The prayer reaches its aim even though its meaning is unknown to me, the clangorous prayers of the monks from the temple touch my heart, breath goosebumps on my skin and fill me with a certain awe as if I would know who is addressed by this credo and would respect this deity likewise. This spiritual religious feeling feels misplaced in the profanity of Bangkok’s city life, but a monk who watches a child playing in front of the temple and smiles frees me from the grab my thoughts had on me. The rich golden ornaments on the otherwise plain red and white temple complex invite the mind to dream, the songs of exotic birds from the parks outside of the temple make it hard to draw a clear picture of these opposites that this city unites within its borders. At this very moment a monk passes me accompanied by a short-legged Rottweiler dog with a bell on its collar, bluntly the dog jumps into an impeccably trimmed flowerbed, his masculinity dangling far down to his ankle, and passes water. The monk watched this scene and just keeps on smiling pensively. Hard to imagine how a german call for order and tidiness would disenchant this peaceful situation. The animals has its own rights, in Buddhist beliefs we are all alike and moreover a lot less stressed, we should take this as an example for ourselves. At the end of the day we laugh and love in the same way, we just do it way too infrequently.
In front of the temple’s gates a megapolis is raging, that one is right in the centre of it is hard to imagine within the protective coat that the temple offers. But if one’s brave enough to leave the temple‘s embrace you find yourself lost in a city whose streets and alleyways are just as entwined as the windings of the infinite amounts of cables and lines which seem to be forming the lifeline of the city hanging in bales on every corner. The magic that inhabited the temple complex slips from the observer‘s mind quickly if you try to follow all of the happenings on the streets at once. The noise of uncountable motorbikes, tuktuks, busses and taxis and the incidents on the street coopt the mind. But if you take your time and give your attention to a scene apart from the rest, then you realise that the magic is even within this daily scenes. People are smiling a lot, laughing together and are happy and don’t seem to cram themselves that much with self-pity and dissatisfaction like we are used to do it in Germany. Gratitude for the life that you were given, accepting what it is like instead of always trying to change something for the better. This joy is highly contagious if you are willing to open up your heart to the world. I would be a liar if I pretended that all of this is easy for me. Letting go is not an easy thing to do, like the breaking of old habits, but in one way or the other it seems like it is easier for the Asian people to dismiss all of the inessential and nasty parts of everyday life. A huge obstacle for my German sense of aesthetics because with our very own art of complaining a particular emphasis on everything nasty and stressful seems to be part of my native cultural heritage.
In other aspects Bangkok seems to be trying to fulfill all the expectations we had. The streets are filled with life, there are small crammed shops on every street inviting the pedestrians for Thai massages, good food and the purchase of countless trivialities for tourists and natives. At the roadside tuktuk-drivers and street vendors with food carts are hoping to get people interested in their services and goods. Again and again we have to reject the offers of the locals because they are presented in such an abundance and variety that we are unable to react to all of them even if we wanted to. Oddities like roasted insects are part of the cityscape just as much as the seemingly insufficient routing of countless cables above the ground, just like the people who talk to you so openmindedly and are so enthusiastic about shaking your hands, but all of these things only seem absurd in the German mind, they fit this city just like a glove. When we arrive in Bangkok we don’t have to share the city with too many tourists, though. We are told that many Asian countries have vacations at this time of the year and so the city is filled with Chinese and Japanese people, but we only have rare encounters with European people.
What really left us stunned was the cleanliness of the city. Unfairly as a German native you always suppose that in poorer countries cities would be dirty and infested with pests of all kinds. Bangkok let us down concerning this fact because as a longtime commuter to Cologne and after walking about forty kilometres by foot through Bangkok I can say that in many parts of Cologne it is way more dirty than in many non-tourist areas in Bangkok. Considering the vermin, we’ve only seen one cockroach in the streets, even in Rome I saw more of these small bugs when the sun set und the amount of rats we’ve seen is pretty much congruent with how many I had seen in my hometown. All in all the wildlife in the city was wealthier than we expected, occasionally beautiful yellow butterflies crossed our paths and when visiting a bigger park in the city centre we could observe monitor lizards and tortoises swimming in the pond arrangements while a variety of exotic birds were giving this moment a special mood by singing in their diverse voices. Ultimately a visit to Bangkok is highly recommendable. The city offers every visitor a aspect to fall in love with from the possibility to have interesting observations of nature via a rich cultural diversity through to affordable, but incredibly delicious food. To me it’s the Tai people’s smile that made the days in this city so memorable.