Bangkok, 23 years later

River boats

This is my second time in Bangkok, after almost 23 years. I don't remember too many details about that previous trip, only a few impressions stand out: the pineapple vendors, the ubiquitous tuk-tuks, the street food, the fresh produce market with heaps of various sorts of chilies, and the awfully polluted air. Naturally, this time around I was curious to find out what has changed since then.

The pineapple vendors are still here! They serve the pineapple chopped up in a plastic bag with a wooden skewer, to be eaten on the go. In this hot climate, it's the perfect lunch, light and juicy and I love it. The vendors have diversified by adding other types of fruits to their selection, including melons, coconuts, pomelos and local fruits for which I have no name. I do recognize apples. They are polished a shiny red and packed in clear plastic gift bags. I can't decide whether they are meant to be eaten or taken to a Snow White production. The price of an apple (that is one apple, not one kilo) is two and a half times the price of a pineapple. Apples seem to be the expensive imported delicacy just like pineapples are imported tropical fruit back home.

The tuk-tuks are gone. Well, most of them. I realize this is good because the air pollution has gone down due to a lack of tuk-tuk exhaust fumes. The occasional tuk-tuk that I see around now doesn't emit anything black like it used to. Public transport now consists of buses, the metro and the sky train as well as the river boat. I took the river boat to get me to the sky train station. The sky train is clean, air conditioned, efficient, and not too crowded. Nice, but to me, Bangkok will never be the same without those crazy tuk-tuk drivers.

Street food

Street food is what travelers eat in Asia. I don't remember exactly how it was 23 years ago, except I ate delicious fried rice from street vendors. Now the vendors display too many animal parts that I wouldn't want to see, much less eat (think chicken feet, intestines, liver pieces in cloudy liquid, seafood with tentacles and so on). I still haven't worked up my courage to order anything from them. I don't know how to explain in Thai that I don't want any of those unmentionables in my fried rice.

But times have changed and now there are huge air conditioned shopping malls with food courts serving Thai food. This is much easier, I can order by pointing to a picture. It's just like a typical fast food experience: the pictures show bright, crisp, fresh food but what they really serve is wilted and soggy. I avoided stalls with too many eyes or claws or tentacles and so far I managed to eat well.

Because I arrived in Bangkok on a weekend, my first destination was the Chatuchak weekend market. On first glance it is just another sprawling Asian market. But on closer inspection, it's very clean and was less crowded than I expected. That's probably because half of the visitors were in the adjoining air conditioned mall. Not one single vendor at the market pressured me to buy anything which is a miracle. In fact, I saw several vendors passing time by watching movies or playing games on their electronic devices, oblivious to the potential shoppers they could harass. I was able to stroll through the market in peace and look at anything that caught my attention without having to worry that someone would run after me insisting that I buy it just because I looked.

Fresh produce market

The fresh produce market was disappointing. There are no more heaps of various sorts of chilies like I remember from my previous visit, it is all packed hygienically in bags. Therefore the intoxicating smells that I associate with a produce market are missing. With the white tiles, it reminds me of a pharmacy rather than a market.

Palace and skyscrapers

If it weren't for the occasional palace with a golden pointed roof or a piece of some animal's interior organs displayed on a food stall, Bangkok is just another modern city, not typical of Asia at all. They even have functioning street lights where cars stop on the red and pedestrians cross on the green.