Bangkok, 15 years after

For: Daniel Landa (Text) D. Yeray Landa and Martin (Photos)
Previous Image
Next Image

info heading

info content

One tends to return to the happy face bobo places. Longing to return to Bangkok was distorted by those endless nights party, that youth who now longed to wander the neighborhood of Sukhumvit Road, 15 years after. The girls keep dancing to the white, but they do it reluctantly, with the urge to get the calculation right in five minutes, so as not to waste time. Bars have more advertising, everything is direct, without the magic of furtive glances or perhaps time has stolen part of the naivety with which we once looked at the world.

I saw a lot of fast food places this time, where before there were street stalls of fried fish and spiced chicken. I no longer smelled the city of the exotic East. And women have changed considerably. This was the first time I've seen plump girls in Bangkok. Before there was not. Import and progress often make staff fat.

Bangkok has been ordered. There is more glass, more skyscrapers and less garbage on the streets. The traffic jams continue as before, but in a more civilized way, without the motorcycles turning the avenues into a circuit.

Perhaps time has stolen part of the naivety with which we once looked at the world.

I returned to the spiritual center of Wat Pho as a turtle returns to its first beach. With an irrepressible love. I have to admit that time passes more slowly there. I enjoyed as I did the other time the golden temples and that reclining Buddha gazillion meters long. There Bangkok reconciles with the other Bangkok. But looking around one sees the crowd of tourists, with that irritating habit of taking pictures holding a stick with your back to the monuments, in such a way that many see the stupas for the first time, already at home when they review the photos of the trip.

For those things of traveling making documentaries, this time we got accommodation at the Lebua State Tower. To be more concise, in one of the suites where part of the team from the movie Hangover was installed 2, shot in thailand. Luxury has the uncanny ability to make you enjoy a place in the distance, from a bubble. So, Bangkok appeared to us extraordinary from the floor 52 of the hotel, no need to smell the smoke and the hamburger on the sidewalk. They offered us an exquisite tasting of Australian seafood and wine, creamy desserts and even cocktails with impossible colors. But I understood that that delicacy was typical of ostentatious places, not from thailand, because also the most exclusive tends to lose personality.

Luxury has the uncanny ability to make you enjoy a place in the distance, from a bubble

I wanted to get out of the atmosphere of "how not, Mr., right now". Maybe that's why I insisted on the mistake of going back to the place where I wrote one of the funniest and most surreal nights that I can remember. It was called "Dance Fever", a kind of disco with live music, girls who could tell you no, and screens where I remember that fifteen years ago they broadcast a Real Sociedad match while we drank our whiskey out loud. The taxi driver was going crazy trying to find the place. "That place does not exist" said, and asked here and there. It was as if they denied me my days of revelry and that I could not allow. Of course there was, or at least once existed. It took us a couple of hours to get to "Hollywood". That was now the name of the old "Dance Fever" and yes it was the same place!!

And 1999 I went into that place with Alberto Fernández and Orson, as we called Pedro Martínez. The three of us got drunk, we dance without knowing how to dance, We laughed and we even had to take Orson off the stage, when one of Manolo García's microphone in hand began to sing, encouraged by a crowd of laughing Thais.

we had to get Orson off the stage, when one of Manolo García's microphone in hand began to sing

And 2014 I went into that same place with Pablo Vidal and Yeray Martín. There were no crowds, maybe because it wasn't Saturday. There was no live music and the girls offered cheekily. There were two showers by the stage, where two almost naked women contour under the water.

But I have to say, that in order not to completely break the memory in the passage of time, on digital screens, i swear it's true, they broadcast a Real Sociedad match.

We returned to the contemplation of the city in the suite of the Lebua hotel.

Bangkok is cleaner today, more beautiful, but less interesting. Perhaps the Bangkok experience is a way of understanding how the world changes. The human being tends to order, It is copied, Is structured, speak other languages, cleans its streets and dusting the sidewalks so much takes away the essence of the places. And then the agencies sell you a ticket to the Far East and the traveler arrives in the city and takes a selfie in a restaurant where the waitresses wear grave goods that no one wears anymore, that belong to another time, and so, in that fiction we are fooling ourselves on the way home, back from a place, that like Dance Fever, no longer exists.

 

 

  • Share

Comments (2)

  • Ricardo

    |

    Very good story Dani. It confirms my idea that there are memories to which it is contraindicated to return.

    Answer

  • Daniel Landa

    |

    Certain, Ricardo, very true, but when it's already there, curiosity… in the end.

    Answer

Write a comment