Hello Bangkok, goodbye Bangkok

I wake up to my last day in Bangkok and my first day without diarrhea in almost seven days. Basically everything I’ve eaten since Delhi has turned into water. When it comes to food, my arrival in Thailand has been a tremendous torture: no matter where you walk in Bangkok, you’ll find a place to eat within five meters. I instantly became a fan of what the Thais sweetly call tiklicewithmango—in English, sticky rice with mango and coconut milk. It is absolutely irresistible, even if the outcome is still water…

I picked up my girlfriend at the airport on Tuesday the 9th, and we took the Skyline train to the city center. Reaching Bangkok this way gives you a wonderful perspective of the city’s landscape. The eastern outskirts are filled with small wooden houses, palm trees, and water canals intersecting narrow, quiet roads. Gradually, Thailand’s capital skyline appears from the train window. Dozens of skyscrapers rise from the incredibly dense and chaotic traffic, asserting their place on the horizon and showing off their expensive glass facades and architectural materials.

As we reach Siam Square, a large commercial area in the heart of the city, I feel I could be anywhere else in the Western world. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Gucci, Armani, and their lookalikes flash their icons across gigantic shopping malls. From above, people resemble ants—moving constantly in perfect synchronization with traffic lights and traffic jams.

Two stations later, the name Phaya Thai is announced—first in English, then in Thai—and we’ve reached our final destination. From the station, we take a taxi to the backpacker district of Banglamphu and find a place to stay at Lamphu Guesthouse, a two-minute walk from Khao San Road.

Banglamphu is a strange, impersonal place to stay. Massage centers, tattoo shops, 7/11 supermarkets, clothing and handicraft stalls, guesthouses, and restaurants line both sides of narrow, crowded streets where hundreds of backpackers from the wealthy West watch football on television while drinking pints of Chang beer. At night, the streets gain a rather peculiar atmosphere. Like Thai food—where sweet meets sour and chicken marries pork—the music on Khao San Road becomes a kind of eclectic Now 44 compilation: hippie bars play Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, ripped record stalls blast Daft Punk’s boom-boom mixes, and a Thai street artist tries his luck with Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling neutral. Food stalls seem to have multiplied in a matter of hours; the number of places to eat has doubled, and all kinds of exotic snacks can be found, from fresh mangoes to deep-fried black scorpions. It is dazzling and confusing, and the only place to find refuge is the hotel room.

Bangkok is known for its duality: the old and the new, tradition and modernity; everything can be experienced within the same space. Taking a boat from one of the several piers on the east bank of the Mae Nam Chao Phraya feels like a trip to an entirely different city. Small shrines, wooden houses, narrow empty roads, schoolchildren running and shouting, and temples like Wat Pho and Wat Arun reveal the spirit of an ancient Bangkok that faces modernity with an orange robe, a bald head, and bare feet.