All that relaxation I had achieved by driving through rural Thailand evaporated in a big fiery explosion as soon as I reached Bangkok! This is an enormous city where the cityscape of skyscrapers extends as far as the eye can see. Much more like Los Angeles than San Francisco, and like LA it has an incredible maze of highways, bridges, overpasses, elevated causeways, and toll booths. Unfortunately the maze is too tight for the Google Map Lady, who from time to time forgot to mention a key intersection such that I took a left when I should have taken a right. Everyone of these screwups dumped me in heavy street traffic that I had to navigate through several turns before I could get back on the speedway to the airport (and had to paid the toll again, grhh).
Eventually I made it to the airport, where I wasted another half hour looking for a gas station, and returned my trusty steed. I am back at being a pedestrian (:
The way to move between the airport and the city is the 65 baht (US$ 2) fast train, but from the arrival station you are on your own figuring out how to access the metro. Fortunately the rail ends at the green line, which is the one I needed to get to my hotel. In Google Maps it looked like a short walk from station N10, but in reality it was a good kilometer under the sun, lugging my backpack. Unfortunately I will have to walk this one kilometer back and forth to the metro, because once I am at the station I can go anywhere in the city.
For the first day I limited my activities to a walk through my neighborhood, where I was hoping to soak in some of the local color. For the most part, however, I had to deal with a jungle of steel and glass behemoths, which reminded me of walking through Hong Kong or the San Francisco financial district after hours. Clearly there is a lot of money in Bangkok, and the corporations have spared no expense building their corporate palaces.
I did follow a small canal boarded with simple dwellings. Most of them were just a door on an uninterrupted wall, but some had taken the time to place some planting pots along the wall, as if creating their own small gardens. Gardens is something I think this city desperately needs.
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