The Changing Faces of My Neighborhood

I've traveled the streets of my neighborhood -- a district that is part of greater Bangkok -- at many hours of the day and night now. It is never the same. Street vendors appear and disappear -- their wares sold only at dawn, or in the late evening hours. Whole discount markets emerge from almost no-where as evening falls, only to be gone the next morning as I taxi by to work. Even sidewalk restaurants are temporary -- there for lunch, gone for dinner. The facility with which businesses come and go seems almost a metaphor for the Buddhist foundations of the culture -- nothing is permanent, everything is emptiness. I'm delighted to find new things each day, but sometimes mourn the vendor whose morning dim sum is nowhere to be found if my timing is off. The locals understand the patterns well. The stalls of the indoor food market are crowded in the AM when the stands are filled, empty in the evenings when things are closing down.

Poor and rich seem to live side by side in this part of Bangkok -- my apartment building, filled with middle class Thais and some foreigners (many of whom seem like they might be missionaries) has a garage filled with new cars, and people coming and going with briefcases and laptops. Next door is a tin shack shanty town filled with the families of workers who are building a large new house on the lot next door. Their lives are lived publically -- food cooked outside, and televisions hooked up to outside lines and shared. There is a University not far away, and the Internet shops are packed with teenagers playing video games day and night. And though I've not ventured there yet, one of the biggest cinemas showing Western and Imax films is further up the street, with a shopping center filled with Western fast food restaurants. All of this lives peacefully side by side.

I'm far from the center of the tourist sections of Bangkok as well as the older parts of the city. I've not found a wat (temple) in my wanderings yet, or a place to get a good massage (though I've ventured downtown to other districts to have my first experience of Thai massage). I've been surprised at how few monks I've seen on the streets. I suspect it's a bit like living in Queens in NY (as I do) -- life as many New Yorkers live it, but not necessarily what people think of when they imagine Bangkok. But it's home for the next couple of months, and I'm learning more about its changing faces every day.