Bangkok Revisited

When I was staying with Kavi, we watched V for Vendetta. He was writing a paper about it, and how politicians use the media to influence the balance of power. I was surprised that it held up well to a second viewing. I had complaints about the movie when I first saw it--I thought it encouraged complacency, and a vague sense that someone else would do the fighting and you could just wander through a heavily armed fighting force because you believed in Justice and no-one would shoot at you.

A second viewing revealed a much less effortless film. Evey's plight is supposed to represent all of us who resent living in fear of our governments, and it is she, and her suffering, we should envision as our own when we must choose to identify with someone, not the masked and anonymous crowd.

A second viewing of Bangkok was also an improvement on the first. I had a feel for the town now, and could effectively resign myself to taxis when I had to, and take the public transport the rest of the time (which was rarely).

Kavi and I parted ways at the MRT/BTS station so that I could go to the train station, which is at the end of the MRT, while he could head for his apartment (at the end of the BTS). I purchased an overnight sleeper to Chang Mai for the evening of the following day for about $14, and then, after doing a little research, I headed for MBK.

When I'd gotten back from the V.I.P. bus, I cleaned up, did a little digging, and then went to the MBK. MBK is to Bangkok as The Mall of The Americas is to Minneapolis St. Paul. It's a huge multistory sprawl of shops and hosts thousands of visitors and tourists every day.

I was there because on the fourth floor, about half the floor was Asian handphone vendors.

Kavi had recommended that I pick up a handphone because it would be so much cheaper for me to make and recieve calls while I was in the countries, and I would be able to make it that much easier to meet up with him over the weekend.

Let's be clear, he hadn't actually said I should buy a phone, he'd simply suggested I buy a SIM card (about 50 baht) and throw a little money on it, top-up style.

See, the rest of the world sees a phone as completely divorced from the phone number that it recieves. It's like your e-mail. You have a computer, and you have an e-mail address, but these things aren't linked in any restrictive way, you can check your e-mail from any other computer, you just have to set it up to know who you are.

That's what SIM cards do for handphones--the Asian term for cellphones--here. So if I had a phone that accepted SIM cards, I could just spend about 6 bucks, and have a functioning phone that would accept SIMs from throughout the world.

Of course, all of the American networks have colluded to create a culture where

1) the phones are expensive so you'll buy a two year contract to subsidize them, locking you to one number and provider with strong penalties if you try to break contract.

and

2) The phones are tied to their numbers by your service provider so in order to take a number with you or change numbers, you've got to go back to your providor.

It's called vendor lock-in in the business world, and it is one of the business practices that I despise most, and would love to see die, but unless people know there is a better way, they rarely fight with their provider about it, and all the best providers in the states have long since refined this tradition to the point where anyone who started up the better, "rest of the world" way wouldn't really be helpful since you couldn't just jump to any of the others.

I guess it's kindof like imperial measurements--they're outdated and need to fall by the wayside, but no one is quite sure how to kill them yet.

So instead, in the 'free' world, you buy a handphone from a vendor. You can then go buy your SIM card from wherever you want. You can buy them from a different vendor, or just pick one up in a 7-11. Or, if you fuss a little about the price, a vendor will throw in a SIM card for free.

At this point, you're on a network (the one your SIM links you to) but there is no contract. There's just money on the phone. You just make calls until the phone runs out of money, and then you go to 7-11 (they're everywhere, and they do everything) and tell them you want to "Top up" and give them money, they sell you the money back as a number sequence you dial, and you follow the instructions on the receipt (or let them do it for you) and then you've got more money on the SIM card.

Phone breaks? Pry the SIM card out (usually not any harder than switching out the battery) and buy a new one, or take it to any of those little vendors I mentioned before, most of whom can fix the basic problems with phones.

Old boyfriends, bosses, and obscure crazy relatives get your number? Walk into 7-11 and buy a new one for $1.50, and you're golden.

You can see why I like this system.

So since I'm trying to meet up with people in the Philippines as well, and my visit with Kavi had gone so well, I decided a handphone that worked in the rest of the world was a good idea--so I went to MBK and shopped around and bought one. It's a cute little Nokia low-end, brand new, with a flashlight and a really weird menu system (at least compared to my SAMSUNG with the Verizon OS). It set me back 950 baht with a SIM card included. I put 150 Baht on the card to use while I'm here in Thailand, which brought me to a total of 1,100 Baht (about $30 US) for a working phone on which there are no additional requirements.

And, when I get to the Philippines, or Australia, I can just buy a SIM card for that country, and I've got local cheap calling. I kindof wish I'd done this when I arrived in Hong Kong at the start of my trip.

So I bought a phone at MBK. The phone people suggested I go to 7-11 to top up, and gave me directions that implied it was inside the Mall.

So I wandered around for a while and couldn't find one, and suddenly there's this young (maybe 24?) Thai girl at my side, walking with me. She's got bags in her hands, and she asks me if I'm Army, because I'm wearing the boots, of course. I laugh and explain that no, I'm not, but these are great boots if you are in the Army.

Every time I've been approached on the street in Thailand there has been a scam in play, and I still kindof think there was one here too. So I kept on my guard and explained that I was looking for the 7-11, and she told me she didn't think there were any inside MBK, and showed me one just across the street. She explained that she was interested in the boots because her brother was about to join the Army, and she thought they'd make a nice gift, and I took her seriously, and wrote down the make and model of the boot on a business card for a phone vendor I had in my pocket.

I don't know if she really just wanted an avenue to talk and was hoping I'd take a shine to her (she was cute enough, and her English was quite good) and become sugar-daddy for a day, but we parted ways after that and I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop an hour or two later, and it never did. Ah well, maybe she just thought I was cute and wanted to practice her English, hard to say.

After this, I went to Bangkok's notorious weekend market.

You know those rat mazes, where you put cheese at the end and let the rat go?

Imagine one of those, only scale it up to human sized, line the walls of the maze with vendors in booths 2 meters wide and 3 meters deep, make the walkway about one meter wide between them, and put the whole thing under a shade that really just traps in the heat and sweat of thousands of people wandering lost through a maze of tiny shops.

It was incredibly hot and stuffy and crowded and chaotic and the shopping was incredible. I found a couple of gifts I didn't know I was looking for, and I had been planning to hold off on the rest of my shopping until I got back to Hong Kong at the end of my trip.

So after a couple of hours, during which I got mind-numbingly lost (I found out later that Thais get lost there all the time, which made me feel better) and only saw perhaps 10% of the sprawling, crazy maze, I headed back to my hotel. On the way, I stopped at a riverside restaurant and had a really remarkable dinner while the sun set over the water.

The plan was to take a shower and then meet Kavi so he could take me to a place called "Skybar." It has a Thai name as well but I have trouble pronouncing it.

The Skybar turned out to be on top of one of Bangkok's tallest apartment buildings, and the view was jaw dropping. Unlike Seoul, Bangkok has the kind of weather where you can just leave the top off the building, so we were literally just ushered out of the lift and straight out onto the open roof, which only a waist high glass wall with a metal top to seperate us for a 64 story plunge to the streets below. The visibility was in the multi-kilometer range, with a high, thin cloudcover that didn't interfere with us seeing all the way to the horizon.

I tried to take a few pictures that would come out well, and Kavi and I stood and talked about life and travel and the differences between cultures for perhaps two hours.

Afterwards I caught a cab back to my hotel and finally got to sleep around 2 or 3. This was going to be trouble, since I was meeting Kavi and a group from his University for an adventure the next day, but that's another story.