Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Bangkok Chinatown
We took 4 friends from Singapore on an afternoon and evening shopping expedition in Bangkok's Chinatown yesterday. This is my favourite place in Bangkok. Then we had dinner at the open-air on the footpath Red Shirt seafood restaurant that appears at 6pm each evening, takes over the footpath, and then the first lane of traffic with tables and tiny chairs. It is just across the narrow Soi from the Green Shirt seafood restaurant that also sprawls out into the traffic.
The food: fresh crabs and prawns and scampi and fish from the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. So fresh, fast, & hot barbecued and you sit there not so much watching the world go by, but rather the world winds its way between the small metal tables, as if they are rocks sticking through the flow in a fast river. The rich, poor, old, young all pouring through; and sometimes a 1961 Vespa all-metal Motorscooter comes through as well. Strong smells of chestnuts cooked in coal, of fruit from everywhere. Carbon dust. Food smells, meat, fish and the sewers.
I think Chinatown Bangkok is the most 'historically true and living' of Asian cities in its crowded unruled way. Just as the peak hour traffic of cars and buses and tuk tuks starts to really rise into something phenomenal, thats when the restaurant chairs and tables take over one lane of traffic and the squeeze becomes 'palpable'. Thai folk ability to include and to blend all forms into a flow is quite a human achievement and its done each day in the most tolerant and considerate way. It as if everything, the society itself, is held together in fine complex webs of silk that cannot be undone except by unfortunate fire.
The crowds are everywhere as are the smiles. Bangkok was 'prettier' before the uprising a few months back. I think it would take years to get the city to that tinsel-like glittering beauty again and I don't know if that will happen because the causes of the social anger are deep and abiding and obviously reached some point of no-return with so many deaths this year. At the same time, the nature of people remains warm and smiling and kind and you really dont get that, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the world. I have great respect for the complexity of Thailand and the willingness to accept the flow of life rather than to diminsih and control it. There is a high price to this of course but there is always, always the right, and indeed the responsibility, to smile and bargain.
The food: fresh crabs and prawns and scampi and fish from the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. So fresh, fast, & hot barbecued and you sit there not so much watching the world go by, but rather the world winds its way between the small metal tables, as if they are rocks sticking through the flow in a fast river. The rich, poor, old, young all pouring through; and sometimes a 1961 Vespa all-metal Motorscooter comes through as well. Strong smells of chestnuts cooked in coal, of fruit from everywhere. Carbon dust. Food smells, meat, fish and the sewers.
I think Chinatown Bangkok is the most 'historically true and living' of Asian cities in its crowded unruled way. Just as the peak hour traffic of cars and buses and tuk tuks starts to really rise into something phenomenal, thats when the restaurant chairs and tables take over one lane of traffic and the squeeze becomes 'palpable'. Thai folk ability to include and to blend all forms into a flow is quite a human achievement and its done each day in the most tolerant and considerate way. It as if everything, the society itself, is held together in fine complex webs of silk that cannot be undone except by unfortunate fire.
The crowds are everywhere as are the smiles. Bangkok was 'prettier' before the uprising a few months back. I think it would take years to get the city to that tinsel-like glittering beauty again and I don't know if that will happen because the causes of the social anger are deep and abiding and obviously reached some point of no-return with so many deaths this year. At the same time, the nature of people remains warm and smiling and kind and you really dont get that, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the world. I have great respect for the complexity of Thailand and the willingness to accept the flow of life rather than to diminsih and control it. There is a high price to this of course but there is always, always the right, and indeed the responsibility, to smile and bargain.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Young breezes
We've put a big wind chime at the back door patio of the apartment. Its a big glass sliding door on the ground floor. The chime is the standard six lengths of aluminium tubing and a wooden gong on a string; the only difference is that the six pieces of tubing are each about two metres long, so its a very very big windchime. From the lounge room you can see the wide-eyed expressions on the faces of the local kids who sneak up to it and clang about with the gong before running off.
Here's another of my poems from about a week ago: Wolf Poem
Wolf Poem
I went to see the Wolf today
and he was sleeping, all away.
I asked if I could be so free
and he yawned beneath the cooling tree
"Oh that's not up to me."
John Fitzpatrick, Soi Sam, Mooh Baahn Pop Suhk, Pak Kret, Kingdom of Thailand. Copyright 2010.
I went to see the Wolf today
and he was sleeping, all away.
I asked if I could be so free
and he yawned beneath the cooling tree
"Oh that's not up to me."
John Fitzpatrick, Soi Sam, Mooh Baahn Pop Suhk, Pak Kret, Kingdom of Thailand. Copyright 2010.
here's my poem about "The Escape Cage" It's copyright 2009
The Escape Cage
He wanted what he wanted til he got it
then didnt want it
so he could
want it again
when it was gone.
Oh my dears, the tears, the fears, the years.
Each escape became a cage to escape
and then one day
when he was old enough to know
he could know himself no older
he bent the cage into a bicycle
and rode it all the way to China
ringing the bell he made for you.
John Fitzpatrick 2009 Krung Thep Mahanakorn Kingdom of Thailand
He wanted what he wanted til he got it
then didnt want it
so he could
want it again
when it was gone.
Oh my dears, the tears, the fears, the years.
Each escape became a cage to escape
and then one day
when he was old enough to know
he could know himself no older
he bent the cage into a bicycle
and rode it all the way to China
ringing the bell he made for you.
John Fitzpatrick 2009 Krung Thep Mahanakorn Kingdom of Thailand
Yukio Mishima- Thirst for Love
This is a lovely book. Mishima's talent in clear plain story telling is very refreshing 50 years on. Then there are such surprise additions into the flow: big ideas, deep ideas, the human condition...in just a few lines, and then the story gently continues.An example: "A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him-the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage."
Looks Like Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, Father and Son, recently
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| The face features esp the slightly higher L eyebrow, and if he's about 27/28, seems to indicate that this may well be a recent picture of Kim Jong Un with his Dad |
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