Update

There’s a scene in one of Charles McCarry’s superb Paul Christopher espionage novels where Christopher and his wife---or girlfriend, maybe somebody can help me out with this---return to Italy after a sojourn in cool, tidy, reserved Northern Europe. In the morning, the wife throws open the shutters in their Rome pension and declares happily, “Oh, it’s the human race!” That’s how I feel about Thailand every day when I wake up to it. The Thais are voluble in a quieter way than the Italians. And they certainly don’t parade from place to place in seried ranks of fabulousness. Here only the royal family does that. But Thais give off that same air of “I’m so glad I got up this morning, and I’m lucky to be alive.” We sleep in an air-conditioned cocoon, and I can’t wait each morning to open the windows and balcony doors for the aromas from the food stalls to come drifting up, along with the nonstop gabbing and good-natured industriousness and kidding around.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we went on a visa run over the past weekend, is markedly different. It’s mostly Muslim, it’s multi-ethnic---Malays, Chinese, Indians---and it’s tense. It’s not really dangerous, even though there are signs downtown warning shoppers to beware of “snatch thieves.” But it’s a city of the Big Hustle---sidewalk touts selling knockoff watches and swindler taxi drivers. The first night, Joe said, “It’s the wild west!” People on the street look somewhere between glum and bitter. The Islam in KL has been described as “Islam-lite,” like Turkey’s, so it’s not entirely religion that’s the problem. But the clerics do put a damper on things. On Monday, the government warned people not to observe Valantine’s Day because that could lead to “immorality.” We heard later that the cops hassled young people holding hands in a park, raided some “clubs,” and arrested 16 people.

On the other hand, there’s a discreet but lively gay scene in KL. Our American friend Dick Sandler was there from Thailand for a few weeks visiting his Malaysian boyfriend, who’s a teacher. We didn’t meet the BF---he was off teaching jungle survival skills to other teachers. But we had a nice Dim Sum lunch with Dick’s friends Gabe and Paul. They are Chinese Malaysians; Gabe works for an NGO promoting corporate responsibility, and Paul is the marketing rep for a Swiss watch company. Gabe went to college in the U.S., and interestingly he said he has encountered more racial prejudice in Malaysia than he ever did in America. Because the Chinese long dominated the Malaysian economy, quotas are now in effect guaranteeing ethnic Malays a percentage of certain jobs and contracts. These two young men and their British boyfriends (yes, they are “potato queens,” their boyfriends “rice queens”---a couple of unfortunate terms) have pretty good lives. Although, Gabe said that in conservative Sarawak, where he grew up, gay men are careful not to congregate, out of fear that their families or employers will put two and two together and have a fit.

The best tourist attractions in KL---a city that looks like a kind of Tulsa with palm trees and afternoon tropical downpours---are the gorgeous Islamic Arts Museum and, next to it, the KL Bird park. The museum, a modern white marble wonder of an edifice, has one of the best collections of Islamic decorative art in the world. The ten-plus-acre bird park is a rainforest under a high net with resplendently feathered red and yellow and green and iridescent blue birds of all sizes and national costumes on delightfully garish display. We also hiked over to the Petronas Twin Towers, KL’s signature skyscrapers. They look like the Chrysler building with boils. I had assumed they had been built by somebody named Nick Petronas, but it turned out that Petronas is the National Petroleum Company, which produces Malaysia’s vast oil wealth.

Here in Bangkok, Joe has been continuing to research his pocket guide to Thai street food---he is happily eating his way across the city---and I have nearly finished writing Strachey-12 (no title yet). A distraction has been our TV set. We receive just two English language channels. One is a CNN-like news channel from Singapore. The other is Al Jazeera, which we find impressive. Its 24-hour-a-day live coverage of the Egypt uprising was biased in favor of the demonstrators, and why shouldn’t it have been? Watching this was terrifically suspenseful and finally thrilling.

Plans: we’re off to the seashore at Hua Hin and our friends Simon and Poe February 26-March 2. Then we go to Burma March 14-27. This afternoon we have to haul ourselves over to the Myanmar Embassy , crawl under the razor wire, and apply for visas. It’s a dreadful place, every visitor’s first taste of that dreadful government.

You may have read that Thailand and Cambodia are having a border-demarcation spat and are on the verge of war. The dispute went to the U.N. a few days ago, and the Security Council wisely said, “You’re grown-ups. Work it out.”