Week One – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly - but mainly just the good!

After leaving North Carolina and a packed ten days with family and friends in Seattle we have had our first week in Bangkok. At 7AM it’s a cool 78 degrees (25C) and a gentle breeze is blowing in the doors to our little balcony off our room. In a couple months the temperature will be closer to 100 so we are grateful for the cool morning air now. We have much to be grateful for and so this post will focus more on the good that we have experienced in the past days. (photo below taken on the campus of Chulalongkorn University.)

The Good

It’s so good to be back in Thailand. In some ways it doesn’t seem that long since we left Thailand two and a half years ago – although in between we drove across the country from Washington to North Carolina, settled into Durham, found employment and some fabulous friends and coworkers, Andrea has almost completed a dual MBA and MPP and lived in Geneva and Boston completing two internships – but it IS evident in how rusty my Thai is! But it was so good to walk off the plane and smell…Thailand, the warmth and humidity, the ever lurking fragrance of flowers in the night air. In the midst of the chaos and commercialization of Bangkok and the sometimes confusing and frustrating cultural differences that allow for abuse and use of people – especially women - there is a calmness and contentedness that rises up in me when I am here. Some of this is due to adjusted expectations knowing that life operates just a little differently here, some of it is just loving this country that continues to be home for me in many ways. And the joy (or more relaxed state) I feel is also a direct reflection of not working a full time job, plus a part time job and volunteering multiple hours in a week, while also helping Andrea persevere through a demanding academic load. Life is great at the moment (;-) I have time to think, pray, ponder. Although Bangkok hums at a pretty frantic pace 24 hours a day (just like any other city of 10 million plus) in some ways our life is slower here as it can take longer to accomplish certain things and also because we choose to live a little slower.

Anyway…we’re grateful to be here, grateful that my work has allowed me to take a leave of absence until April, grateful for time with family and friends in Seattle, grateful for smooth flights and great accommodations for the first 5 weeks that we are here.

We are staying at Sasa International House, a small hotel that is often used for visiting students and professors at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand’s oldest and highest ranked university (photo on the right taken from Wikipedia) where Andrea will be studying at SASIN, Chula’s Business school. For those of you who know Bangkok, we are living right on the edge of Chula’s campus, five minutes walk from MBK and the National Stadium BTS stop. Chula’s campus is expansive and stately with large lush trees. From our fourth floor window we look out on trees and some fun scampering squirrels. The birds wake us early in the morning and we can look down into some ponds where there lurk some massive koi and another 2 ½ foot fish that looks like a cross between an albino catfish and a hammerhead shark. We haven’t seen him clearly as the water is a little murky. Being on campus we have found a campus cafeteria that serves all manner of yummy thai food and drinks for even cheaper than you normally find it on the street. We’ve been able to figure out where to get things, where the real people live (as opposed to tourists and those with tons of money), set up internet and find a laundry – because hand washing clothes for two months would be a bummer but so would paying what the hotel wants to charge!

And I get to swim every day and enjoy my beloved rice cakes for breakfast! When we were here last time I posted a list of my favorite things in Bangkok. You can read them here, here and here.

The Bad

Really not much to report for us personally but you could count a little 'Bangkok Belly' which is par for the course at times. And then there was the moment that we were setting out to explore the campus and a tiny, almost invisible gnat didn’t just fly into my eye as we have all experienced at times but somehow this one stung my eyeball, unloading what felt like a nuclear bomb in my eye. I'm very thankful that it quickly subsided.

The Ugly…and ongoing questions

If you have read previous posts from our time here you know of some of the darker things that haunt us here. One day last week we walked up to MBK (advertised as the most visited mall in Bangkok), across the street and through several more huge, exclusive malls, (Siam Paragon – the 2nd largest mall in SE Asia, Central World etc) taking advantage of their air conditioning to get to a store we were going. It’s hard to describe sometimes the magnitude of these mammon/money worship centers of commercialization – hundreds and hundreds of boutiques, luxurious brands, dining experiences – one of the malls contains the biggest aquarium in Asia (in its basement!) - to me, it’s just a little overwhelming and maddening and then you step outside as we did and were confronted on an overpass bridge with a woman and her child begging, another woman with horribly disfigured hands holding them out for a few baht. After walking through the wealth represented in the malls which are still playing “God rest ye merry gentlemen” and then to encounter those so on the margins of society who will make less in a year than what one person might spend on a handbag…it almost undid me. I wrote about this before in Tell me what to do??? and am still wrestling with some of the same questions. It’s hard not to. (photo on the right - graffiti on a bridge in Bangkok.)

I have more questions which I’ll post in the future – but this is enough for now! Thanks for wandering with us, for your support and prayers for health, protection and good connections with people. We don’t take them for granted!

Duncan
PS. Another great post that Andrea wrote on our last trip describing Bankok can be found here.