Bangkok: The Mistress

Being in Bangkok was not our plan, not something we sought out, yet it wouldn't let us leave with out a visit. Despite our self-righteous dedication to volunteering, we were forced to be tourists. At first we hated Bangkok, just on principle. It's what any self-respecting person would do when things don't go your way, right? Then despite our efforts to be miserable and displeased, we found our surroundings and experiences quite unobjectionable, even enjoyable, and OK, fine, we like it here.

yummy outdoor food vendors

However, we are just not very good tourists, which makes it difficult when trying to bide our time for an entire 168 hours in a big and new city across the world from where our normal comfort zones lie. The main problem is that we get kind of site weary. Actually, it's more like we are just not interested at all in sightseeing so all we ever do is eat and then wait to eat again, which really isn't such a bad option but it can get a bit boring and tiring on the body. So while spending some of our increasingly diminished-in-value time in the internet cafe, I decided to look up things to do in Bangkok and found a sort of obscure list with an address of a doll museum on it. Sure, OK, a doll museum.

It took us about two hours to get there, despite the short distance of maybe 2 miles. After trying to find and navigate various forms of transportation in a new city, we arrived at our stop and not withstanding our detailed directions from google, we could not find the museum.

Cleanest bus I have ever been on

This normally wouldn't have been a problem, but the street names were not in the alphabet that we are particularly familiar with, English, and the ones that were in English were nowhere to be seen on my 'map', something They (the notorious "They") must give tourists in order to give them enough confidence to try to get places and then get them lost enough to have to pay for transportation, (thus boosting the economy). This, in our desperation, is exactly what we tried to do, but the schemers behind the map ploy were not clever enough to put the street names on the map in Thai, so everyone that we tried to get to take us to our destination, by showing them on the map, couldn't, because they couldn't read the street names in the English alphabet. So to make a long story short, after getting off a bus near the supposed address of the doll museum, we went on a wild goose chase to find someone who could read English well enough to translate the address and write it in Thai so that we could give it to the moto driver to drive us around the correct corner that the museum was supposed to be around.

After all that, we spent only about 25 minutes in the tiny room of a museum filled with old dolls, with a room of a factory attached to it where old women sat building more dolls. Strange place. More strangely though it all seemed worth the effort. Worth it just to not have to see sights, and to be able to say "no" to the entourage of transportation beckoners asking to take us to this Wat and that Wat and Where are we going? and its only 5 Baht Ma' am, and to not have to wait around the neighborhood of our guest house just to eat again. On top of that the museum was cool in its own right and it kind of made me want to do art about dolls someday. So all in all we are calling this day a success.

a collection of some of my favorite weird dolls

We are getting better at being here. We are discovering better and faster transportation that is also in English, which took us to our other epic success yesterday (our purity of 'Epic" might be waning here considering the first one was the doll museum), which was HORSE RACING!!! Upon purchasing tickets and entering the stadium we might as well have been aliens, wearing our cute flowery fabric clothing, with our white skin and our non-male gender. This event is being called an epic success due primarily to the fact that I just fulfilled a childhood dream of mine to see a live horse race, and besides that we didn't get lost and were able to walk all the way there, which is considered FREE!! (even if it was a three hour walk). We got to see two races thunder right by us with a clear and front row view and then we had to leave due to fear of death by heat stroke and went on a dismal search for anything liquid and ingestible.

note the above mentioned flowery fabric

boat taxi

In addition to our two main epic successes, we have been privy to witness some memorably funny things just by being out and about. We are staying pretty close to a beautiful park along the river. Jessi and I found ourselves there at dusk one night looking for a place to settle down and read for a while. We could hear pretty instrumental Thai music being projected from speakers all around the park, so we happily found a bench and started reading away while enjoying the music. Suddenly the music stopped and a new patriotic sounding song started. As Jessi and I looked up we realized that everyone in the park, which was packed with locals, was standing up in respect for the song, which must have been some sort of national anthem. In my imagination everyone had just transformed into toy nutcrackers, marching with batons in thier hands in time to the music, cued by an imaginary conductor. I caught eyes with one of the locals, who I couldn't quite decide was a man or a woman, that was encouragingly waving her/his hand at us to have us stand as well. So Jessi and I stood with confusion and entertainment written on the back of our minds. The song stopped and everyone went about their way, as if someone hit the play button to reality again. I felt as if I was just enlisted into the circus and then told I wouldn't be needed as the circus packed up and disapeared. Jessi and I giggled to each other, jogging us back to reality.

The silliness of the evening doesn't stop there however. Right after that we start to notice an accumulation of older women dressed in athletic-ish-wear gathering around where the speakers were set up. The he/she that encouragingly waved us to stand up for the song had joined the group and was wearing spandex running pants with a strange looking sports bra/midriff type article, but didn't really have any breasts and definitely no waist. As the pump-it-up music began we realized that we now had front row seats to an outdoor aerobics class in the middle of the park. Jaws dropped, Jessi and I couldn't take our eyes off the spectacle long enough to even at least take a photo, which is what just about every other white person was doing. At one point during the class, just to top off the whole experience, a scantily and dramatically costumed woman in heels, bright red sequins, and something that was supposed to be little wings on her back, randomly walked by, stopped in front of the class, and then in rhythm to the music did a little sexy bend your knees and twist your body down and then back up dance. She then looked around for some approval or opportunities for some more attention, and then walked on. The shoulder to waist ratio, upon further inspection, might have led one to believe that there was more to this "woman" than meets the eye.

So that is how we spent our evening, in the park, reading away while listening to aerobic music until the sun went down over the river. We both urgently wished we had had the nerve to join the class, but were cemented to our bench by our sense of image and all the uncomfortable ways in which that image would have come crashing down, with a million eyes on us, the white girls, had we tried. There are so many times like this that I desperately wish I could be invisible. Maybe next time we will have the nerve, however I think there are just some things white people should not do, and aerobics in the park in Thailand might just be one of them.