I never looked for calm. It was never a value, nor has it been something that longed. I have searched for emotions in the Township in South Africa, The Mozambique jungles, The suburbs of Rome, The Marmites of Lima, India trains, Among the narcos and prisoners in Chihuahua.
A life behind, many years accustomed to raising the commitment of an emotion, Sure also with a professional ego and a vital curiosity, To feel more alive. There was also an innocence, A beginning, another age.
Light cables hanging everywhere, accumulated garbage, A diffuse and poorly explained story
And then Bangkok arrived. I was never very interested in Southeast Asia. His mass tourism bothers me, Its landscapes are often too contaminated from crowds and plastics, I'm missing laughs and I have plenty of business. The problem is that there is little in the middle to choose. Or that offer from everything to a euro on sale, or a complicated labyrinth where cities and towns are repeated. Light cables hanging everywhere, accumulated garbage, A diffuse and poorly explained story, The cheap turned into exempt. Of course there is beauty, past and art, tribes and its own culture, But it costs me more to hook with all that here than elsewhere.
It is a perception that I felt already when in 2014 I spent a month traveling through Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, And great emotions did not get except in Bangkok. I got calm, yes, But I was still not prepared to value it. Bangkok was different because we had a married friend with a Thai and they taught us the city that did not go on the Lonely Planet. And I was interested in that space so much that eight years later Francesca, my wife, and I, We decided to come to live here.
And it turns out that the city has given me a lesson that has removed everything a bit. Maybe it hasn't been a lesson, It has been learning. The first teach you, The second you learn. Or maybe I get older, that I left 15 Years of my house in Madrid and life has made me more contemplative. It is not the world around what has impacted me, It is the way of relating to him.
Bangkok is written a lot. The city of cheap sin, of the Buddhist monks and gold temples turned into selfie more than in pray, of industrial prostitution, Marijuana, The cool tattoos, Farra nights and scorpion dinners. What Thai eat scorpions? I was never interested in that city. That is the bangkok that bores me. I found accommodation in a more lonely and intimate city of which I now find it going to leave. Let me tell them.
It is very difficult to advance in Thailand. By car or walking it is difficult to do it. That sometimes stresses me. You go behind people who walk very slowly, carefree, almost occupying the entire sidewalk or narrow hallway. And if someone is in a hurry, He stays behind, waiting, And when there is a hole, without saying anything, It sneaks without any fuss.
Vehicles are indistinctly on the right or left side of the road. Not move, They are not removed.
With the car is even worse. Vehicles are indistinctly on the right or left side of the road. Not move, They are not removed. They are at a constant speed, Many times slowly, and you, If you are in a hurry, You are making an outline between them. But the funny thing is that nobody gives them the lights, or the horn sounds, To demand that they retire. The car that goes faster changes lane, transfer to the left you have in front, without getting anything. It's you, impatient, The strange element. Do you run for what? Where are you going? Why are you in a hurry? I have asked myself so many times these more than two and a half years that sometimes I raised my foot from the accelerator because I didn't know what to answer me. Why running brandoli, Why you run?
At other times, Unable to control my impatience, I went to the shoulder, The car passed, I once blown expletives, but They rarely occurred to me to play the horn or give the lights. And when I did, I found myself so out of place that I felt a cretin. I walk and lead more slowly in this country for a question that I had never asked me and that I have learned here. Why am I hurry? Do you know why you are in a hurry?
In Bangkok you learn that Your individual self is not above the plural self. There is the secret, That is The gigantic difference between this East and West. You live in a society, for better and for worse, I suppose that influence of Buddhism and its karma, in which you are not only responsible for your life and environment, You are responsible for all others. I don't think a Thai is more supportive than a Spaniard or Italian, I'm talking about something else. His responsibility is not saving the world, It is not altering it.
That's the sacred part. It is not attacking, Do not wear a bad face. Running is an unnecessary vice. Runs only before thunder and fire, Faced with death and crying. The rest is life, And life is expected, It is allowed to flow. It is lived in plural because the vital space is understood shared. It is a way of living. You learn it, You internalize it, You assume it. In the West that does not happen. Life is you, Your wishes, Your rights and freedoms. The liberal self that we have built with its enormous virtues and defects. I am not here judging or choosing what is better, I am trying to explain what is different.
Running is an unnecessary vice. Runs only before thunder and fire, Faced with death and crying.
Bangkok traffic is terrible. It is not worse than the one I lived in Mexico City or that of Rome at some times, But there is a detail that I already mentioned that it makes it diverse: The car whistle is not heard. It is not a minor detail, It is a character.
And it still surprises more than in the midst of that congestion nobody opposes a guy with a red flag on the road, The lift, and from a building or alley comes vehicles that are put in front. At the beginning I was startled. I came from Rome. There to the goalkeeper of a farm comes up with a flag to stop traffic to leave various cars from his building and it is likely that his widow was awarded days later by the mayor. Now I'm going to live in New York, where the goalkeeper may also die if he can do that, But there the mayor would decorate the widow but the driver who took him ahead.
Sometimes the flag is not needed. It happens the same in the changes of direction of the avenues. Suddenly sneaks, It must sneak into, A car to turn, And all, absolutely all cars, They stop. Nobody crazy and takes their heads through the window berreando to the front. Everyone understands that there are other cars that if they don't stop. Did they understand what I am saying? Did they understand what it is?
Let me tell you about another example. The Metro and BTS (Light Rail) Bangkok are two first level infrastructure. Many times they are crowded. Then, You arrive at the station and see that Everyone placed in a row by order of arrival. No matter the people who have, No one allows to jump that order. The train arrives. Doors open. First let those inside and then one to one come in line. The miracle, I lived it as a miracle accustomed to wearing the head crushed against the door in the meters of Madrid, Mexico City or Rome, is that when they see that the car is very full, many stop and wait for the next train to come to push the rest. They stay out not to bother others. They bother them so as not to bother you.
They stay out not to bother others. They bother them so as not to bother you
I put two examples, But I can put a thousand. You enter a shopping center and you listen to "Sawatdii krap" (hello, In Thai). They tell everyone. Always a smile, A kind gesture. The same in the hospital, In the park, In the driver's exam center, When you go to the bank. Amability is part of its essence. It is not imposed, It is culture. Does that mean that every hello, Each thank you, They feel it as something intense and personal? Is it a friend of friendship? Not, of course not. Hence his merit. It is a social structure.
I don't take any great Bangkok friend who is Thai. Many known, None friends. I have not felt that people welcome you and open your home, As does happen in Mexico or Italy. I don't laugh laughing with them as it happened to me in South Africa and Mozambique. The city has some important deficiencies for me: His cultural life is commercial and unattractive; There are almost no sidewalks, It's a city for cars; There is a constant pollution that only cleans the monzons season.
Nothing is perfect, Do not look for that place outside that does not exist, But Bangkok has taught me pleasure, I said pleasure, what they treat you well, that do not add up to you. The kindness, The simplicity of being able to live without worrying about the environment. The happiness of calm that I did not know that it existed before coming to live in Bangkok, The city in which to advance is a vice.
