Stir-Thai-Crazy-Land

Well, what can I say about Thailand. I'm afraid I can't really say much that hasn't already been said but I'm sure if I put my mind to it, I'll be able to say an awful lot anyway! In a nutshell, it's magnificent. Apparently I've come at the best time of the year. In the summer, the temperature gets to unbearable heights and the humidity is in the 90's for a period of approximately 6 months. Being here in December means that the temperatures fluctuate between 20 degrees at night and 30 or above during the day. Its kinda bizarre but I love it. You get to wear shorts and a t-shirt everywhere you go apart from between 5 and 8 in the evening, when certain flying creatures come buzzing out from their little homes and annoy the humanoids of this world. A vocation they have become very good at here in Bangkok. So, if you like the idea of maintaining a bump-free profile on your body then you have to spray yourself with anti-miji stuff. I've actually sprayed some towards one of these horrors and the results are rather satisfyingly horrid. They just go mad! It's great because it doesn't kill them, but you can certainly see the effects it's having on its poor little brain. But Bangkok isn't too bad actually. It's a huge place with over 15 million people, in a very hot and humid area of the world so it's bound to have some in there. The thing I'm loving about this place is the people though. They're all so friendly it's incredible. Polite, educated, ready to help out with anything. Not that many of them even speak English but for some reason, communicating is really easy. Here, just smiling gets you straight into the mix. My Thai book has helped me no end and when they see I'm trying, they do anything and everything to help me out. Bangkok transport is the best. They have a super technologically advanced and hygienically crisp tube system and an Eco-friendly "sky-train" which travels 3 floors above the city roads. It's a modern and clean running system where children, then women have absolute seat priority and where people actually cue up outside the doors, wait patiently until everyone is out and then file on in. There's arrows on the floors telling people where they should stand and guards on all the platforms making sure no-one even touches the yellow lines before the trains have stopped. So that's all great. But what I love is the contrast. When you either climb down from the sophisticated cloud nine sky-train or up from the super cool swishy-underground with it's built in tellies and jubilee-like door opening systems, you emerge in a metropolitanaec jungle, where cars and motor bikes whizz in all directions with very little regard for anything non-machine like. The roads are all clean and clearly labeled but the vehicles care little for it's intentions. It's a place where the machines become a living entity. Artery-like veins pulsating through the major parts of the huge animal called Bangkok and keeping it alive. The buses have no windows and the doors are always open. Travelling inside one is great. The drivers chair seems to have been added into them, almost as an after thought. It's like a car seat that sits on the floor and you could literally walk up to it and look over what the drivers doing. One of the most efficient forms of getting around is actually by boat. The city is full of canals. The boats are insane. They pull up but rarely come to a full halt so you have to kind of jump in and then the engines propel you at crazy speeds from mini raft-like stop to stop. During the ride, they hitch up these plastic bits of sheeting to stop you from getting wet and the ticket people walk round the outside hanging on to nothing but a rope in a death defying fashion to get over to you. Finally, back on Terra firma, there are three forms of taxis. The regular car taxi, painted ridiculous pink, yellow, blue and red neon like colours that just hurt your eyes. The highly polluting, loud but admittedly, mildly thrilling bike-with-a-cart tut-tuts and the deadliest of them all, the motor bikes. The traffic here is silly. It's always jammed. The lights seem to fluctuate between red and green for a full 3-5 minutes at a time. At first, I thought this should actually work. You stop for a long time, but then you all go for a long time. WRONG! I don't know why but it just doesn't. So the fastest way through town is on a bike. Now, as an experience, I do recommend it... but only as an experience. As a way of life? It can surely only lead you onto a path to death. I've done it twice and both times were on streets that weren't even busy. Yet both times I finished with my heart in my mouth. Its strange. The roads are very good quality. There's no dirt tracks here. But in between negotiating speed bumps, the occasional drain, oncoming traffic, sleeping dogs, people and the stalls on the sides of the road, you end getting home in a flash... only to realize that flash was your life flashing before you. It's a bizarre system too. Bangkok is divided into huge roads and then little roads that many times shoot off to dead ends. It would normally take about 10-20 minutes to walk them so the bikes laze around at the junction of these roads and take people up and down it in about 3 minutes. They never wear helmets and neither do you. Apparently there's an option to wear them but, I guess because the trip is so short, there's no point. Ok, I could go with this story for a while, so I'll just finish up quickly by talking about the food. The food here is... in... credible!!! The people seem to love eating and love cooking. All day, every day, everywhere you look, there's people eating (apart from on the Sky-train and the underground where it's forbidden). There's little stalls on the sides of every road, and at different times of the day, they seem to change round from sweet bananas and pancakes to stir-fry noodles and rice and at night, barbecued "stuff"! It's a bit weird sometimes. I had some BBQ grasshoppers with lemon juice the other night... verdict? Crunchy. But not bad :-) They had cockroaches too along with other mysterious insect-like creatures but I haven't quite got round to them yet. I've come to the conclusion that I'm gonna go for it all. Once again, my plan for losing weight has gone out of the window. I sometimes fear that by the time I've finished my month here, when I try to get on my plane to Australia, they might not let me on unless I promise not to take any extra baggage. Oh well... hey, maybe I'll just stay here :-D Uh-ohhhh!