Bangkok: A tale of two cities.

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Bangkok: A tale of two cities

        For many Westerners, including me, the east has always been somewhat of a mystery, the curiosity lying in the great culture clash that exists between the east, and the west. The only knowledge that many Europeans have of the land which lies so far away is based on over hyped tourism, or highly exaggerated and stereotyped views extracted from contemporary novels, and biased, commercial documentaries.  All this resulted in me packing up my bags and heading for Bangkok, honestly not having a clue what to expect.

        To be quite honest, my first impression of Thailand wasn’t very impressive; I was expecting the highly spiritual and traditional atmosphere that the east was so stereotypically famous for, dreaming up various extravagant scenes in my head, involving women dressed in beautiful traditional Thai costume, chanting and singing Buddhist songs, and me magically being teleported into another universe altogether. I soon crashed back into reality and found out how ignorant and ridiculous my ideas were, when, after miles and miles of bland airport corridors, the glaring, intrusive lights of a mini McDonald’s blasting Thai electro-pop out of its speakers greeted my site.  I now knew that what I was expecting of Thailand was very different to what I was going to get.

Curious to get my first real glimpse of Thailand, I tried to get out of the airport as fast as I could once I had arrived. Although exhausted from the cramped thirteen-hour plane journey, my eyes desperately bulged out of their sockets at the sight of windows, trying to extract as much visual information from the extremely dark panes of glass as possible, but this was in vain. As soon as me and my mother had collected our luggage, we hurried towards the exit, being unsurprisingly excited at out arrival at this “strange and mysterious land”, however, the moment our bodies had marginally stepped across the border of the cool air-conditioned building, we were hit with the immensely heavy, hot and humid air, which seemed to attack our whole bodies, sucking every ounce of energy we had out of them. Of all the things we had been prepared for, heat was not one of them. We knew Thailand was hot, but we hadn’t expected the humidity. The heat seems to affect some Westerners very badly; I’ve heard stories of people arriving at Bangkok, stepping one foot outside the airport, and immediately booking a return flight to the cool of Europe. Although our primary reactions had been quite bad, after the first few hours within Bangkok our bodies had begun to slightly acclimatise to the conditions, however apparently locals weren’t too happy, or comfortable with the weather either, as nearly everywhere we went was air-conditioned, from the more expensive shopping centres, to back street toilets.

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        After a few days of wandering the streets of Bangkok, the thing that most struck me about the city, was the rich poor divide. I am quite aware of the fact that this is a commonly talked about factor about many cities, but the divide in this city was greater than any I had seen before. In fact, I was so struck by the size of the divide, I though that a tale of two cities would be a suitable title for this article. The city itself was not divided into two, but there was more of an overlap of ...

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