Back to Bangkok (and all that comes with it)

Well, this post is a little untimely, umm, I mean, late. We are currently making our way around Myanmar (Burma) and Bangkok seems like ages ago, but due to various reasons including changing countries and painfully slow internet speeds, we are just getting to this now.
I thought these guards at the royal palace were kinda funny...

Bangkok was a transition time for us- we spent our days obtaining a Myanmar visa, changing USD travelers cheques to baht to USD (a silly way of doing it), concluding what we considered the "southern peninsular" leg of our trip and preparing for the next phase: Myanmar. We did manage to squeeze in a little time to play tourist, though. And what a place to play tourist- we got a little frustrated being back in Tourist Tax land... but I will leave that discussion for the end of this post!

Read the rest...

We arrived in Bangkok via airplane from Singapore. Again, we braved the public bus system and made our way to the Kao San Road area- of which Josh already posted- for a cheap guest house. Along with heading to Kanchanaburi (forthcoming post), we spent a day at the impressive National Palace and Wat Phra Kaew. We also headed to Wat Po, which holds the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand, and to Wat Trimitr, where a 10 ft solid gold buddha happily resides. We walked around the city quite a bit, discovering little pockets of activity: a few streets full of intricate temple-bound flower arrangements/arrangers and an area where they sell everything buddhist- huge yellow candles, gold buddhas, silver bowls, etc. Our favorite was the "electronics" street where people sold speakers, stereos, motherboards, amps, DVD players, little bits of electronic-y looking things and circuit-y bits, all on tables in the street.

This time we ended up on a few ordinary buses- instead of AC, a few fans hang from the ceiling! We actually liked the river ferry best of all- so much quicker than braving the appalling Bangkok traffic.
At the royal palace- a pretty place.

After a few days back in Thailand, we were both getting a bit tired of the country. While we enjoyed it overall (especially Koh Tao), the "Land of Smiles" was honestly not that smiley to us. We met some friendly people, yes, but we got tired of being treated "differently." I've rarely been the recipient of discrimination, and this is certainly small scale, but we were consistently experiencing a double standard when it came to money. (Writing from Myanmar gives me a slightly different perspective, but here the inconsistency is primarily government-induced or petrol-related.) We experienced this some in Cambodia and Vietnam, and some travelers would argue that Vietnam is the worst in SE Asia, but we've seen it the most in Thailand by far.

The morning we went to Kanchanaburi, our boat across the river was 26 baht total, but somehow our medium-size bill (we had no small change) turned it into 36. We didn't have time to argue as we'd reached our dock. Then at the train station, a sign was posted in English saying the charge for foreigners on this rail line has been raised to 100 baht, almost twice the amount we were expecting. After buying our tickets, we walked across the street to find something for breakfast. When I asked one woman how much her tiny skewers of pork were, I was expecting 5 baht or maybe 10 because we were at the train station. "Thirteen," she told me. I noticed a sign on the stand. It was in Thai, but it clearly listed two items, the same number of items she had for sale, and two prices: 10 and 20. When Josh pointed at this, she just smiled, faintly apologetic in that "I'm not really sorry" way, and shook her head at us. The admission to the National Palace was up from last year from an already pricey fee and the price of Wat Pho, where the big reclining Buddha rests, more than doubled from 2006. Thai can enter these temples for free.

That big reclining buddha at Wat Po...
... and the solid gold one at Wat Trimitr.

That being said, these prices I am listing are very low, much lower than they would be in my country (usually, not always), and I acknowledge that. So I don't know why exactly it irritates me quite so much. Certainly since Malaysia, we'de experienced a much lower quality for higher prices and this was even more true now that we were back in Thailand, but I think it's the fact that I can do nothing about it. I've heard Asians from other countries say that they can sometimes get by with the Thai prices if they don't have to say much. That makes it sound like it borders on racism to me.

To some degree, I'm fine with paying more as I have more earning potential than most locals, and I like knowing that national treasures are cheap or free for those who live there, but it does catch me off guard. I don't think I've ever seen a separate foreigner price posted at a national park or museum in the USA. Thailand, too, seems inundated with tourists, so higher prices could help limit the amount and type of visitors. However, it certainly doesn't seem to exist for that reason. A man we met in Singapore proudly said that all museums, temples, etc. are the same price for foreigner and national alike, knowing what we'd experienced in other SE Asian countries.

I think part of it, too, is that we fairly carefully budgeted a certain amount for each country based on estimates and printed materials of previous prices. Then after arrival, we discovered that costs were consistently more expensive in certain countries, even if the product was exactly the same as it was before. And this appears to have little to do with inflation or increased petrol costs, but simply a "good" business mind realizing they've got a good thing going and that there's a whole people group just waiting to be exploited. We were not paying more for better goods or services. We were simply not Thai, so we were paying more.

PS:

We can't have a Thailand post without a photo of Josh and street meat! (Although he claims street squid doesn't win the "best of" award...)