It’s funny how familiar it all seems while being vastly different at the same time. Bangkok in particular is like a melding of every city I’ve been to, shifting to a new one every few miles or blocks. It’s Orlando; big palm trees everywhere, wet and muggy. The hot sun is the skyline’s most prominent feature, bathing everything in a moist, inescapable blanket. Modest buildings eclipsed by billboards so large that the designers consider them failures if it can’t the seen not just from space, but from Jupiter. It’s Las Vegas. Flat stretches of traffic choked streets. People all over every single corner selling everything to what looks like no one. Every corner repeating somehow at a different vibration than the last as new half dressed just jock to get noticed. It’s Houston because it has that magic that somehow makes smog and uncomfortable heat feel blue collar charming. Everybody’s got an angle, and everybody seems rather nice about it. It goes on and on like that, but as a city of 13 million, I suppose it’s more accurate to say that every other city is aping Bangkok.

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