After a colorful sea crossing, navigating large, antiquated sea vessels offloading to smaller ones, and a relatively smooth bus trip, I arrived in Bangkok and immediately savored its elevated subway. It is ultramodern, but only serves limited swaths of town; the line to the Airport was supposed to open last December, then in March, but not the March I arrived in apparently. Advertising is ubiquitous, at a level I haven’t seen anywhere else (though I haven’t been to Japan yet): serial luminous billboards on the platform are tied in to the spot running on the in-car screens and entire trains outsides are painted with a single advertiser’s gigantic, kinetic billboard. Personal media chatter, also at a level I haven’t seen anywhere, is also pervasive. Nonetheless, I spent a lot of time on the metro, especially on unfruitful shopping trips and (by default) effective photo safaris. I tried (in vain) to find silk, most of what was on offer was the worst of the t-shirt trade available anywhere and adapted to the local lore: pussy and drugs innuendoes, massproduced “crafts”.
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