Welcome to my first post from Thailand, these are not going to be travel blogs with tips on travel and photos of beautiful Thai beaches but more about my experiences whilst travelling, sittinng on the motorbike, watching the world, thinking about things that may inform my painting in the future. So in no particular order, herre goes.....

The ebb and flow of the rubbish pile in Bangkok.

At the End of Elm Street Lane in Cardiff there is a spot where Councill reject rubbish, next thing there's a mattress, an old pillow, cat's litter, take away food containers, eventually even the middle class designer dog walker condones tossing dog poo bags onto the pile. Nothing taken only added to. Unlike Elm Street Lane, the Bangkok rubbish pile has an add and subtract. As I sat in the dark at our bedroom window on the fourth floor looking down….incoming, shopkeeper dumps mixed bag of rubbish, outgoing homeless guy with bucket filters through and removes glass bottles (you get money for recyclables here), incoming, old man places bowl of leftover soup, cat arrives and licks bowl clean. Homeless guy returns, sorts through clear plastic and leaves with a full bucket, an old lady removes a broken shrine suitable for repair. In the morning the pile still looks like chaos but there is more order than meets the eye and definitely no dogshit bags.

Power poles, another sign of Chaos and Order.

If you have been to Asia you cannot help but notice that all power cables run above ground swinging from pole to pole wrapping the buildings like hostages. I have recently been looking at these cables more closely and it is as though you can see the personality of the person who works on them. Some are well-organized with the same tension, as they straddle the poles and neat excess cable coiled and neatly tied. I imagine the person that works these areas keeps a tidy house. Others are a mesh of tangled lines, some cables taut others slack to the ground tangled with branches and bindweed. Maybe I shouldn't blame the workers, it could just be the layering of time and growing of trees and vines. I have a met a couple of Asian cable layers through wheelchair rugby classification electrocution resulting in multiple limb amputation.Next time I see them I'm going to ask them why some are ordered and others are chaotic.

Conformity

There is no sign of rebellion in this country when it comes to Covid, walk into a shop and the routine starts with a temperature check and hand sanitisation. Everybody wears a mask, not just in the usual places like shops, but riding scooters, sitting in cars, walking in the rainforest. I think I'll come home with a brown forehead, white nose and spotty chin.

I apologise

I am reading, ‘Ways of Seeing’, by John Berger. The first essay talks about the way we see things being affected by what we know or believe also, seeing and being seen by others makes us fully credible in this world. Not entirely relevant to Bergers text but this got me thinking about my preconceived ideas based on my experience as a backpacker in the early 90’s. I have held onto the opinion that Thailand, despite its outward beauty, has an aggressive underbelly, I have been physically kicked off a bus for going back to my seat to check I hadn’t left anything, locked in a shop and called a fucking bitch for accusinng the owner of scratcing my negatives, seen a weapon pulled on a guy for asking for the bus air con to be turned on... All these things really happened but let’s face it, it’s not just about how we see, but how we are seen by others. We were backpackers then, as tight with our cash as could be, if you screwed the stall holder down to their smallest profit margin for a trinket it was a great success and something to brag about, 20p was a meal to them and nothing to us, the privileged lot that were lucky to have the means to travel. We would buy the cheapest Pad Thai and sit in a cafe half the day buying only a bottle of water, the worst backpackers robbed or did a runner from their accommodation as a way to eke out a longer trip. We were not all bad, I think I was always respectful but as a type of traveler we must have bloody hard work for any Thai in the industry trying to make a living and it’s far from surprising that we had the potential to test their patience to break point. I have returned to Thailand many times since those days, had no majorly bad experiences and only been ripped off by a tuk tuk drive who put a far smaller dent in my purse than a taxi driver in Istanbul. I have good Thai friends through work and leisure who have shown me nothing but kindness. I sincerely apologise to my Thai friends for holding onto these beliefs and be mindful of the inextricable dynamic between seeing and being seen.