Our first stop was Bangkok. We arrived late at night to a steamy night and took a cab to Kho San Road, the place the guide book described as a hangout for backpackers. That is an understatement. As everyone who has been there knows. Kho San is one of the biggest centers of "backpacker" culture in the world. The sweet smell of pot and hundreds of foreigners "enjoying" life were our welcome to backpacking in SE Asia for the first time. You don't learn much about the country you are visiting when at Kho San but you do learn a lot about an interesting part of Western society. We stayed at a small guest house a few blocks away from the commotion although we did venture back a few times. There really is no other place that caters to the needs of travelers like Kho San.

We stayed in Bangkok for about 3 days. It was hot, sticky, relatively difficult to get a breath of fresh air, but overall an interesting place. We hit all the main sites. The Grand Palace, famous wats, poor neighbourhoods, the river boat tour, and the malls. Sarah also took time out for one of those famous Thai massages. The thing that always gets you about the big cities of SE Asia is how there can be such affluence and such poverty side by side. Just a few blocks apart. You can see this in the States or Canada, but not like you do here. The areas surrounding the shopping malls are like a green oasis in the midst of a never ending desert.

Two reflections on Bangkok. The colorfulness of the wats and Grand Palace. The colors and the brightness of Bangkok's cultural assets are amazing. In Japan, and in America we seem to have a fear, or mismatching colors and so we stick to rather conservative decoration of our buildings. The brightness of Thai culture is so evident when you walk through the Grand Palace. There are multitudes of colors, emotions, creatures, and moods. When we went to Bangkok we followed relatively quickly on the heels of the Asian financial crisis that in particular pointed out some weaknesses of the Thai economy. One of the most striking images I have of Bangkok was enshrined in my memory while we were on the boat tour. The tour took us away from the wats and the tourists and to some parts of town where people lived in rundown riverside houses and kids bathed in the river. With this in the foreground there was a lone skyscraper in the background. It was completely empty. This seemed to symbolize the state of some countries in the developing world. The skyscrapers move to the foreground and the people in their run down houses move into the background and the relationship between the two is not clear.