This Image In No Way Shows The Utter Chaos Of Bangkok’s Chinatown…
I went to Chinatown in Bangkok yesterday. I had been invited by a friend, Bob, that I had met in the Taipei airport and his friend, Maeve, a line producer in the film biz in Hollywood. What an intense experience. I’ve been to the Chinatowns in NYC, Los Angeles, and Seattle, but this was a whole new experience. The Chinatown in NYC is very intense… at least until you visit the one in Bangkok.
Bob is a food writer, so he took us to this hole-in-the-wall restaurant and we had the most wonderful shrimp in red curry over noodles. His 3/4 page review from the Bangkok Post is on the wall, along with quite a few others. This restaurant is a jewel.
After we ate we wandered down into a market that was crammed into a long, very tight alley. There were masses of people walking, large carts being pushed… and guys riding their scooters through with loads strapped to the back. At some points, the walkway was only about 4-5′ wide. I was really impressed by the very old and diminutive Chinese women who went no-holds-barred and barreled right through. At one point I followed one of these women and used her to block for me. Worked for a bit, then she dodged, shimmied, and moved through a hole I couldn’t fit through. I came to a stop just short of a bucket of sea slugs.
Mmmm! Eviscerated Sea Slugs.
When we finally exited the market alley and returned to the normal chaos of the sidewalk, Maeve looked at me and said This is very Blade Runner-ish. I couldn’t have agreed more.
The next day I’m wandering around in one of the colossal malls on Sukhumvit Road and came across this shirt, please click to enlarge:
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Really? I mean, what the…? What does that even mean in the context of the rest of the shirt? Or related to the movie? Whatever. I really don’t like seeing the meaningless usage of a quote from one of cinema’s most poignant moments, but who knows? Maybe someone will buy the shirt, wonder where the quote came from and look it up. Then they can have there own Blader Runner-ish experience. Good on them.