We pipe up

We've been slow getting the blog up and running, mainly because after the long slog over here---left home on a Tuesday morning, arrived in Bangkok on Friday night---inertia has been just too nice not to give into. We have no complaints overall about the journey. Tuesday night, just before the big snowstorm hit, the Delta terminal at JFK looked like a scene from the partition of India. But we'd been forewarned and had booked two nights at a nearby Holiday Inn Express, and we flew out Thursday without having to endure more than the usual annoyances and indignities of air travel today. We're still jet-lagged, but we've been dealing with it by sleeping standing on our heads and by popping some pills Charles Wohl prescribed for us---can’t remember the name---Amblusia, or Zizzmulch, or Sevastapollen?

Bangkok is real. For so much of the year it exists only in our happy imaginations, and it is so wonderful to discover again that when we are not here it apparently is blasé in the way it goes on without us.
For the first few days the weather was cool for Bangkok---82 and breezy, more Key West than Southeast Asia. Thais we know were remarking on the chill and bundling up. Now it's a more seasonable 90 and reassuringly muggy. Yesterday we walked through Lumpini Park and the air was heavy and sweet. Lots of frangipani and orchids, and the monitor lizards grinned up at us welcomingly from the lakeshore, or so it seemed to us.

We're about to have a home. We're renting a condo in the building where our friends Simon and Poe have one. It's on Suan Plu, Soi 8, a neighborhood not far from the Pinnacle Hotel, our usual digs, and we are very eager to settle in. We looked at another place that would have been okay---some of you will know what I mean when I call it Peace Corps mid-range---but the one we got is only a little more expensive, $800 a month, and bordering on posh. It's on the seventh floor and overlooks the pretty trees and gardens of the Baptist Seminary (what's that doing here?) and the showy ultramodern Bangkok skyline beyond. The idea is, we'll use all this space (two bedrooms) for Joe and Poe to work on their pocket guide to Bangkok street food and for me to finish Strachey-12, which I should have finished before we left home but did not do.

Joe won't have to go far for street food research; our soi (little street) is a cornucopia of this magnificent stuff. There’s a big fresh market nearby with vendors who show up every morning with their limes and dragon fruit and pig snouts. We are very eager to get moved in and start poking around the neighborhood. It’s the first time in our five years of coming to Thailand that we’ll have a place of our own. We feel as if we are crossing a threshold, and we like it.

We will miss the Pinnacle Hotel. At the breakfast buffet, the bacon is great, and where else on earth anymore can you enjoy a meal while listening to Patti Page sing The Tennessee Waltz followed by It’s an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini? And these are people who disapprove of The King and I?

We’ve been preoccupied with practical matters, but not so preoccupied that we haven’t noticed that the political atmosphere is still tense. Not explosive like last year, but uncertain. Our room at the Pinnacle looks down on the blackened hulk of a branch bank firebombed in April by the Red Shirts. A 7-Eleven around the corner was also gutted. The Central World Mall that got torched is partly re-built and open, though the adjoining office tower is still scorched and empty. The Red Shirts are planning a rally outside Central World this Sunday. “What?” you might ask. Our curiosity is great, though we’ll be moving into the condo on Sunday and so might not be able to attend this peculiar event.

The violence last year has, we think, damaged Thailand’s idea of itself, but probably not permanently. The country has gotten by these spasms before. Poe emailed us in May, at the height of the violence, “I think we Thais do not love our country anymore.” But the despair of those desperate weeks when over a hundred people died in street fighting is gone now,
And while the underlying conflicts are still there, there’s a sense that nobody on any side wants to push Thai society to the brink again anytime soon.

Lunch today: Khao Soi. That’s a Northern Thai chicken broth with a light curry, crunchy deep fried wheat noodles, sliced fresh cabbage, pickled cabbage, bean sprouts, a small chicken drumstick, chili powder, spicy vinegar, palm sugar and fish sauce. As usual here, it was the best meal we ever ate.