Ignorant Tourist

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I've complained elsewhere about my neighborhood. It's one of the places that some of the more disreputable tourists come to play. Every time I walk down the road I am accosted by touts wanting to take me to a massage parlor or tuk-tuk drivers wanting to cart me around to bogus gem shops, for which they get a modest commission. Later in the evening there are various women who offer to accompany me wherever I care to go.

My fashion sense probably doesn't help matters much. Living in Tokyo and the US, I developed a thing for tight pants and rockabilly shirts with a slightly tropical theme. OK, so one of them features a more than slightly tropical bamboo print with voodoo skulls. In Tokyo and the States, with luck, it comes off as hip and kitsch. But in the actual tropics, it looks like I just walked out of a cheap clothing market and I'm ready to sling money at any stupid thing thrust in front of my face. So to a certain extent, I deserve all the unwanted attention. In a way, after years of inflicting my questionable fashion sense upon my innocent friends, perhaps I have it coming.

I can go on and on about the woes of being viewed as a fountain of money here, but earlier this week I got a glimpse of the other side. Walking down Sukhumvit road past one of the more infamous areas, I was passed by a well-dressed woman, obviously on her way back to the office after lunch. She had an exasperated smile fixed on her face. A step behind her a tall gangly tourist at least 15 years her senior was quoting prices in an effort to persuade her to go to his hotel. Just because she worked in that area she was probably mistaken for a prostitute on a regular basis by foreigners who can't discriminate a woman dressed for business and a woman dressed to do The Business. I didn't catch much of it as they passed in the other direction, but I did hear him say 150. I sure hope he meant dollars and not baht. Some folks will tell you that everyone here has their price, but I firmly believe that is not any truer here than in the West.

Thaksin's Revenge

I got food poisoning earlier this week. The vendors down in front of my building don't use electricity and hence no refrigeration. That doesn't stop the nursing staff from the hospital across the way from frequenting the place so it's good enough for me. I worked in restaurants in the US and had to take the test to get my food handler's permit. We learn in the little class they give that meat should never be at room temperature. It should always be either freezing or cooking. You can stretch the rules a bit and thaw your frozen meat under a stream of tap water, but that's about it.

Here in Bangkok, though, vendors have bowls of mixed raw meats on display in the front of their stands just to show how yum-yum-yummy it all is. And far from even room temperature here, we're talking about the tropics, with warm rains bringing down zoos of airborne viruses and bacteria. And just in case the rain misses the food, taxis drive by to churn up the flowing rivers of primordial goo and throw it back up off the street for good measure.

I've been eating this food twice a day for weeks now, but that's not how I got sick. On Wednesday night I decided to splurge a bit and had dinner at a popular sports bar called Gulliver's Traveller's Inn. After weeks of downing food that would give a group coronary to the FDA, I was laid low by a hamburger. The guts are back to normal now, but I had a lot of time to think about new decorating ideas for bathrooms.

Fireworks Or Terrorists....And Is There That Big a Difference Anymore?

It was Independence day for us Americans last weekend. There are quite a few American expats here and I should have expected to hear fireworks since they are readily available all over Asia. Even safety-minded Japanese love to watch their children tossing lit firecrackers around (they are incredibly mystified by the fact that in the US you can't light fireworks except on the 4th of July but you can shoot a gun any time you like).

But recently there has been a lot of irresponsible rumor mongered by the world press to the effect that the Terrorists are planning an attack on key tourist sites in Thailand. The fuzz even caught a couple three of them and got them to confess to a nefarious plan last month. So when I heard the large explosions coming from somewhere in the tourist area I got a creepy chill and had to keep convincing myself that fireworks sometimes make big, dull thumping noises. I wish I knew what grenades and plastic explosives sound like. No wait: I don't wish that at all.

The next day there were no ruins and no stories in the papers (man, they would love that: bombings at the go-go bars....I wonder how many papers would use the words 'carnage' and 'carnal' together in the headline). Life went on and nobody got a shot at the Pulitzer.

Again, that evening, I heard more explosions. Yet this was July 5th. And it was much more like what I thought mortars might sound like. I could easily imagine concrete getting thrown around with abandon. I rushed to my balcony but my floor was not high enough to see anything. Across the way I could see tourists out on their hotel balconies enjoying better views. They were pointing in the distance, but I could not see if their open mouths were laughing or gaping.

I was even more spooked than the night before. But again, in the morning there was no carnage and the girly bars were open for business. Yes, they do business even in the morning.

Last month a Thai agent for the CIA arrested a man for buying radioactive cesium from him. The agent says the guy intended to build a dirty bomb with it. But it's turning out that the agent conned the guy into it so he could improve his arrest record. The guy says the agent told him that the cesium would be bought back from him, he could make a few bucks and nobody would get hurt. There is no evidence that the man has any terrorist contacts and it looks like he is pretty much just a chump.

This whole terrorist thing has everybody pretty jumpy. And that's the point. That's why they call it TERRORism. As much as George Bush talks about a war on terror, the fact is that the moment we started cancelling our vacations, the war was won. By the terrorists. Their goal is not to kill people, but to scare the rest of us into ruining our economy. The real war on terror should not be fought by armies, but by tourists who refuse to stay home and shoppers who don't cancel their Christmas because of a rumor in the press.

That's the soap-box for this week. Sorry it was a couple of days late....

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.