Marmalade Daydreams

Well, now that I'm back in Bangkok after nearly twenty-four hours in transit (thank Buddha for Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin), I feel that my reservations about leaving my Brooklyn community were fairly unwarrented. To arrive in the middle of the night, yet be able to sit with a group of backpackers from four continents on a rattan mat in the street behind the temple drinking Beer Chang amid the rattling of tuk-tuks until the roosters heralded the impending dawn, to emerge into the morning market and its symphony of smells from mouth-watering (wok-fried chilis) to fetid (rotting rat on the banks of the canal), the floral aromas emenating from booths of ladies stringing blossom bracelets for spirit offerings, overwhelmed by diesel fumes, I feel home.

And though some things are different (the 7-11 by the river is gone, my friends from Kanchanaburi seem to have gone home), there's something about running into the same honey salesman that I've been buying from since 2002 and drinking that sweet raw nectar out of the 8 oz. glass Pepsi bottle that suggests that this place will always be a familiar port. True, New York's Chinatown, especially in the early A.M. hours of the weekend, has a wonderous stench that is comparable to any of the redolent concoctions of Asia, but where in New York can you stumble around a corner and be confronted by piles of durian and dragonfruit? Coupled with the genuine friendliness of the people (as I have yet to reconstruct my animosity toward fledgling speakers practicing their English, I've had any number of basic directionless "conversations" this morning), the low costs of high living, the gustatory delights, the animism, and a low level of background ludicrousness that pervades (it was pointed out to me last night that, while Beer Chang's label simply claims a "minimum alcohol content" of 6.4% by volume -- have they not yet standardized the brewing process? Do they not posess a hydrometer?), I'm as enamored to be here now as ever.

But I'm getting out. Soon. I am wholly aware of the stickiness that this place holds for me, and I'm not simply talking humidity, though I'm sure the tropical climate has influenced my history of getting stuck in this town. Having limited time this summer, I am eager to immerse myself in some new surroundings rather than simply indulge in the simplicity of Khao San hedonism. Tomorrow night I continue my stretch of overly time-consuming transits, and board a sleeper train to Vientianne, Laos. While I've been to southern Lao (from what I gather, the country isn't organized or uptight enough to figure out whether it prefers being Lao or Laos, which is just fine with me), which is fairly untravelled, rural, and extremely poor, over the next couple of weeks I'm going to follow the Mekong up the tourist trail of Vientianne, Vang Vien, and Louang Prabang, for I hear that this tourist trail is well-justified, what with wild limestone formations and 600-year old teakwood temples and all.

Oh, and extra thanks to Zachary and Katya, for making San Fran extra special. For anyone planning a trip to the Bay Area, mind that Mark Twain quotation, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."