Confined to quarters
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
118
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Bangkok,
Thailand
Thursday, January 31, 2008
We arrived in Bangkok very late last night, after the whole comedy of errors with the delayed Jet Airways flight. Our plane arrived in Bangkok at 2 a.m. after a three-and-a-half hour flight. When we de-planed into Bangkok airport, we all exhaled. The airport was modern, spacious and above all clean. I think we did not realize how oppressed we were by the filth of India until we left. Thailand's GDP is $8,000 per capita, compared to $2,700 per capita in India -- a world of difference. Add in that Rajahstan and Uttar Pradesh are among the poorer Indian states, and it makes even more of a contrast. In short, Varanasi makes Bangkok look like Berlin.
We drove in to our hotel on an empty highway, without a camel, pushcart, caparisoned elephant or bicycle rickshaw in sight. Check-in to a nice new Marriott Courtyard and immediately to bed, pushing 4 a.m.
I was up at 7:30 a.m., showered, dressed and off to the Pearson VUE Center in the Sukhumvit area to take a required certification course. I had the building name (the Bangkok Business Building -- you know, that one) and street number. Two numbers actually, with no idea what each number meant. Turns out it did not matter. My cabbie spoke little English and read none. He had no idea what building I was talking about, and finally let me out on the street near the vague circle drawn on the map by the concierge.
And then the heavens opened. After a full month in India without a single drop of rain, over the next hour I'd guess Bangkok received about three inches. The streets were rivers. The sewers overflowed. And I was walking around a city I'd never seen before, ankle-deep in sewer overflow, slowly soaking to the skin even through my Gore-Tex, asking the security guards in the various office building lobbies where the Bangkok Business Building could be found. None of them knew, though they very kindly pointed me in a variety of conflicting directions.
Already thirty minutes late, I saw a distant Westin and walked over. The concierge gave me a different map, this one with the BB Building marked. Evidently nobody pays the slightest attention to street numbers in Bangkok. Buildings are known by their names. The BB Building (as the sign read in highly-stylized Western letters -- nobody except the Westin's wise concierge had ever heard of the Bangkok Business Building as such) was about one block from where I had started my rain-soaked odyssey, and about a mile from the Westin.
Fortunately, the nice folks at the very modern, Western-style testing center allowed me to start an hour late. I was in the standard testing room at the usual computer, surrounded by Westerners and Thais taking MCATs, GMATs, and various other computer-based tests. I spent a pretty bizarre two hours answering questions about brokerage branch supervisory practices, an issue utterly alien to how we've lived our lives since last July 15, and come to think of it, also largely unrelated to my actual career back home.
When I emerged the rain had stopped. Having been mostly unable to exercise in India, I chose to walk the two miles or so back to the hotel. While walking past a line of souvenir stalls, a nicely-dressed man came up to me. I thought he was going to try to sell me a souvenir elephant. Instead, he opened up a flyer showing dozens of naked Thai women. I started laughing and shook my head. "Married," I said, holding up my wedding ring. Undeterred, he instantly switched gears. He held out a new brochure, this one advertising custom-tailored clothes, done in one day. Nice to represent a diversified portfolio of products, I guess. Prostitutes and business suits. It even rhymes. I passed on the suits as well.
When I got back to the hotel, Jack was barking like a seal. His cough continued to get worse, and by evening we had a Thai doctor at the hotel room with a nebulizer and a little black bag full of unfamiliar meds. We spent our next day mostly confined to the room, hoping Jack and I could shake our coughs, without success. I went out in the morning to get our visas processed at the Cambodian Embassy, conveniently only a block from the hotel.
At least, it once was. Though our information appeared current, the embassy had moved in January 2007 to a distant suburb of Bangkok. Its former location was now the construction site for a huge new luxury condo building. We don't seem to have much luck with this whole visa thing.
Bangkok seems like a nice city. I hope someday we get to experience it.
