I’m not a practical person, nor am I a particularly logical one. I daydream. I never know the time. I see the world through spectacles tinted in the shade of what is desirable and convenient to me, a sort of lilacy-blue colour usually. I truly believe that I can bend the universe to my will,…
Read more
Getting lost in Chatuchak Market is a rite of passage for new arrivals to Bangkok. It’s only once you’ve felt that panic, that real thud in the chest realisation that you’re lost and dehydrated and if passed out on the spot nobody would come to look for you, you’d just get swept up with the…
Read more
The first time I went to Chatuchak Market it was a hallucinatory experience. I had been in Thailand for less than two days. I was jet-lagged and hung-over, swept along with the crowd, blinded by the sun, sweating and dehydrated, too overwhelmed to commit to a purchase, of anything, even a bottle of water. I’m…
Read more
Coming to Bangkok for the second time is like déjà vu, unsettlingly familiar. I lost a whole day when we arrived. A whole day, half a rotation of the earth, gone. After three flights and almost 24 hours of travelling I collapsed into bed at 1.30am and when I slept, I slept for fourteen hours.…
Read more
You can’t really prepare for Bangkok in all its contradictions. Like all big cities, the extremely rich and extremely poor share the same streets, but in Bangkok they literally brush shoulders. Every stretch of pavement is fair game; giant shopping malls cater to the label-obsessed super rich and right outside children sit on the street…
Read more
My interest in a Buddhism lasted all of a week. Mesmerised by the beauty of the temples and intrigued by its popularity, I picked up a copy of the revised Pratimoska. This is the complete list of dos and don’ts for monks and reading it shattered any illusion I had that, as far as organised…
Read more
In Bangkok, the sacred and the profane collide like nowhere else on earth. Buddhist monks stand on the Sky Train next to prostitutes; a mother nurses her child in the street in front of her stall selling a startling array of sex toys; a man hustles on the street corner offering tourists a chance to see…
Read more
