Faces of Bangkok.
Try not to miss an evening drink at the open-air bar at the Dome on the sixty-fourth floor of State Tower: the view rivals that from the Peak in Hong Kong.
Those who have not kept up with Southeast Asia’s permanent cultural revolution may be a tad surprised by this new, trendy and frenetic face of Bangkok. Perhaps you visited five or more years ago and remember the cooked food stalls at every curbside, the saphron-robed monks, the women from the floating market in their sampans, the appalling traffic jams, the girls in black tank tops who called out from makeshift bars in disused parking lots: what happened? Well, actually, nothing. They are all still here.
Most of what I have described is not so much a city as an archipelago of elevated islands joined by a high-tech causeway. One must descend to earth to experience the rest: pollution and gridlock, temple bells and hawkers’ horns, a haunting dirge sung by a blind minstrel through a speaker on a strap around his neck while a monk with a rolled umbrella passes by, aromas of green curry, lemon grass and ripe durian: as the locals sometimes joke, there are three seasons: hot, very hot and very very hot. While we have been viewing the city from above, under the Skytrain vendors have been selling every kind of local cuisine, designer rip-offs, cut & sew services on street-corner machines, fortune telling by Tarot or palm, lottery tickets and, of course, sex.