A Bangkok diary
1/5/2025 ☼ cities ☼ structured mess ☼ food
I’m just back from 10 stunningly hot days in Bangkok. Water came out of the faucets feeling warmer than blood heat.
It was my first time to Thailand other than overnighting in the airport 22 years ago when my connecting flight home was canceled. Bangkok is so good, and its geist reminds me of Marseille. I would like to go back, though perhaps in a cooler time of year.
Hua Lamphong (28 April, 2025).
The city is sprawling. Its freeways and major roads are thick with traffic during rush hours. But the small streets and alleys in the core are sometimes deserted even at midday. As in Tokyo, new high-rises and megamalls exist next to dilapidated low-rise buildings of varying vintages.
Tower Park (20 April, 2025).
Frequently, the view in frame is of a clichéd touristic image, such as a multi-tiered palace roof glittering with gold leaf, or a flower-garlanded spirit house by the roadside.
Water slices through the city, both in the form of the Chao Phraya River which winds through Bangkok, and the network of canals it feeds. Canals are an improving urban feature. It’s civilised to be able to walk most of the way to drinks beside a canal, and stop en route at a tarp-shaded counter for a plate of noodles.
Khlong Maha Nak (20 April, 2025).
Food is everywhere, in legible restaurants and in less legible streetside carts or stands. While escaping from a torrential downpour in a conveniently located megamall, I accidentally had a spectacular plate of cowslip flowers fried with glass noodles and egg at a 4-table work-lunch counter on the 2nd floor.
Baan Saladin (22 April, 2025).
At the other extreme, is the small streetside cart selling basically one thing. Hunting kuay teow kua gai (which I’d first encountered in a takeout spot in Cambridge, Mass. years ago), I was sent to a tiny side alley near Wat Mangkon where every stand specialises in it.
This dish, in my view, must be cooked over tremendous heat. It is a handful of wide fresh rice noodles first fried loosely with abundant fat, slices of marinated protein (mainly chicken), and chopped preserved radish; then the mass is fried flat with lightly mixed egg and flipped repeatedly. A good one, I wrote last week, is “chewy and lightly crisp noodles with light wok hei, barely cooked chicken that still has scorched edges, and egg variably custardy and browned. The savoriness comes from the marinated chicken and preserved turnip.”
Kuay teow kua gai (19 April, 2025).
The mix of textures and the outline of technique will be familiar to those who like the Teochew-style oyster omelettes which contain a starch slurry cooked into the egg and oysters. (I discovered that the Chinese food of Bangkok is heavily influenced by the methods and preferred textures of Teochew cooking.)
The city has a form of what I call “structured mess.” Though cars are everywhere, the transit network is extensive and very multimodal (multiple above- and below-ground trainlines and rail, scheduled buses in a wide range of crustinesses, ferries, ride-hailing cars, and on-call motorbikes). But these modes of transit don’t interoperate perfectly, even if you have access to local digital payment systems.
On one of the days I was at large, moving from origin to destination just on the train network involved segments on 3 lines operated by different companies. I paid for each segment in a different way (cash, QR code, contactless debit card). Because the train lines in the network don’t interoperate, stations where the lines overlap often aren’t true interchanges between segments. So in the core where the lines cross each other, open-air, mostly sheltered skybridges often form the actual connections you take to switch lines. The lack of seamlessness is messy, and makes it impossible to navigate the city on autopilot. You’re forced to pay attention, and that’s a good thing.
Asoke (27 April, 2025).
Where systems rub up against each other but lack rigidly enforced interaction protocols, the people in the systems have to pay attention.
Because scooters are such a useful way to get around a messy city (similar to how Marseille works), they end up coexisting with pedestrians. In big streets and back alleys, along narrow canal-side paths, between stands in crowded markets, there the scooters are. So the dominant mode is not to assume that there are Rules everyone is following. Instead, pedestrians and riders pay attention to their shared environment. They move slowly, signal intent overtly, and watch for acknowledgment. This is how passengers can hop off and on scooters at major intersections, with the flood of vehicles rolling on, slowly and without honking, around them.
Makkasan (23 April, 2025).
All through the city, there are fancy malls, hotels, houses, office blocks, and apartment complexes — each is a nice place to be occupied, a node from which to come or to which to go. The city is a matrix in which these nodes sit. In Bangkok, tolerate a messy, humble, dusty, crusty matrix filled with stray cats and dogs, but make the nodes nice and spend time in them. In Europe, to grossly oversimplify, make the matrix nice and spend time in it, and be content with humbler nodes.
In the grocery stores and convenience shops, I saw milk flavoured with honeydew, banana, strawberry, white malt, and (once) tamarind. At a 3-table restaurant at the bottom of Charoenkrung, we had lukewarm beers and a plate of fried horseface loaches before going around the corner to look at old silver and used gemstones from all over South and Southeast Asia.
Soi Sawatdi (27 April, 2025).
One morning, heading to coffee in embassytown, all the fountains outside a succession of luxury apartment blocks were quiet — they had turned into still pools of jade green water.
Under a banyan in the courtyard of an 18th-century house, two uniformed security guards dozed in the shade, on their sides, heads pillowed on their inner elbows.
Bangkok Kunsthalle (25 April, 2025).
I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can design themselves to be good at working in uncertainty by clearly distinguishing it from risk.