Where am I again?

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I woke to the soft sound of increasing movement in the hallways outside my room.

The guest house was waking up. People shuffled to the communal bathrooms. I heard soft conversations about the previous night’s adventures, the day’s plans and the like.

It was nearly pitch black in my room. There were no windows and no lights, not even the omnipresent glow from the diodes of my blinking cell phone or the ‘charged’ light from my computer. It was weird and foreign to me. I knew there was light coming in through the crack under my door but I couldn’t see it because my bed abutted the door jam.

It was 11 a.m. and I’d slept for about six hours. It was light sleeping again and I had several vivid dreams, although I can’t recall exactly what they were about.

My head hurt and my stomach and muscles felt raw and grated. I had made my first significant tactical error during my soft invasion of Thailand. I ended up drinking nearly the entire fifth of Sangsom, a local Thai whiskey, I purchased the night before as we walked around the neighborhood. In my jet lagged state and pulsating adrenaline rush, I sipped and sipped while my eyes consumed all the neon-lit debauchery and big-city adventure from the night before, until the only thing left in the bottle was a slim quarter-ounce whisper of the brown, sweet whiskey.

Waking in that state is awful an any environment, and here I was, still mentally distorted from the time difference and in a huge city I knew nothing about, feeling completely in over my head.

I rolled over and laid face down in my pillow, letting the air conditioning wash over me as I mentally prepared myself to get up, drink some water (bottled), put clothes on, open the door into the assuredly-blinding light of the hallway and stumble down to the communal bathroom, that peculiar blue-tiled sanatorium that I hadn’t yet investigated fully, e.g. toilet/shower situation. I felt dread and was almost paralyzed about venturing out in my state, and was disappointed in myself for making such a blunder the night before.

Turned out I drank all my water the night before. So I had nothing to drink and I was still apprehensive about the prospect of gulping down mouthfuls of shower water… Now I had to go to 7-11 again to re-up on water. Already there were two empty one-liter bottles of water in my room and I was painfully aware of the fact that I would probably amass a collection of more empty water bottles in this country than I had my entire life up to that point.

The light was just as blinding as I’d anticipated. What I didn’t anticipate was the fact that the hallways and stairwells were not air conditioned, and immediately I started to sweat. The bathroom was empty and well kept, which was nice, so I took a stall and was reminded, yet again, that I was in a foreign country and would be getting used to new norms.

This was the moment I was able to place the image with the guidebook description that “small showers are usually provided in restrooms around Thailand.”

Well, “small showers” prompts a rather vague image, at least to me, and what I found was more like a small hose connected to the fresh-water line that feeds into the toilet. No toilet paper. After using the restroom, one uses the hose to hose one’s self off where one would have used toilet paper. Incidentally, I got myself and half the bathroom soaking wet when I went in for my first attempt. Since then it’s second nature and if I ever build my own house some day, I’m having one installed. Seriously.

Fresh with a shower and a new change of clothes, I hit the street, relieved I didn’t have to hump my pack with me the whole time either. I could have eaten at the hostel’s nice restaurant, but I wanted to sample some street food, so I headed off down Rambuttri.

Looking behind me, a view of the front of my hostel:

The semi-quaint, brick-paved road ends when you cross the main road about a hundred meters away, and beyond is the more traditional, madly-dense and nonsensical arrangement of all the apartments, shanties and other structures that make up the greater Bangkok skyline. Street vendors glutted the sidewalks and it’s along these sidewalks where nearly every Thai enjoys their meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The vendors differ wildly in their offerings, but there are themes and patterns that begin to emerge after a little exposure. One common style of vendor food is from the portable cart, either propelled by motorbike or bicycle, that offers a few select items, whether various meat satays (chicken, pork, beef or seafood bits or whole fried fishes) or meat-and-dough balls skewered and waiting for the small deep fryer or wok of heated oil.

Another common street food vendor is the one outside a small commercial kitchen that occupies a storefront. Out front, on the sidewalk, the kitchen has churned out food for a “buffet-style” spread, where anywhere from three or four to as many as twenty different items are available, all pre-cooked and waiting to get scooped on a plate. This is usually where the most variety is available, but I’ve also heard they’re also the easiest ways to contract food poisoning, because it’s in these quasi food troughs that bacteria flourish, where food is often left out for potential customers for hours at a time, without refrigeration.

This photo doesn’t do any justice to the actual flavor of the dish, but this was an extremely delicious meal of minced pork (basically ground pork), garlic, chiles, basil and lime, all stir-fried together and heaped on steamed rice, with a half-fried egg to go along:

I sat at a small stainless steal table and tucked in, adding heaping spoonfuls of fresh, raw green and red chiles and a little fish sauce for salt.

An older Thai gentlemen sat at a table across from me and basically stared at me the whole time I ate. I must have been either infringing on some nuanced Thai etiquette, or I looked funny, or something.

I finished eating, asked how much the meal cost and she told me 40 Baht, even though the sign said 30, but I wasn’t about to haggle after I’d already eaten her food. I walked into the street and as I continued on a severe cramp wrenched through my stomach. I looked around for a bathroom, of course not seeing any blinking restroom signs or anything and booked it for the hostel.

I spent the rest of the day writhing in my bed in between dashes to the restroom…

My first full day in Bangkok and I was sick as hell.

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