It was probably a mistake on my part or an experience I wanted to have but something I should have known better than to dabble in but I went back to Soi Cowboy tonight thinking I would just have a beer and hang out for a while. The problem for me is that I take things too seriously sometimes. I walked all the way down and almost all the way back trying to talk myself into wanting to go into one of them. Listening to a cover band do Neil Young from After The Goldrush lp of the '70's just isn't my idea of what I think of as entertaining while in Thailand and I won't find out what kind of place to go to until I come back another time I'm afraid. So most of the way back and a pretty girl catches my eye and lures me in to her bar, which I quickly realize is deserted and I end up ordering a beer and a "lady drink" for her before I realize just how aggressive she is with crotch fumbling and nipple tweeking and I guzzled the beer and said I was going to look around some more. I beat it and went in search of my dinner which I actually found far more interesting. The whole sex business is really tiresome after a while. It's the pinnacle of pandering.
I noticed tonight that there are all these vendors of garlands of jasmine and an orange flower the name slips my mind at the moment. There are shrines all over that people leave offerings at and I wondered if the garlands were some special festival and was told they are year round. When I went back out without my camera of course I immediately ran into a tiny old woman with a large tray of these flowers on her head. That and I also ran into another elephant. I like them for some reason.
Tomorrow I have to check out of the hotel at noon and find something to do for ten hours. I guess I'll just walk around and take some pictures but ten hours is a long time with airconditioning and somewhere to sit so I'll have to improvise some how. I guess it's time to find a coffee shop with airconditioning where I can hang out for hours at a time if I need to. I doubt I'll be bored, that is a state largely foreign to me thank god.

Last evening at the hotel

I bought a second suitcase as from China Airlines website it states that if I am going to North America I can carry two suitcases not over 23 kilos. I have done that and can easily carry everything else.
Tonight I went out at twilight to find what I could in the neighborhood. This may give some feeling for what the atmosphere is like here. It is so many things simultaneously that it is probably a mistake to try to sum it up in some neat statement. I think I'll be coming back here some day. There is a Bangkok Gift show in November, maybe then. So I'm going out to enjoy the evening with out my camera for a change.

After taking these pictures and a hundred and eighty or so other ones (believe me they're not all usable the way I work) I started my dinner with some skewers of meat from a vendor grilling them on his cart. Four different kinds and four different qualities as well. The pork sausage one had too many bone fragments in it to pass FDA at home, but it tasted good and I like the smell of the meat griling all over the place. Next I had corn on the cob that was as good as any at home and to finish it off I had a bag of roasted crickets or grasshoppers. I just had to try some of the insects I've been so curious to find out what they're like. They're OK, not bad at all, mostly crunchy greasy and salty. Three of my major favorite food groups.

Siam Center and MBK Mall shopping

I was told to look at the MBK mall if I wanted anything electronic or whatever and I wanted to see what it was like. I thought I might buy a memory card for my camera if the price was good but I don't really need one to tell the truth at this point.
So I took the sky train, which is incredibly modern and efficient. I'd say it was quiet too, which is more than I can say for most metro trains. Two stops later and I was at shopping central. The contrasts here were driven home again though with the sleeping man under the stairs and the child beggar asleep on the stairs with his cup. I guess if I lived here I'd have to get used to it. It appears that millions of people have.
Once inside it was a relief from the muggy heat of mid day. It must have been in the eighties with humidity around 75%, but I'm just guessing. There is quite a lot of air conditioning here and I wondered what the power source was as they use it liberally. Inside it almost seems like malls within malls and malls linked to other shopping centers by passageways over streets and it seems to really become one amazingly dense concentration of everyday commerce. All the ladies underwear, Pashmina scarves, luggage, fast food, electronics and so on with another area reserved for the Imax and other movie theaters. I'd guess Singapore might be on a par with this but this clearly is some miles ahead of even the most modern department store I saw in Beijing.
After looking over the electronics and wondering how so many people selling so much of the same thing in such proximity can survive I decided the prices weren't compelling and I was unwilling to risk the purchase of a product more sophisticated than I can readily understand and not be confident I will have no problems when I am thousands of miles away and have no recourse.
Roaming around in the malls also were visible numbers of western tourist fair skinned and blond in many cases. It looked like a high school had gotten out in some San Diego suburb as there were so many young looking white girls and a lot of maybe college aged couples as well as the odd middle aged person looking lost. Hey, not me. The point in getting lost is to figure out how to find your way back so you begin to learn your way around. That's my theory. Of course if you get frazzeled or anxious you can hop in a cab or on a tuk-tuk and sit in traffic for a while, might be quite a while too.
I decided to look for neckties and underwear. At least I found three decent neckties for around six and a half each. They definitely will bargain as she wanted 490 baht each for the ties and I offered her 900 for three, she laughed at me and said some things in Thai I didn't understand and accepted my offer. Perhaps she didn't expect a westerner to bagain that way, I don't know.
Finally it was time to head back as I wanted enough time before the tailor delivered his goods to me.
Then I got lost trying to leave and began to feel like I was in a video game of strategy where because I am overlooking one critical detail I keep repeating the same sequence over and over. It was maddening. Finally I went outside to get my bearings and sort of did and decided to go back inside and go up a level so I could go across and so on and it didn't work either, I ended up on some upper floor walking past the same Bangkok versions of KFC, Sizzler, Pizza Hut, Swensons and innumberable Japanese chains. Finally some how I saw the detail hidden in the mass of confusing textures and images and signs and mannaged to find my way back to the sky train so I could confidently wait on the platform to take the train going in the wrong direction a few stops. It all worked out and I got back in time to have one of the beers I bought last night and got cold in the room fridge.
Tonight I imagine will be an orgy of photography and street food. Maybe I'll get propositioned again, most likely I will. It's kind of flattering, even if it is all about dollar signs. At least it's honest and it never happens at home.

Snacks

On my way back through the vendors closing up shop, past all these actual bars that are set up on the street complete with a few tables and the whole thing kind of impromptu I decided to go to the all night Food Way or what ever it's called to get myself a treat and a midnight sip and a snack. I got fascinated and had to take pictures in the grocery store too of course but to go with the three different cans of Thai beer I bought a bag of Poppo Joufu which said in English that they are Fried Corn Chips. Being a fan of Fritos from way back I went for the corn. The product that came out of the bag back at the hotel bed seems to be something that was once told about an idea that used to be called corn but before they reconstituted the powder that they created from the actual plant substance and reconstituted it into the shape of a chip, but they conveniently removed as much of the flavor as could legally be allowed and to still claim a relationshio to corn. The Rittersport Hazelnut with chocolate is the real deal though. And the beer, worth drinking if you're a beer drinker, I say, generally speaking.

LAst Night with the guide

My guide, Wan, a pleasant, well seasoned Thai woman who has lived in Germany and other countries but grew up here took me for my last night with her paid assistance. We went to dinner at the same spot she took me to the first night. Food, two dishes and a fruit juice for about $3 or less, I paid for hers as well.
Then she took me to Soi Cowboy, a famous street of girly bars where there are some topless ones as well. Never having actually been to a topless bar before i have to say it was slightly anti climactic in that the difference with the one she took me to the first night was that their breasts were bare. Othr than that it was the same inventory of bored out of their minds girls trying to keep jiggling to the indeffinite hip hop electro disco beat that never stops. I bought us each a bottle of water (same price as beer she pointed out) and finished mine in maybe six minutes and suggested we move on. I think she was mildly surprised that I bore so quickly but there wasn't anything to do but look at all these bodies with nothing to do but leave finally in as much as I had no intention of giving any of them money. The street it's self was such a trip I had to come back later and I did.
After that we went back to her favorite massage parlor (legit, big sign says NO SEX) and we each had a two hour full body massage. I think it's the first meaningful human touch I have experienced in far more months than I care to count and just like the person I tell my inner most secrets to, I pay for this service. Like the other though, this is really worth it and cost $10. The woman who worked on me found her way to my back and shoulders and paid them the attention they have needed for decades. It would be worth coming back to Bangkok just to have that every day for a week.
Then we walked back to the hotel and agreed to meet for breakfast when she would give me some tips on how to spend my last full day here alone. I'm actually looking forward to it as I don't feel particularly intimidated having had a few days indoctrination which was just about what I needed.
After that I grabbed my camera and headed back to Soi Cowboy, but not before coming to a small intersection with a traffic jam involving two elephants. I was going to take the sky train for 15 baht which is maybe fifty cents but I couldn't figure out how to get up to the platform so I took a cab which cost me a total including the tip of 45 baht, and was much less hassle at 11pm.
I walked up and down the street doing my dumb tourist guerilla photographer routine which consists of holding the camera to my eye to take pictures of the neon and the food vendors and holding it at navel height with the zoom all the way open and allowing the camera to auto focus and hope that what I'm aiming at proves to be what I had in mind. I'd say I have mayber 30% to 50% luck but no one gets irritated with my taking their picture as I am looking in another direction entirely than what the camera is aimed at.
Then I walked all the way back to the hotel which only took fifteen or twenty minutes. During that time I was propositioned by a prostitute who asked me to take her picture and witness to a small child sleeping on the sidewalk with a puppy. You want pathos? Here it is.
I kind of enjoy the colorful polyglot chaos of the whole thing, it's simultaneously some how sweet and honest, garish and vulgar, exhuberantly absurd and unabashedly carnal. Fun for all. It has begun to remind me of both Toulus Latrecs Moulin Rouge period where he hung out with prostitutes and had them model for him as well as George Grozs images of Berlin in the twenties and thirties. Filled with fat men ogling bored women who have only one thing on each of their minds, sex and money. The girls are so cheerful and want you to pay them attention (and money)but it seems so much more human than what ever the version of this is in America where we are shocked, SHOCKED! that such behavior is going on in our communities. Oh the indignation. And thennnnn...the drunken fat tatooed lumbering western white males in clusters, deciding, deciding, deciding, which one shall it be, by god there are so many so qualified and my god, it's only money. Oh well, you only live once, or so they say.
The tailor came to my hotel room to show me the suit he made, with the two other pairs of pants I had him copy and the suit pants I brought along to be altered. The man works fast, and we decided the jacket cuffs were a half inch too long so he'll bring it back tomorrow to deliver the finished product. I am hoping he can ship it for me as I'm anxious about the weight thing and China Airlines allows only 23 kilos total to be checked through. I hope I can carry a lot.

Forgive me friends

I have enabled "monetize" on my blog in the feeble hope I may actually make a little money. As I am now trying to shift my focus to earning money from merely making art and expressing myself I hope you will be forgiving.
In Bankok and to a great extent in Phnom Penh was the reality that every transaction becomes a financial exchange ultimately. In the states we're a little more lax about it, partly because we receive so much value in our daily life such as the infrastructure and various amenities in our lives such as the kinds of things we have access to and take for granted. They don't have those things here or in many parts of the world and thus it is true, that no matter what your personal, economic or social status, by comparison to the majority of people in these kinds of countries, we are all "rich Americans" if we can even afford to visit their country as an excursion away from our own worries and complications. It's easy to forget when you're home and surrounded by the daily routines of American life, but believe me, the vast majority of us have it easier than an awful lot of people do here. I hope I can keep that in mind after I come home, at least for a while. I may need to be reminded though, knowing myself and my tendencies. This is me today, who knows about tomorrow.

Thoughts about Bangkok

This city, I don't think I am the first to say this, has elements that make me think of the way the movie Blade Runner was designed to look. An amalgam of astonishing wealth and equally tragic poverty. The openness of the sex trade, and somehow not quite as vulgar as it seems in the states, along with the embrace of Buddhism.
Today I went to the Grand Palace and saw where the king lives and saw the Emerald Buddha (which is jade) and it got as hot as Cambodia was and no rain. Met an African American woman from Charlotte NC here for the first time to visit her brother, a military vet of Viet Nam era. We joked and commiserated about the traffic and so on. After Cairo and Phnom Penh though this city is orderly and clean with traffic as reasonable as New York, at rush hour sometimes, but still, orderly.
I have to figure out how to send some things home as I have accumulated too many things to bring on the 20 kilo limit China Airways flight on Friday.
I'm looking forward to my own life and not being confronted with the spectacle of so many others whose lives a far more constricted than mine. I whine and complain but the luxuries I take for granted are countless and I need to count my blessings even if the ones that mean the most to me are missing now, there are others and I'll just remind myself of the man who was so deformed he looked like he was melting into the pavement at the entrance to the brothel in Phnom Penh. I wish I had his picture but I didn't have a camer or the heart to ask.
Another trip to these places I'm visiting for the first time and I would plan more around the kinds of photography I like, I somehow find it important to document what I see in these places, I want to show them and share them, but maybe no one really cares, they're all so far away and maybe this is all my upper middle class white anglo saxon privlege trying to rationalize the freedom and luxuries I take for granted. It does not seem so hard to find oneself living in the street in America anymore.