Beijing, while full of embassies, and various foreign businesses chiseling inroads into the market of 1.3 billion people, while it has the traffic and subways of a developed city, while it sprawls unrestrained by six ring roads, it has nothing of Bangkok’s international flavor.
Bangkok is textured with a collage of languages, cultures, skin color, and habits. Signage in Thai, Chinese, French, Arabic, and English. Germans in shorts, Muslim women wrapped in black, tourists in tee shirts, Thai’s in pressed white shirts. Traffic counterflows using the British standard. Hello kitty pink taxis, a neon rainbow of scooters, buses that roll slow motion through stops, skytrains and subways, river taxis and tuk-tuks create the circulation through a city dense with humidity and humanity.
Bangkok’s heat and humidity unlocks Beijing cold from the skin. It is nourishing in a way that only nature can arrange. The authentic cuisine from around the world finds its way into every nook and cranny, as if there are wormholes that connect all the cultures of the world. Bangkok is not only one of the major transfer stations for air travel throughout the world. It is a crossroad of culture that reminds us of how different, and how similar we all are.
It is an antidote to the regionalism and single vision mindedness that naturally grows out of being completely surrounded by your own kind.
