Harmful elements in the air / Symbols clashing everywhere

A truly odd few days.

On the Thurs­day before last I get an email ask­ing if I can come to New Zealand to con­sult on a project. Sure - sur­prised - says I, when? How does Sun­day sound. Um, ok — how long for? Five days? Okay…

Ticket arrives on the Fri­day and it’s Qan­tas via Syd­ney. I re-send the email that I sent to ear­lier: Sin­ga­pore Air­lines or Thai only. I won’t fly Qan­tas, Malaysian or Air New Zealand, all for rea­sons of food, com­fort and lack of ser­vice on a very long flight (okay Air NZ are fine on the ser­vice but the food and seat­ing suck badly).

The replace­ment ticket arrives a cou­ple of hours later — Thai, but leav­ing within 48 hours.

That’s fine. I buy a few exotic Thai snacks for the par­ents and head to the air­port. At Swampy I get into an argu­ment with the Duty Free store: you can’t take liq­uids over 100ml on the plane to NZ.

Didn’t I resolve this a month ago? Yes I am — in a sealed bag.

No you can’t. I quickly work out that to staff in King Power Duty Free, New Zealand is a pair of words that sim­ply means ‘a part of Aus­tralia - we don’t know exactly where’.

I tell them I’ll take the risk — and the girl sells it to me, then a few sec­onds later chases me through the air­port in tears, plead­ing with me to go back as she’ll lose her job when Thai Air­lines throw me off. I tell her I won’t men­tion her and if there is an issue I’ll some­how get it back to her.

I leave her sob­bing, con­vinced that I’ll never make it to the city of New Zealand in Aus­tralia and that she’s unem­ployed — and with­out issue I board TG491.

In Auck­land I hug par­ents and daugh­ter, do a movie with daugh­ter ($18 for two pop­corns and a drink? When did that hap­pen?), take her to a Great Blend which she really digs (‘they treated me like an adult, Dad’ ‘that’s because you are now my love, and one I’m immensely proud of’), and we do Dim Sim with friends. I do meet­ings. I do wall to wall break­fast, lunch, din­ner, cof­fee meet­ings until it’s time to once again — bat­tered and exhausted — board an aircraft.

Bangkok — 5 days after I left. I’m back in an mid-evening cab head­ing along Rama IX des­per­ate for a plate of raw prawns mar­i­nated in ridicu­lously  spicy nam prik, in the post-dusk cool — that is, if it was actu­ally cool — the evenings are ridicu­lously and unsea­son­ally hot this month — in our favourite rus­tic (that word will do, any­thing else tends to scare the friends and and fam­ily back home) out­door cafe around the cor­ner from the house. The increas­ingly recur­rent rains, as the rainy sea­son gath­ers, had passed for the day.

The soi wasn’t flooded when I arrived. Yay.

Flip­ping back­wards and for­wards between my two favourite cities has become a fairly tol­er­a­ble part of my lifestyle in recent years and this was my fourth trip to Auck­land in 2012. Of the first 28 weeks of 2012, 10 were in the old hometown.

Fam­ily, busi­ness and some­times just whim.

I get home to Ekkmai — after I bat­tle lunatic dogs who seem to think dad has been away for months — I find another mes­sage ask­ing me to come back to Auck­land within four weeks. Can I? I guess…

Brigid says the maid has quit with­out notice — a week before pay­day. Oh. She was hope­less but quite lovely so we kept her on so the regret at her leav­ing is mixed.

There is still a weird­ness in the inevitable cul­tural mind­fuck every­time I tran­sit south-east and then back north-west. I’m still deal­ing with it.

Auck­land is fab­u­lous; it’s warm (as in com­fort­ing), I know it so well, it’s sooo quiet and yet it often inspires with its clever peo­ple doing very clever things. We take the clev­er­ness for granted — or at least we do until we leave.

I just wish, wish, wish it was open just a lit­tle more often: the habit New Zealan­ders have of mostly shut­ting them­selves tightly in their mort­gaged up boxes at night with Short­land Street or the neutered thing they call news around 6pm and not ven­tur­ing out until the morn­ing — unless of course they feel the need to get loudly and often vio­lently drunk or wasted — throws me no mat­ter how much I men­tally pre­pare for it each time I land at Auck­land airport.

A guy on the plane — a pakeha New Zealan­der — tells me his Thai wife has been there for a dozen years and still can’t get her head around this. It’s socially abnor­mal. Tee­ter­ing on dysfunctional.

I have trou­ble cop­ing. The intense empti­ness and quiet­ness of the streets and related precincts bro­ken only by spo­radic wasted noise — or sirens going to other spo­radic wasted noise and/or vio­lence elsewhere.

I sit on the Sky­train on a Fri­day night around 11pm and reflect that a sim­i­lar machine in New Zealand — if it existed– would likely be full of drunks, ran­domly abu­sive peo­ple want­ing to know exactly what I’m look­ing at — and vomit. The night buses in Auck­land are threat­en­ing places. In Bangkok it’s groups of chat­ter­ing twenty some­things on their way to a club/bar, diner/shoppers going home, and kids sim­ply rid­ing back and forth until the last train.

Fun. No violence.

I like rid­ing the train to Chinatown.

I like going to Chi­na­town. I could never live in Chi­na­town but it’s eas­ily the place I love most in Bangkok — the multi-directional noise, the ridicu­lous omnipresent clam­our, the end­less thin alleys that seem to wan­der into dark places which offer fas­ci­nat­ing ven­dors sell­ing a vast range of things I really couldn’t ever want, but really want to want.

I like the ancient print­ing stores — some of whom have been hand print­ing and cut­ting glo­ri­ous tra­di­tional Chi­nese busi­ness cards for close to two hun­dred years — all gath­ered together as cities used to gather together like busi­nesses (and still do here). I dig the rows of guys strip­ping and refur­bish­ing every kind of mechan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal motor you can imag­ine, next to other shop­houses per­fectly and lov­ingly rebuild­ing rows of clas­sic Vespas.

The almost impen­e­tra­ble mar­ket maze that seems only to sell eye­glass frames by the bil­lion stands a few dozen metres from the sim­i­larly dense cov­ered mar­ket that offers just sex toys and every kind of dig­i­tal game device invented or per­haps merely pro­to­typed in some Japan­ese lab before the pirates rushed it into pro­duc­tion. Plus — nat­u­rally — the two soft­ware addenda needed for both sec­tions of the market’s tar­geted pur­chasers: games and porn.

I like find­ing excuses to visit the but­ton mar­kets, or to peer (like the silly curi­ous farang that I am of course) into the dark stores sell­ing every kind of tra­di­tional Chi­nese spice and med­i­cine out of walls of overused draw­ers that have been exactly the same since the place opened some­time in the 19th Cen­tury — or so you’d swear. I’m too ner­vous to take pho­tos and would more than likely — and cor­rectly — be quickly shooed away if I did.

The gold shops are amaz­ing — but espe­cially the one on the cor­ner of (I think) Soi Texas — the  won­der­ful name being a legacy of a mil­lion GIs in the 60s per­haps — which looks like it was boarded up years back and is lay­ered inside with cen­time­tres of black grime and cob­webs. I bet there are snakes and large lizards in there.

There are the cof­fin mak­ers with pol­ished wooden boxes shaped like Lotus flow­ers or hand painted red and gold cas­kets to take you into the next world; the over-coiffured women sell­ing lot­tery tick­ets (all sorted and priced by the lucky num­ber com­bi­na­tions they might offer), odd pink pas­try things and multi-storied mini-malls that stock noth­ing but fancy hair­clips & stick­ers — by the gazz­il­ion — and are right next to a dozen sim­i­lar mini-malls sell­ing the same thing.

The depart­ment store with stock all bought in the 1950s and 1960s and all still for sale; fresh Chi­nese donuts, pulled out from the fryer in front of you and best enjoyed with the sweet, strange flower flavoured drinks sold every­where, or the stalls with count­less vari­eties of teas that I’ve never seen, heard or imag­ined before.

And after all this, you stag­ger out, at the end of the Sam­p­eng Lane labyrinth that anchors the world’s old­est and biggest Chi­na­town — gasp­ing for cool air and liq­uid — into the imported (long, long ago) South Asian clam­our of Pahu­rat — Lit­tle India.

Where Chi­na­town is intense and semi-claustrophobic with nar­row over­crowded lanes  - they were once roads how­ever the decades have pulled them in on each side until they are now only pass­able with effort and resort to a semi-gymnastic weave around food stalls, motor­cy­cles com­ing from each side and mer­chants push­ing over-laden bar­rows of what­ever to wher­ever — Pahu­rat seems almost open and sane in its pace, allow­ing you to reclaim a lit­tle of the per­sonal space you invol­un­tar­ily gave away back there in Sampeng.

But of course it’s all totally rel­a­tive and Lit­tle India still has a human den­sity I’d never imag­ined grow­ing up in New Zealand — or even knew when liv­ing in Aus­tralia or London.

The other thing that hits is the change of smell. From the Chi­nese spices, which are so so much part of cen­tral and north­ern Thai cui­sine any­way that the odour jig­saws, you find your­self instead sur­rounded by cumin, by garam masala and sticky cloves.

Pahu­rat is about food, spices, sticky sweets, per­haps thou­sands of fab­ric whole­salers and retailers.

And large flatscreen tele­vi­sion sets.

A sub­set indus­try of Lit­tle India is the export of TV sets to India. Per­haps because of taxes, per­haps sim­ply because of the cheap­ness of elec­tronic goods in Bangkok com­par­a­tive to much of Asia, there are dozens of shops sell­ing thou­sands of TVs to thou­sands of Indian tourists. Bus­loads of them draw up out­side seem­ingly small retail out­lets (clearly with vast ware­hous­ing out the back) and all scram­ble back onto the bus with a 42″. The next bus pulls up and does the same — and so on all day.…

And there are peo­ple mak­ing deals. Every­where, young Indian men on the phone mak­ing deals.

I write all this this because I’m dream­ing — obsess­ing — now of the freshly cooked samosas sold the end of Soi Pahu­rat — next to the new Indian fab­ric mall — which may be the best in the world. Hot, crunchy on the out­side and del­i­cate but with a nice latent kick inside that reveals itself in the few min­utes thereafter.

They are — sorry — fuck­ing amaz­ing. And they’ve been known to pull me 15km across this insane city.

There is no other point to this post other than to try and excise this crav­ing I’m hav­ing — a crav­ing that may force me onto the Klong boat down the road, and then into a taxi to Pahu­rat if I don’t supress it.

It isn’t working.

Tagged with: Auckland • Bangkok • BKK • Chinatown • Little India