart piled high with all their worldly possessions nearby. I’m sure there are homeless here, but their situation may be less onerous in some ways than those in Western cities. The climate, of course, is considerably more forgiving.

The most disconcerting thing that I have come across so far is the insistence of the gate guards at the condo where I am staying to come to attention, salute, and click their heels whenever I arrive. Whether I’m just generally uncomfortable with the implied servility or if I’m particularly worried about heel-clicking in light of recent political developments at home, I’m not sure.

I was warned about the stench, but honestly I haven’t found the smell of the place particularly awful. There are a LOT of aromas, some of them not so pleasant, in any given stretch of road, but it’s not a pervasive smell at all. And some of them, particularly the food, are actually quite pleasant. On the whole it’s on the level of, say, New Orleans.

There is a lot of trash, scattered everywhere despite the best efforts of an army of sweepers deployed each morning across the city. There are sweepers everywhere, and constantly. Right now, there is a guy sweeping the sheet metal roof of the building under construction next door.

But still, there are vast amounts of litter around. Much of that litter is composed of plastic bags, which Thais appear to have some national love affair with. You can’t get them to not give you a bag, no matter how minor the purchase or how unsuitable a bag might be for carrying it. For example, I bought a bubble tea the other day, and the girl at the counter promptly produced a cup-sized bag and bagged the drink up (with a straw) before sliding it over to me.

If you try to tell them you won’t be needing a bag they look at you as if you had just announced that you have no need of the doorway to exit the shop, but will instead be walking directly through the wall. Impossible! You must have a bag!

So, for all you plastic bag banning liberals back in the States, know that your efforts there to reduce the number of plastic bags clogging up our beaches and oceans, after accounting for rounding errors, amount to approximately nothing.

So I’ve been waiting for that big culture shock moment and have yet to find it. I’ve only been here a week so far, of course. Much of that has been spent sitting and writing, just as it would be at home. So perhaps the craziness is further around the corner somewhere. I’m keeping my eyes open for it.