Elephants in the City
Posted on March 28th, 2002 by aj
Mandy and I are in Chang Mai. We flew here today from Bangkok. Life here more sedate than frenetic Bangkok with its Asian ultra- modern skyscrapers sprouting out of open air fruit and meat markets. Gleaming chromium steel and gold everything with people sleeping on the steps. Much of it is more modern than American cities, selling Japanese electronics that will show up in the states next year or maybe never as the technology evolves. Bangkok is filled with Europeans and Japanese. Elephants shoulder aside Toyota land cruisers and tuk-tuking taxi-trikes on the street. Six lanes of traffic on the city streets all drive on (mostly) the wrong side and fill the air with smelly haze. Long live the king. The Thai’s truly love their king and his grand palace is amazing and resplendent. You don’t know it yet, but you’re looking forward to pictures of it.
I am physically afraid of the ride home. It took us 36 hours of travel to get from BOS to BKK after the engines cut out on the 747 over Alaska.
We’re hanging out here in the north where the food is amazing on our way to Laos. We might get a day back in Bangkok when we return. The major Thai cities are fully bilingual absolutely everything is in Thai and English (and often in English and then Thai). All the Japanese and Europeans speak English to get around. Things should be even more interesting farther north or in Laos as we get away from the monoculture and away from English.
Its nice that all the wildlife is different. I wish we had some bird books or monkey books. We’ve been pretty bad about pictures, but we’ll try to be more snap-happy. Cee’s website has a lot of pictures of the grand palace and Bangkok. They’re a great preview to our physical snapshots, and faster than the developing time we’ll need. Pippin and Cee lived in the south on the islands for a while. We haven’t been there, but we’re gonna go see a night market and I hear there’s a giant water-fight holiday called Songkran coming up. We’ll try to write soon.
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