I hope I’m still in love with Bangkok
It’s 8:33 pm PT and I’m a fourth of the way to London from San Francisco, en route to my favorite city in the world: Bangkok. I’m watching the Bourdain documentary – it makes me feel the way that Asia does. Curious, dangerous, sweaty, loud.
I guess it’s quite cliché to fall in love with a city, especially Bangkok. The Beach, a whole generation of travel writing, backpacking lore – they all romanticize Krungthep. I’m just another in a long line.
I’m in love with Bangkok because it was my first. When I was riding in a taxi from Suvarnabhumi to Khao San road as a 24 year old it terrified me. My first real memory of Bangkok was how large the billboards were. That first memory doesn’t align with any of the ways I feel about Bangkok. I can see the large curved billboard as we turned left and it was on our right. This memory is irrelevant and imprinted.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
It was sensory overload, overwhelming, overly hot, just…too much of everything. I couldn’t leave my capsule bed for 3 days until some British girls invited me out. I was scared to move around in the city, to even exist in it. It was an afront to everything I’d ever known. I spent months hating it. I left as soon as I could.
It wasn’t until trip number 7 or 8 that it clicked for me.
What an incredible way to structure and live a life. The city has food, shoes, bags, cell phones, litter, smoothies, and wires on every corner. Everything you need is within a few blocks, always. People exist almost wholly outdoors.
I don’t know anything about the people who live in Bangkok. Sure, I observe their way of life and eat their food and shop their stores and worship their temples and watch their river and hail their moto-taxis. Maybe that’s part of the mystique of Bangkok: I will never, ever, ever know even a small fraction of what the city really is. She has mysteries and culture that I can never access and don’t ever want to try. Just as a Thai can never understand growing up on a farm in Indiana, I can never understand being a citizen of their city. Impossibility of understanding is what makes culture, culture. It’s why travel writers have their title. How seductive to write about a place that can’t be understood?
I picked up a 1993 cultural guidebook of Thailand at the local used bookstore and have been slowly making my way through it. The first story I read in it explained Bangkok in a way that I remember how it made me feel but not the precise words it said, so I’ll recreate it from memory. Bangkok is sensual. Not in a sexual way, but in a literal way – it evokes all your senses and more you didn’t know existed until you fall in love with an Asian city. From the book: “That is what the sensuality of Thailand comes down to: a constant reaffirmation of the astonishing variety of life.”
Bangkok is possibility. Hop a flight from Don Muang, wander an alley, watch the Chao Praya, photograph figurines, drink, steal cold from a 7-11, mingle with HiSo 20-somethings, shop at MBK, cry, make change to catch the MRT, sit on a very small stool, do a crossword while Simon and Fabian pick out shoes, watch your purse be mended, meet a friend on their honeymoon, sleep on the floor of Hua Lamphong, run on a treadmill at a 5-star hotel, buy a counterfeit handbag, enjoy.
I’ve never met anyone who feels the way I do about this city. Maybe because I can’t clearly articulate it to see if those thoughts resonate. Maybe because a city is just a place and not the feelings we attach to it. Maybe it’s because of the smog. It’s probably because no one experiences anything the same way. It definitely doesn’t matter.
I don’t hope that my love stays the same when I land, but rather that I can find new things to love about the city that started my life as I know it. I wouldn’t be Shelly without Bangkok but it will continue on in perpetuity without needing anyone in particular.
If there are other worlds, I hope they all have a Bangkok.
What Anthony Bourdain said resonates with me more than anything I can write about this corner of the world: “To fall in love with Asia is one thing. To fall in love in Asia is another. Both have happened to me. It’s a gift, a dream, a curse. The best thing, the happiest thing, yet also the loneliest thing in the world.”