Dear all,

I arrived in Bangkok just under a week ago.

The oppressive, stifling heat reminds me somewhat of Dar es Salaam, or Lima - New Orleans even.

One vast, dirty, sprawling metropolis home to some ten million souls, nobody is quite sure, which is where the comparison to New Orleans departs abruptly.

For it is magnificently dirty and filthy, with barely a patch of green, where the belching fumes of tuk-tuks, lorries and hordes of spuming motorbikes shovel out monoxides into the barely breatheable air.

Then one catches a glimpse of a busload of children, presumably on their way to school.

The similarity to other cities evaporates however when one sees that the shaven headed children are all wearing Saffron robes, Buddhist novices I imagine.

Every street is lined with stalls selling a vast arrays of food; duck feet, chicken necks, noodles, soups and iced fruit slices among the clamouring hubbuby filth.

Some stalls have jars of many tentacled things, that every now and again gloop and shift within their murky depths as though defying you to eat them.

Every other stall has a wok within which the vendor shifts small amounts of food at high heat with a brisk pace, and the incessant chatter of their melodic chatter mingles with the searing hiss as the food is quickly sealed and delivered with a deft an easy hand.

Piles of salted and quickly fried salted fish are stacked next to battered fruit fritters, deep fried banana slices, and transclucent noodles that look much like squid tentacles that were earlier knocking against their glass prisons.

Upturned crates, wooden boxes and gerrymandered cafes spring up everywhere you look; the Thai people seem to eat constantly and never put on a pound.

And every now and there, certainly on one in four corners, the ubiquitous Buddhist shrines, surrounded by beggars with drooping Min like moustaches, some with all their limbs intact, others with substantially less.

Even the taxi drivers take their hands off the wheel and make the famous Wiat hand gesture, for luck, as the car appears to careen out of control before being wrested back at the very last moment.

Buddha indeed grants them the luck of their thought, though one can't help but think that such granted generosity is immediately used up.

There are other differences too.

The beggars seem less desperate, there are people from nearby food stalls that freely offer them food and drink, stop to talk and dust them off with something that appears to be an almost familial care.

Next to the food stalls are people threading flowers, buds and other religeous totems, to be placed before the Buddha, and everywhere people pass the hallowed grounds, the smell of incense fills the air and pervades the ever present fumes with their tendrils of cloying sweetnesses.

The heat is everywhere.

There is no escape, not for the street vendors, and in Bangkok it seems that everyone sells something on the streets.

Nearly forty degrees of wilting, drenching, sapping, pervasive heat that infiltrates everywhere.

The dogs and cats and people themselves take every opportunity to sleep beneath awnings, in underneath stalls and in the shaded alley ways that seem to make little difference.

Beneath stalls, under cars, wherever they can gain relief from the sun sullied by the polluted air.

It is too hot to argue, and nobody ever seems to.

There seem to be few insects, fewer birds but everywhere that soaking heat that mocks those inspired to energy and physical movement beyond spooning food into mouths almost too weary to open.

And everywhere the bleat of horns as the traffic writhes wretchedly around itself, like mating rattlesnakes.

The fortunate can escape the oppression into air conditioned valhallas, but these oases simply belch out the heat within to those stifling without.

Sweating, polluted and yet in an odd way lethargically vibrant, Bangkok shifts and conducts its business in that strangely chaotic way of urban sprawls the world over.

There is apparently nothing that cannot be fixed, not with an imagination and a skill that is visible at every corner of every street of every part of the organism that is Bangkok.

Filth, dirt, pollution and choking fumes.

And a welcoming, friendly, almost playful cheeriness amongs its stoic inhabitants.

Welcome to Bangkok.

yechydda,