Bangkok was a big one. My entry point into Asia, and an opportunity to slow down and stay in place for a while. I booked an AirBnb in a building with a rooftop pool and a gym. I was looking forward to having an apartment to myself, a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom that I didn’t have to share with anybody. This would be my home for the holiday season and my base as I explored a totally new culture in Thailand.

Basking in Bangkok

• My trip to Bangkok had me catching a connecting flight in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I debated whether or not this counts as having been to Africa, leaning towards not really. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to think that I set foot on three different continents all within a single day. The quick view I got of the lights of downtown Addis Ababa as I arrived from Athens had me feeling some regret that I hadn’t allowed for at least a couple of days to explore the city.
• My stop in Ethiopia did add some unexpected hassle when I arrived in Bangkok. After standing in line at customs, I was initially turned away because I didn’t have a Yellow Fever waiver after having transited through Africa. So I had to go and stand in the waiver line for another half an hour before returning back to wait in the immigration line again. But, at least they ultimately let me in.
• The train ride from the airport to my condo gave me my first look at Bangkok from the elevated rail line. The city sprawls out endlessly in all directions. Surprisingly, to me, modern, with fancy residential skyscrapers poking up all over the place. Stepping off the airport train to transfer to the local skytrain that would take me the rest of the way, I was smacked in the face by the heat. It was only 30 degrees but metal roof of the train station and the humidity of the air were an incredible shock, especially after the comfortable, cool of the A/C on the train.
  When I made it to my stop, I descended to the street level for the first time along Sukhumvit Road and experienced the madness that is Thai traffic. Sukhumvit is a major artery through Bangkok, technically stretching for hundreds of kilometers. I was about 10 kilometers out from the center of the city, and even here it was absolutely bustling. The entire roadway was covered with cars, buses, trucks and thousands of mopeds and motorcycles. Constant honking and engine noises, amplified by the skytrain tracks that run overhead creating a roof for the roadway.
  My condo was only a few hundred meters from the station, which was pretty handy, as public transit in Bangkok isn’t quite as developed as I was used to in Europe. I initially missed the turn to my building, as I judged it to just be an alleyway at first. But no, this narrow two-way street, without a sidewalk on either side would become all too familiar to me over the next few weeks. I remember my first walk down it felt so dangerous, car and bikes passing by within inches of me. By the end of my time, I would be perfectly comfortable, understanding how aware, patient and considerate Thai drivers are of pedestrians and other users of the road. But, for now, it felt like chaos.
  The condo building itself was fairly new and quite nice overall. Though, one of the first things you see upon entering the elevator for the building are numerous notices regarding the illegality of short term rentals in Bangkok. Warnings about the fines and promises of clemency if you present yourself to the police promptly. As far I know, this only applies to tenants occupying an apartment for less than a month, which put me on the right side of the law, but they were still a little spooky.
• The condo was everything that I wanted. A relatively compact studio apartment with a tiny balcony with a washing machine and a couple drying racks. A nice walk-through closet and a giant shower. A galley kitchen with a two hob electric stovetop. A desk facing a windowed wall that looked out into the empty lot next door, overgrown into a mini-jungle with a massive tree that was home to all sorts of birds and squirrel-like tree shrews. It was heaven.

• Other a run to get groceries, my first few days in the apartment were spent in seclusion. Enjoying a bit of relaxation away from the world of travel and the world in general. It’s hard to recall exactly what my feeling was now after 3 months in Asia, but I do remember feeling a bit of culture shock. I guess it was the overstimulation of being surrounded by people and noise all of the time, and feeling like a visual minority for effectively the first time in my life. I know I felt some trepidation whenever I ventured away from the apartment. With time this became easier to overcome, and nowadays it’s a faint memory. From my current perspective, Bangkok is a modern and rapidly developing city, with some differences from the Western cities that I was used to, but not as many as I would see in the smaller towns and villages of Cambodia and Vietnam.
• The heat was another big factor making Thailand feel different. I didn’t see a single day under 30 degrees, though thankfully I didn’t see any over 35 either. Compounding the heat was, of course, the humidity. Every time I went outside I was guaranteed to come back soaked in sweat. Let alone when I had to make the twenty minute walk from the grocery store loaded with all my food for the week. That said, no complaints. Late December and January in 30 degree heat, that’s a dream for basically any Canadian.
  More surprising was seeing the local Thai people wearing their winter clothes, not too different from what Canadians would be wearing at this time of year. Sweaters and parkas were the norm, while all of the tourists around them were decked out in shorts and tank tops. Temperature truly is relative.
• Despite being in Bangkok for over a month, I ended up seeing a terribly minuscule amount of the city. And not just due to how large of a place it is. Having control over my space and my food led to me completely nesting during my stay. I would enjoy lazy mornings, playing games on my phone, listening to podcasts. Afternoons, I spent trying to catch up on blogs and processing photos. Though, I would inevitably end up procrastinating from that with one distraction or another.
  My principle distraction during this time was working on my geography trivia. It started with me wanting to see how many countries I could locate on a world map. Initially, I was able to get roughly a hundred or so countries, of the 197 recognized by the UN. By the end of my stay, I knew the location of all 197 countries. But also, I could list all of the countries alphabetically. And I knew the capitals of about 75% of them. Today, I know the capitals of all of them. And all of the flags. And I extended past the 197 “official” countries to about 250 countries, overseas and disputed territories.
  I would spend my evenings watching TV and movies. I started rewatching the first couple seasons of the Fargo television show that was shot in Calgary. I was already feeling a bit homesick during this period, and seeing locations I recognized throughout the background of the show either helped lessen that feeling or fed it, I’m not exactly sure which.
• Bangkok is known as one of the street food capitals of the world, but not for me. The true revelation for me were the culinary options available from 7-Elevens. I had heard that Japanese 7-Elevens were on another level from those in North America, but I didn’t realize that this also applied to Thailand. The number of fantastic ready to eat meals that I had from 7-Eleven cannot be understated. My favorite were an Australian beef curry and a Thai wagyu basil beef that did not pull any punches on the spice level. I typically appreciate a high level of spice in my food and this stuff had my head buzzing and sweat prickling my forehead. Just tremendous.
• When I arrived at the apartment, there were some basic necessities that were missing. Dish towels, cloths and a drying rack. Not a huge deal, but a problem that I felt like needing solving. Rather than bothering my host with it, I used it as an opportunity to check out the Thai shopping scene. And holy cow. Bangkok does malls like no where I’ve seen. About a twenty minute walk down Sukhumvit is a complex of multi-story malls that line both sides of the street for hundreds of meters, complete with overstreet connections along the skytrain line.
  These malls host all sorts of stores, generally lumped together by the types of products they sell. All of the luxury stores together, the general clothing together, the home goods together, so on. I found what I was looking for at an Ikea located on the fifth floor of one of these malls, though it took a good amount of wandering to find it. Along the way, I admired the integration of plant life and found a multi-story waterfall in an internal courtyard that had multiple cafes overlooking it.
  Another day would take me to two very different sorts of malls. At the MBK Center, I found a mall unlike any I’d ever been to. This was more of a market, with thousands of stalls, all shoulder to shoulder with one another. Here you could find all sorts of name brand clothing, shoes, bags, accessories for extremely low prices. I never managed to figure out if these are actually knock-offs or just clothes that fell off the truck on the way out of the factory. The quality of everything seemed about as good as I would expect from any legitimate vendor. On another floor, I found the electronics section, and just like with the clothing, there were hundreds of stalls selling phones, accessories, gaming equipment, cameras, basically anything you could imagine. Every stall had a barker trying to grab your attention, entice you in, asking what you were looking for. Along with the copious LED lights and screens, it was a sensory overload.
  The same day, I made my way to ICONSIAM, a massive modern, luxury mall. This is most striking mall that I’ve ever been in. The entire bottom floor in an enormous food hall, offering every culinary option you could imagine, even featuring a floating market on an artificial river that runs through the hall. The upper floors are a more normal mall experience, with a ton of Western and Asian brands. But, the architecture of the building itself is incredible. The mall sits riverside, and the entire backside is a series of terraced balconies forming the shape of a lotus flowering, stretching out and blooming above the water.
• For a city as large as it is, Bangkok has precious little parkland. Though, that which it has is put to pretty good use. I would visit Benchakitti and Queen Sirikit Parks during my stay. Benchakitti is a very large park featuring a man-made lake, gardens, and a wetland area with observation stands. The wetland area was of particular interest to me and I would spend a good couple of hours at different observation posts watching the variety of exotic birds that populated the park. Queen Sirikit is more of a forested area with a series of ponds and streams, along with a more manicured garden area. Here, I came across tree shrews, squirrels, tree and water monitors, and of course a ton more birds. Also at Queen Sirikit, I saw the only rain that I would experience while in Bangkok, and even that was only a light sprinkle that lasted all of fifteen minutes.
• I mentioned that when I arrived, I was happy to find that my apartment faced into an empty lot with a giant tree. As it turns out, I would only get to enjoy this for less than week. Timed almost perfectly with my arrival, the lot began to see development. It started with the removal of several smaller trees around the lot. For a little while, I thought my tree would be spared as it seemed like they were focusing mostly on the back of the lot, away from my window. But that only lasted so long, as one morning I watched as the tree cutters climbed into my tree to start removing the larger limbs. It would take them the better part of three or four days to take the tree down. For the remainder of my stay, I would watch the steady, if somewhat, slow process of turning that minor jungle into a gravel lot. Using just a couple of small diggers, the size that you can rent for working in your garden, a dump truck not much bigger than an F-350 and a like-sized steam roller, a small team of five or six people transformed my little paradise into something more appropriate for future development. The price of progress.

• All in all, my stay in Bangkok was the rest that I was looking for. A chance to settle in and have some consistency, while also have the convenience of having an entire new city to explore at my doorstep, when I felt up to it. The city itself was overwhelming in a lot of ways. It was loud and chaotic, polluted and smelly, hot and humid. But it was also beautiful and alive, home to very kind and gracious people. I regret seeing as little of it as I did, that wasn’t initially the plan. But, I suppose I took the rest that I needed in that moment, and I don’t regret that. It was a good prelude to the adventure that was to come as I joined the biking tour that would take me from Bangkok to Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam.