Hello all! I'm back as promised to
bring you the report of the rest of my weekend and of the last few
days, including pictures! When last we left our intrepid hero, he was
slumbering soundly after a night of aggressive drinking and
rule-breaking. Having returned so late, I slept for a healthy spell
Sunday morning and then showered off the bar tar and bad decisions
from the night before. I've always found the best way to cure a
hangover is to eat horribly bad food and be outside, preferably
working out but really just not sitting indoors and stewing in your
own filth is helpful. So, with this in mind, I made the decision to
get back out there and try and finish up doing all the “touristy”
things in Bangkok. Since I had already conquered Chatuchak Market the
other big thing to see was the various Wats and the Grand Palace. Now
on my first day, Shireen and I had toured around one Wat but there
are roughly 436,000 Wats in Bangkok so I certainly needed to go see
more, and particularly the bigger ones like Wat Pho and the Golden
Mount. So, I grabbed my adventure bag and headed out to the streets.
Now when I go out adventuring I follow
a very simple set of rules. Have a general area to explore, get to
that area, and then walk around and get lost. In my many years of
life and various traveling experiences, I've found that I see a lot
more interesting stuff if I have a loose rubric of points to go to
but mostly play the rest of it off the cuff and follow my instincts,
which almost never lead me wrong. So I mostly just wander around
places until I see something that looks promising or different and
then walk to it. It's a brilliant style that has only one real issue
and that is that it is time consuming. I took the rail to, what
appeared to be on my map, an area close to the Palace and then got
out to go walking around. However, my map is completely garbage and
was apparently not drawn to scale. What looked like a small kip over
turned into a trek of Rodenberryish proportions. At one point I even
debated abandoning my personal philosophy and catching one of the
many motorcycle taxis that littered the roads on my journey but my
stubbornness won out and I trudged on. At one point I was hoofing it
down this long straightaway and on the right side of the road there
were a healthy number of armed forces standing around a high wall. As
I kept walking I discovered this to be the place the King actually
lives. It was an absolutely massive compound and he had his own herd
of cattle I saw as I was walking past, so that was kind of neat. On
the left of me was a wall of trees and behind them was the Bangkok
racing track. However, more interesting than that was a tiny estuary
that ran next to the road. At one point I looked down and saw some
humongous catfish which was pretty neat but the real treat came a
little further down where there was a a water monitor just chilling
there swimming around and looking at me. For those not in the know, a
water monitor is basically a smaller version of a Komodo Dragon so it
was especially fun to look at him swimming in sort of a sewer. Like
if an alligator just popped up out of a manhole cover only cooler
since I see alligator's all the time but never monitor lizards.
So after spending an inordinate amount
of time looking at an overgrown lizard, I continued my journey and
discovered that this estuary wasn't a sewage system but actually led
to a....pond? Well, it was a larger body of still water but, like
everything else in Bangkok it had a lot of trash in it, so I'm going
to call it a pond but I'm not entirely sure what it is; however,
there was a really cool old guy in there fishing with this giant net
so it couldn't have just been a sewage outlet.
Sidebar: Bangkok is the dirtiest city
I've ever been in. Now I've never gone to NYC or Mexico city but I
find it hard to believe that any city could be significantly more
filthy than Bangkok. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy the city,
but if you are a neat freak or something, maybe think twice about
coming here. The place smells putrid, like dead garbage. And that is
probably because there is garbage everywhere. My favorite thing is
that seemingly cars are just abandoned when you get into a wreck
instead of fixed. I say this because I can't even tell you how many
busted down vehicles I've seen on the sides of roads, many of them
filled with trash indicating they have been there for some time.
OH. Sidebar to the sidebar: I forgot to
recount the story of traveling to the market on Saturday wherein I
road in a tuk-tuk which got into a wreck. Now tuk-tuk drivers are
equally as daring as the motorbike guys but to be fair to my driver,
he wasn't at fault. We were sitting in gridlocked traffic (which
seems to be the only type of traffic here) and we were right next to
a cross street. All the cars from the cross-street were weaving
around our parked cars to get to the turning lane on the right and at
least 30 of them did it without issue. However, one random guy had
the brilliance mix of being bold extremely confident and wildly
incorrect and when it came his turn to weave through he barely
hesitated on his weave through which resulted in him dragging the
side of his car across our tuk-tuk and ripping of his back bumper
entirely and making my driver thoroughly upset. The tuk-tuk help up
like a trooper and was relatively undamaged and the other driver,
clearly mortified at his miscalculation, rilled down his window,
looked back, exchanged a nod with my driver, and drove on, leaving
his bumper off in the road. Let me reiterate, driving here is wild.
Anyway, back to the main storyline.
After passing the fisherman, I finally came to what looked to be a
genuinely interesting landmark in Wat Benchamabophit. Wat just means
temple in Thailand and its where Buddhist monks pray and learn and
such. This one was pretty cool in that there was a lot of open space
to take pictures from and I've found Wats can be somewhat crowded for
space. It also had a monitor lizard playing around in the little
streams that ran through it so that was neat and when I got there the
monks of the temple were in the process of daily rituals and prayer.
I took off my shoes and went in for a bit but decided against taking
any photos as that seemed crass. Eventually I left for I had so much
time and so little else to do.
After the Wat, I kept trekking towards
what I hoped was Democracy monument. However, before getting there I
came upon a bunch of other fun things to take photos of, a monument
to the king, the UN, pictures of the king, another small wat, statues
of the king and more pictures of the king just to name a few. Having
never lived under tyranny or in a constitutional monarchy, I'm
genuinely baffled by how much the Thai people seem to love the king.
I suppose it is much the same as the British and there love for the
Queen but I just don't get it. You spent a lot of time, energy and
lives to get out from under the unfettered rule of one person, why
instill them as a glorified mascot? I'll be the first to admit I
don't know the King's particular role in the government but I do know
he is an extremely wealthy man and has pretty significant sway over
things when he chooses to do so which seems dangerous to me. But
everyone here looooves him. His picture is everywhere and there are a
lot of “Thailand Hearts the King” bumper stickers. They even
have a song that may be the national anthem I'm not really sure, but
it gets played everyday at 5 and before movies and stuff and people
stand around in silence listening to it. He is just a generally
beloved figure which is so odd to me. Sidenote on the pictures: they
are all different. Dude must have taken 12000 photos in his life all
decked out in royal regalia and posing, and not a one of them has him
smiling. For a place titled “The Land of a Thousand Smiles” their
king never so much as smirks.
Anyway, the rest of the day was
thoroughly exciting but doesn't have lot of story value. I went to
the Golden Mount next which is another Wat that is quite tall and has
a spectacular panoramic view of Bangkok from the top. It was also
bedecked with hundreds of bells of varying sizes and all the visitors
to the Wat were ringing them. Not one to be left out of any event
that is noisy and childish, I proceeded to ring every single bell in
the place and bang on all the gongs I saw as well. I am roughly 6
years old.
After the Golden Temple I found
Democracy Monument which is basically another Wat but a little more
majestic and without all the monks in orange robes walking about. In
there place were an entire company of the army. Apparently the
monument, and one right up the road from it dedicated to students
killed in a student led protest in 1973, have been big sites for
anti-coup protestors and both sites had a gaggle of military folks
standing by. After looking at these I actually ended up getting quite
lost. I found my way back to Khao San square which was much better in
the daytime though worse since I was sober so all in all about even.
But after that I spent several hours genuinely wandering down back
roads having no idea where I was. Refusing to ask directions or
getting a cab, I ended up using that old standby of Magellan and
Columbus and I found the Sun in the sky, made a rough approximation
of North, and started walking. By the time I got to a landmark I
knew, it was almost 7 PM, and it was getting dark. I gave up the
other attractions as a lost cause and hopped back on the rail to go
home and get dinner, resolving myself to another day to view the rest
of the Wats and the Grand Palace. That night had nothing fun as I was
too pooped from all my adventuring and I slept as a newborn lamb
being cuddled by the baby Jesus.
Monday was back to work and nothing too
eventful happened. Just more research into the backgrounds of
prisoners of conscience in Vietnam. Confidentiality is one of the
most important things about our operations here, so I'm not really at
liberty to discuss the cases I'm working on in anything other than
broad strokes. That makes it hard to blog about them in a manner that
would be interesting to followers so if I sound a little cryptic when
I start talking about the work that is why. They take confidentiality
extremely seriously over here, to the point that my co-workers are
using assumed names so that the Vietnamese government cannot track
the work they do and through that find escaped political refugees who
are seeking asylum. The point being, I can't say as much as I'd like
to about the cases I'm working on because these people have fled
their home nations and are living abroad while waiting for the UN to
grant them refugee status and if they are found they will be detained
like the others in IDC. However, what I can say is that in the case
I'm currently working on there are several young men and women who
were Catholics in Vietnam and political activists. They were part of
“illegal” Catholic groups because they were not government
sponsored and spoke out against the government's actions with regard
to their religious beliefs (specifically abortion which is sort of
encouraged by the country's child limitation of 2 kids per family)
and the government's repression of free speech. For their actions,
these people were persecuted and eventually arrested. Many of their
compatriots were sentenced to significant prison terms for speaking
out against the government and the ones we are working with had to
flee the country to avoid similar arrests. Their family and friends
have been harassed about their whereabouts and some of them were
kicked out of various churches and safe places that were harboring
them because the owners no longer felt safe assisting these wanted
people. Now I am not endorsing all the beliefs these people ascribe
too and feel quiet strongly in the opposite of a few of them;
however, their biggest issue is one I unabashedly agree with: people
who are governed have the right to peaceably speak out against their
government. And while I may hate or disagree with some o the things
they are saying, they damn sure have the right to say them.
Anyways, that is what has been going on
over here. Again this blog went longer than intended so I'll table
the pictures for next time. Hope you enjoyed it and as always,
comment and spread the word. 7 more weeks of this to go.
Jed
So jealous all the time!
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