Bangkok travels

The last two and a half days in Bangkok has been truly a wonderful experience as I got to hang out with Mako, my former philosopohy teacher twelve years ago when I was a student at city college. We shared many of our travels and it was delightful hearing many of her stories about India and all the other countries that she visited after her six months visa expired. Mako is one of the of the most resilient person that I know and despite seeing extreme poverty in India, she did not feel dismissive but felt completely at home. I have said earlier that India is really not for the faint of heart--the dirtiness found in this country of 1.2 billion people will shock and repulse western minds into disbelief. The spiritual India that I thought I would find on my first trip was displaced by the unspeakable suffering of an overpopulated country struggling for its daily existence. And being cheated on my second trip, I became extremely jaded with the people but despite all of the difficult experiences of the previous year my love for Sanskrit and Buddhism make me want to only come back for more. Among the people who’ve taken me for a fool, there are also a lot of good people here who have sincerely helped me. Not only have I grown mentally stronger, I know that I am extremely fortunate to have a Sanskrit teacher like Vinaya whose simple honesty will help me on my path to mastering this language. 

Thailand in contrast to India is quite a fascinating country. I don’t know what to say about Thai people other than their friendliness is simply unrivalled in this part of the world. Here is a country that exemplifies the notion that you don’t have to speak the language to be friendly towards foreigners. There is a lack of aggressiveness and  assertiveness that I see too often in India. Mako and I stayed in a guest-house that was right on Khao San road which is a strip that is half a kilometer long filled with restaurants, hotels, and massage parlors catered to westerners. There are probably more westerners here than Thai people. And after exploring the nearby premises on our first day, I pretty much concluded that there was really nothing here that was interesting. The one thing that struck me was that I lost all sense of time when we were there and I don’t mean that in a good way. Every night was like a Friday night, there were lots of boozing and partying and local singers performing at a number of restaurants. In that stretch of block, around 7pm music would blast until after midnight. There were a lot of westerners and what really annoyed me the most was that there was a lot of smoking and as a health freak, I hated the smell of cigarettes. But on a positive note, Mako and I spent quite a bit of time talking about our travels and experiences that I lost all sense of time--two to three hours went by so quickly--I guess that naturally happens when you’re having so much fun. 

On Wednesday evening Mako realized how her iphone battery was not taking charge and with my 3G Ipad we were able to find out information on where to go and find her a replacement battery. We had a horrible wireless reception in our room so I couldn’t use my laptop. We found out that we needed to go to a mall close to downtown Bangkok and decided that Thursday will be spent at a mall where she will get her battery and I will get a new macbook charger because for some reason or another the voltage here in Asian countries completely destroyed my other adapter that I bought on ebay two months prior to my trip.  

My advise for my fellow travelers is to always have technology when traveling. It will pay off in leaps and bounds because traveling has been made so much easier in this day and age with the power of smartphones and tablets. Imagine being able to use skype, facebook, or google using 3G everywhere in the country that you are traveling in--on the roads, in small towns, and in the countryside. However, in India it’s really a bitch to get what you need for your iphone, ipads, and 3G for your laptop. The sim is close to impossible to get if you are a foreigner, so you need someone to vouch for you and then there’s a ton of paperwork to fill out. This useless bureaucratic process is very typical of India and it’s what really makes it so damn frustrating to travel in. The airports have free wifi for 20 mins complementary provided you have an Indian mobile number. What they don’t take into account is international travelers who don’t have Indian mobile numbers, I swear this is almost very typical of India--whoever runs the country don’t really think things through before setting on a course of action and so whenever they are finished with building something it is completely rife with problems. I mean this has never been the legacy of India at least not in its philosophy. Indians, in my opinion, have always been great thinkers and navigators of the human mind. Just what the hell happened? It was never this hard to get a sim in Vietnam or in Thailand. In both of these countries I was able to get it in a matter of minutes whereas in India, it sometimes would take days, weeks, and even months. 

I have probably been ranting a lot about India in the last couple of posts, but after arriving in Pune safe and sound at 3am on Saturday and seeing Vinaya finally after nine and a half months, I once again feel a strong affection for the honest and simple people who are living in this corrupt-ridden country. Now it's just a matter of settling down here in Pune and taking life very slowly day by day--studying Sanskrit, yoga, swimming, and traveling around the state of Maharashtra with my teacher.