NOTE: I meant to post this a while ago, but I ran into some issues with the website and never got around to fixing it until now. Sorry!
Oh look, another overdue post. But this time I have a cool excuse. Was I still busy doing homework and preparing for my upcoming final exams and presentation? Yes. But did I also book a spontaneous weekend flight to Thailand? Also yes!
Inspired by some other Yalies and ICLP classmates making weekend trips to places like Hong Kong, Beijing, or Manilla, a friend and I decided to take advantage of our close proximity to cool countries and were able to snag round-trip tickets to Bangkok online for just ~$200 (on a not terrible airline too!).
One thing that I hadn’t realized until we got there was that Thailand attracts a lot of tourists. Nearly 33 million foreigners visited the country in 2016. As a result, a lot of the time it felt like we had no choice but to do “touristy” sightseeing since the country is so “tourist-friendly” (neither of us knew any Thai – we figured out how to say “hello” but struggled with “thank you” and “sorry” – but we were able to get by just by using English) and caters so heavily to that aspect. It kind of felt like the entire city of Bangkok (or at least the parts we stuck around in) was just one big tourist playground.
This was most apparent when we went to visit Bangkok’s Grand Palace. When we arrived, there were massive crowds and corrals that made the scene look more like the entrance to a music festival. Once we got in though, the palace grounds are really, really amazing. I didn’t take great pictures, but the buildings are even more astonishing in person that what you see if you'd search up the place on Google.
However, they’d be even more amazing if I wasn’t stopped every ten seconds to wait for someone to take their photo in what could be a mildly insensitive “buddha” pose while wearing those baggy elephant-patterned “Thai”-style pants (which I don’t think I’ve seen any actual Thai person wearing), or if I didn’t have to fight my way past flag-bearing tour guides shouting and trying to herd their group for roll-call like a middle school field trip.
All of this was mostly just a minor annoyance, but I started to feel a little upset once we entered the palace’s famed Temple of the Emerald Buddha. This, along with all the other temples in Thailand, are… well, temples. They’re real places where real people go to worship, and just like other religious sites, ask that visitors be respectful and not interfere with the locals worshipping there. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy when visiting temples both in Bangkok and in Taiwan: even if I’m not Buddhist, going to these beautiful, reflective spaces feel like a deeply spiritual experience.
But at this temple, tourists kept on jammin’ and crammin’ into a viewing area just to get a closer look at everything inside. Those who came to pray had their own roped-off space marked “FOR THAIS ONLY”, but they had to make their way through a noisy and raucous sea of tourists just to get there. It was one of the most amazing interiors of a temple I’ve ever seen, but the atmosphere was pretty much ruined by the all of the tourists. I felt bad who for locals who had to fight their way through the crowd just to worship, and then felt a little worse when I realized that I – a tourist – was also taking up space in that room and not really helping.
There were a few times where we did manage to escape tourist “trap”-like places, and they were by far the most memorable moments of the trip. On our first day, we visited a smaller temple that, while not nearly as grand, had beautiful grounds and felt like the kind of place where actual people from the community would go. When we visited another temple further outside of the city, we had the opportunity to chat with an incredibly kind monk about the history of his temple and some of their traditions. We even went to an “alternative theme park,” which was this uber weird but insanely cool creative park that had a giant airplane skeleton and featured a ton of art, goods, and music by Thai people.
I guess my earlier frustration in part comes from the fact that while seeing these kinds of touristy things are cool, I didn’t really feel like I got much out of them. Sure, the buildings were beautiful and I got some nice pictures. But by the end of the trip, I didn’t feel like I learned as much about Thai culture, or Thai people, or Thailand as I had hoped. Which is too bad.
But wow did I eat some tasty pad thai.
