THIS YEAR IN BANGKOK: 24th FEB

The jet lag is gone, mostly. My mind and soul have integrated into Bangkok. I have been to my favorite Paragon Mall bookstore, it´s a Japanese chain, have eaten in several of my favorite restaurants in the basement of the Paragon Mall and have made an appointment for a manicure and pedicure.

To my unspeakable delight the girl who made my appointment said, ¨ I remember you.¨ It feels good to have made even just a visual impression.

I have had lunch with my designer friend K, now largely retired although there are a few favored women whom he still designs for. I have gone to my gym in the Anantara Hotel and been welcomed by my old acquaintances there. In other words I have been sorting out my life here, finding my old grooves.

One of the reasons the gym at the Anantara is so special is that you are surrounded by wood, a gleaming teak floor, a teak wall on one side and on the other a huge spread of plate glass that looks onto a little strip of garden about three feet deep and twelve feet long. There used to be two squirrels that played among the plants, but they are no longer there.  I hope they found a better accommodation somewhere.

My lunch with C was in one of those store front restaurants that

no foreigner is likely to find unless they have lived here for years 

and years, and if they found it they might not have the courage to try it out unless it was in their neighborhood. We had curried crab and chicken with ginger and pea pods, and something else that I have forgotten.  Great plumes of lettuce, long green beans and other raw vegetables came on a plate for us to chose from.

If I eat alone, I usually go to Taling Pling, a Thai restaurant with windows looking out on a narrow strip of palms and shrubbery on one side. On the other side it is one of the main corridors of restaurants in the Paragon Mall down which, tip-tip-tap on three-inch heels, young Thai women leading little girls in gigantic bows or little boys who have obviously been told to be good.

Drifting among them is the European population looking sweaty and ¨oil women¨ gliding in black robes, the abaya, often covered from long lower lashes to collar bones by black veils.

Here´s a tip on demystifying the abaya. If you want to know what the wearer is really wearing, look down at its hem. Often you will see a discreet line of denim and know that she is shopping in blue jeans against the rules.

Also these women, ¨oil women¨, and you will know if you don´t see denim, wear the kind of designer dresses that cause a gigantic cramp of envy that will send you to hell when you are in your shroud. But the inequality between us is balanced by the fact that they only get to show off their Chanels only when they are with each other in their, I suspect, palatial rooms.

Sometimes when I drift about the Paragon Mall I go into a reverie about what my life would have been like if I had moved here rather than to Spain. Would I have bought that white sectional sofa for my apartment overlooking the Chao Phaya River? It would look well with the blue background oriental in the window of the Iranian carpet store. And then there are beds and linens, silk sheets, outrageous hanging lamps, cut glass crystal chandeliers and kidney shaped glass tables.

The biggest temptation was the Chao Phraya River. I could spend all day watching it flow by with its passing bus boats, river taxis, long strings of barges pushed and pulled by tough, stout little green and yellow tugs that put up with no nonsense. It is a river to dream on, the Chao Phraya; it can whirl you back centuries to long boats paddled rhythmically by chanting men, the King´s gold boat with its high prow, small pea pod boats of commoners living in the canals dipping paddles from neighbor to neighbor. Their mornings still begin with vegetable boats, fruit boats, and boats bloody with beheaded chickens passing through the narrow canals. Boats with flowers in pots or cut. Line your terrace that overlooks the canal with pots of gardenias and have tea surrounded by their thick perfume.

Occasionally reality insists on intruding in the form of a dead dog, all four legs stiffly in the air drifting along, its own bloated boat.

But the gold spires of the Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha flip you right back into fantasy.

Apropos of very little, except for perhaps fantasy, there is a story about how Siamese cats got the lump at the end of their tail. First, not all Siamese cats have this lump. Second, it is, in reality, caused by the cat´s tail being broken. Siamese cats have very fragile tails which are easily damaged. But to the story…

The King of Siam was at war in the north. His principal wife, learning of a plot by a noble to usurp the crown in his absence, wrote him a letter and attached it to her favorite cat´s tail by knotting it around the letter. She told him to find the King and deliver the message. The cat did and the kingdom was saved from rebellion. But as a sign of its service Siamese cats have retained the lump of the knot at the end of their tails.