What does the pasty man want
An introspection on traveling to a distant land and being made to feel at home
It’s tough to write about Thailand when you’re still jetlaged after a 22 hour trip from your peaceful Eastern-European home. Heat strikes you the second you leave the airport, air so damp makes you wish you had gills. The only time you get to take a breath is when riding the squeaky clean BTS train, crammed with enthusiastic fellow backpackers. While sights of rice paddies and tangled wires flash by quietly, you can’t help but listen in on self-discovery stories, shared loudly in the unfortunatelly universal English language. “They give you sugar with your noodles”, a wide-eyed blonde with dreds squeeks and you make a mental note to never let yourself sound this naive, no matter the oddities presented to you in this trip. As enthusiastic and attentive as you are, your plan is to welcome all the exciting and exotic things this trip has to offer with healthy interest and cultivated humbleness.
And for your following days in Bangkok, is it difficult to act modest. The city greets you with beeping car signals, rumbling scooter engines and screaming advertisments for skin whitening lotion infused with, what else if not, snail extract. Sugary aromas of cooked rice swap with nasty stenches of slops that you try to leap over with your running shoes that you bought for anything but actually running. All this while navigating the busy sidewalk in stultifying 30 degree heat, trying to exhibit your European politeness while refusing the never ending offers of street food, souvenirs, tuktuk rides, tailored suits and legal hookers. Mai-ka, mai-ka, you shake your head expresivelly and your ears keep ringing with the miaowing calls for masah when you lie in the crispy sheets of your air-conditioned hotel room at night.
But now the buzzing first days of the trip are over and couple of sleepless nights and several ferry transfers later I finally can walk to the nearby 7–11 with the relaxed confidence of a permanent resident of a tropical island. Still, no feeling of being deserted here either. In creative English I’m invited wherever I turn — tattoo shops inform you how licensed and certified they are, so you could calmly get that little dolphin on your ankle on your way to the restaurant that is willing to make you an American version of fried rice while clipart monkeys and colorful peace signs lure you to come smoke with us under a painting of a huge cannabis leaf at the beach bar. English breakfast, Italian dinner, French deserts — all to suit your needs, my friend. Scooter rides across the town do give you a lot of time to marvel the local advertising skills. You pass a huge banner of an airbrushed 80's dame seducing you to come and see some Europian ladies, while a shoreline seafood restaurant illuminates the sky with its red neon name Orgasmic and every 100 meters of this exciting road is marked with a rack of washed out rum bottles filled with gasoline so necessary to fuel your careless drive home from a plywood beach bar that has happy tea right next to diet coke on their menu. You can tell the always-smiling locals see right through you — you want fresh coffee, you want recognizable pastries, you want “real dough” pizza and the number three from the five available levels of spiciness. And they take care of you like the curious five-year-old that you become on your exotic holiday. They put destination-identifying stickers on your shirt AND your luggage when you manage to buy the right ticket for a ferry trip to another welcoming island. They give you pineapple slices when you’re sitting in the speedboat on your way from a snorkeling trip, exhausted by the incomprehensible spectrum of underwater beauty you were just shown. They smile politely when you scream SAWAT-DEE KA in their faces and try to bow as gracefully as your sunburnt physique lets you when your gourmand self is presented with a bowl of steaming green curry. Spiciness level number three, please.
Days here seem to be weird, sweaty and colorful enough to never get dull (I guess that’s why they put topical fish in screensavers). And even if you take the same route to the same 7–11 every evening, down the same muddy road, over the same stinky slops, past the same chirping birdcages, the moment you think you got a grip on what it’s really all about, five kids on a scooter pass you by and there your same old pasty self is, pointing fingers with your mouth open.
Photos by Karolis Masilionis
