Bangkok
In Bangkok, the ground-level atomosphere is a car-fart air-gravy.
As we came into town on the airport shuttle, I noticed we were on the wrong side of the road. I forgot about this arrangement the next day as I walked into traffic. “Well, if this was one of the other eighteen countries I’ve been to, it would have been safe to cross.” The ride into town from the airport is pretty spectacular. Since coming to Asia, I’ve had a little quest: find a city that looks like the real-life incarnation of the Blade Runner set (minus the flying cars). Seoul had the lights, but not the grit. Bangkok, however, had grit in spades. The highway from the airport to the centre of the city is like a souped up Gardner Expressway. There are electric billboards that flash corporate logos through the night. The land past the signs is a massive sprawl, but not the GTA type where the land is all accounted for—malls blending into warehouses and then back into malls. The Bangkok sprawl is much more chaotic. Big flashy hotels and convention centres are surrounded by dark patches of space. In these gaps random florescent lights do very little under a night sky that takes its red glow from somewhere else.