Bangkok - Day 1

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  Bangkok, Thailand
Thursday, October 16, 2008

DAY 1 - Bangkok - Hello from beautiful Bangkok, or as it is actually named, Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam.  Seriously, that is the Guiness certified longest city name in the world.  Sarah and I made it in last night after 20 sleepless hours of flying.  Unfortunately we arrived so tired that we couldn't truly appreciate the gift it is to be alive and suffering through yet another Korean Airlines meal, but thankfully our cab driver was able to, quite quickly actually, remind us just how preferable tired, diarrhea-filled life is to a burning to death in a mid 90's Toyota Corolla in a pile of mopeds after driving off the side of a raised highway.  So we're here in this wonderful city of somewhere between 6 and 15 million people (or 75 million according to our cab driver, who apparently pays even less attention to the feasability of there being 12 million more people in Bangkok than in the entire country of Thailand than he does to the road) where the highrise tenements and office buildings go on forever, separated only by lush blocks still covered in beautiful canopies of trees that hide the homes below and remind you that you are, in fact, in paradise.  So we made our way to the Vietnamese embassy this morning and got our Visas, which means that we'll be headed to Hanoi in a couple of weeks, and then we just explored the city like, well, tourists. There are some things you should know about Thailand if you've never been here, and I have, so I'll tell you some of them.
1 - It's hot here.  Like Statesboro, Ga in August hot.  But that's not all bad, because there aren't many public toilets in this city, and I realized today that the great thing about sweating like an overweight, plastic-wrapped Italian man in a sauna is that you never have to stop to pee.
2 - You may think you're attractive, but if you're not from Thailand, you're disgusting.  At first I felt bad for noticing that I'd never in my life been around so many beautiful women.  But then I noticed that neither had I ever been surrounded by so many beautiful men.  Now, I must mention here that about 20% of the afforementioned beautiful people could not easily be categorized as either male or female, but man were they attractive.
3 - There are not very many Americans here.  All of the crackers we saw ended up being French or German or Australian or some other generic white nationality.  However, rest assured that when you see a fat, tattoed white guy with a bleached blonde soul patch and his hand on his even fatter even faker blonde girlfriend's butt, you can be damn sure that he's one of us.  God bless the USA.

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