All Aboard for the Big Mango: A Primer*

The Big Mango! Bangkok – the cultural, economic, and political heartbeat of Thailand – the capitol of the Kingdom of Smiles. Suvnubarmi Airport is a major air hub in South-East Asia, hundreds of flights arrive everyday from everywhere. With this many flights per day, you can fly at a discount from anywhere and arrive here. And the Big Mango has something exciting and exotic to entice everybody and every budget.

If you have a comfortable or perhaps (softly) a big budget you are in the taxi line to slip of to Silom or Sukhumvit Roads where the hotels are grand, shiny and brand name. But if your budget does not include tipping bell boys and hushed piano bars in the lobby then you are in the bus line, waiting for the AE2. Next stop, Banglumpoo!

Banglumpoo means, of course, the world renowned Khaosan Road area. Everyone has hear of it or seen it on a major movie screen but until you have walked through the crush of tourists and locals, bathed in neon, heard all the languages and smelled it all, you can’t have known anything about it at all. Time has ticked here as it has everywhere. Throughout the area there are new upscale boutique hotels, many with swimming pools. But if you keep your hand on your wallet and wander down some of the smaller sois you can still find some of the original wooden structure guesthouses of the days of your, hidden for the discerning, at surprisingly low prices.

Here you have been in the Big Mango for hours and no one has even once mentioned food. And Thai food is vaunted as the best in the world by many. For the homesick and the hopeless, rest assured, you can still find your tasteless mess of mass produced branded fast food. But if you crave more, something exotic, there are scads of things, steamed, fried, or barbequed waiting for you on the street. Do not cringe. No street stall on Khaosan Road has ever been closed by an E. coli outbreak like some major (sic) restaurants in the west have been. And if chicken, pork, noodles, vegetables and fresh fruit do not meet your definition of exotic you can always crunch a kilo of deep-fried crickets.

Night and light. There are a multitude of bars, indoors, best in rainy season, on the streets and in hidden corners to sit, sip and swap stories. Or if you dance: metal, house, techno, garage, hip hop boom and bounce in the many crowded clubs. Live music ranges from easy/fold t spontaneous street jams, to the famous blues bars in the area.

Here you are a short walk from the most famous of the sights to see in Bangkok: Wat Po, the opulent Grand Palace, and the jewel of jewels, the Emerald Buddah at Wat Phra Kheo. And with a short ride across the river you visit Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn, and the oldest temple in Bangkok.

Shopping? The Big Mango has shopping. And if the t-shirts, jewelry, clothing, shoes, sunglasses, music, souvenirs, and what not in Banglumpoo car not enough for you, worry not. China town, Siam Square, Sukhumvit Road, and Phat Phong are easily accessible from Khaosan Road by bus, by taxi or by river ferry to connect with the Skytrain to get you where you are going. Beware of road transportation during rush hours though; the Big Mango can have traffic problems.

And there is more, so much more to Bangkok, far too much to see or do in a short stay. To understand Bangkok you have to return. Or you could just stay longer as so many who arrived before you will recommend.

*  should you dare

The Going

One of the most important aspects of working abroad is making sure that your visa is always valid and up to date, it is also one of the biggest hassles that you will deal with will working in a foreign country. It is far more important to not have visa trouble than it is to be abroad without a job.

Problems arise as countries have many different visa levels. There are tourist visas, non-immigrant visas, long stay visas, work visa, business visas. The visa list is endless. Each visa costs a different amount and is valid for different lengths of stay inside the country you are traveling to. So the first hurdle is to know what your length of stay is. The second is paying attention to your entry stamp which also gives your exit date.

Most people looking for work abroad enter the country on a tourist visa. This is the best way to find out if you would like to live in the country. The visa that you were issued in your home country may indicate that it is valid for three months and many just assume that is the case. What they have missed is that the visa is valid for entry into the country for that three month period but this three months is not for the duration of your stay. That is shown with the entry stamp. Many have made the above assumption and found themselves in very hot water at the end of the three months.

And the hot water can be very hot. If you overstay your visa time you have to pay, cash money, and there is a fixed amount of cash that is to be paid for every day you have overstayed. A reader called himself lucky enough, with a small but seemingly mandatory cash incentive to the border guard, to make a phone call and have the money (a large amount) sent to him but if the time to get the money exceeded two hours he was off to jail. A hot room, now windows, a locked door, and no room to pace and nothing to do but pace.

And if this becomes you, you have to pay your cash money immediately. There is never the opportunity to go back to where you were staying and wait for money to be sent from where ever it is that money comes from. You will not leave the border station without paying or you will go to jail and have to try to work things out from the inside of a foreign prison. Not the easiest thing to do. And while you are worrying about the situation you are in the fine increases everyday by the daily rate.

The overstay rates vary and are changed without notice at the whim of the government so be aware of this if you are in the situation where you do owe money. For example in Thailand the present overstay is 500 baht per day, about $15, but in China it is 500 RMB per day, which is about a whopping $80. The fines must always be paid in local funds as well.

Overstay can be expensive, embarrassing in the first moments if you have no cash in your pocket, and devastating if you end up locked behind bars in an immigration jail. And be assured, immigration jail in any country is not a nice place. Always stay on track with your visa dates.

Dope 2

 

Marijuana use leads directly to heroin use!

This was the watchword of the 60's and 70's. And this had to be true because you could read it in the newspaper every week in Ann Landers agony aunt column. Over and over the suburban parents of North America were bombarded with this wisdom doled out by a woman who had probably never seen the bad weed nor the dreaded white powder. She knew it was true, probably because someone had told her so. But this great soothsayer probably had no idea exactly how difficult it was to actually score wacky tobacky in most suburban areas.

You had to know someone who knew someone that could give you all the code words and precise locations and timing for a seconds long clandestine meeting to pass the grass. In those days it could take you hours to track down a dime bag. Also at that time rolling your own cigarettes was something frowned upon, reserved for the poor, so if some young, healthy buck wheeled into the corner store and wanted to buy cigarette papers that kid was immediately suspect. It was a tough job to get a little high then. And if it was so hard just to score a little pot it is no stretch of the imagination to know that heroin would be impossible to get. Heroin was looked upon as a 'foreign' high. You would definitely have to go to another country to get it. But why would that be considered? Pot was the perfect high.

Time has passed and marijuana is still almost as hard to find now as it was then. But on every street corner there are a variety of designer drugs openly available on every street corner.

With the passage of time just about everyone has met a junkie. Heroin is everywhere and it is much cheaper than it ever was. Now having known many junkies, living next door to the Golden Triangle assured this, and asked and made many observations this has been discovered: heroin users do not smoke pot. The simple reason for this is that the drugs operate on different brain functions. There are no sensations in the brain that overlap from the use of these disparate drugs.

Heroin and all other opiates cause direct stimulation of the endorphins in a person's brain. The multitude of sensuous rewards are instantaneous for the user. There is just no way to feel that damned good without chemical help.

There is another drug that stimulates endorphins in a similar, but not exact, manner. Nicotine, the main drug in tobacco, seems to give the user an endorphin high. And this is a an addictive high that most tobacco users will go to great lengths to get.

Heroin users, for the main, do not smoke pot (well a very small percentage do) but every junky smokes cigarettes, incessantly, obsessively. So the only conclusion that can be drawn from this information is that: cigarette use leads directly to heroin use. (See: Dope 1)

Wake up and smell the hemp!

Ooops

A matched pair!.  Oxen.

Hitch 'em up.

Move 'em out