Bangkok, Last Day Friday Nov. 6th

For those of you just joining, I could not make Tibet - and hence, Nepal - work, and I took a flight to Bangkok as a means of continuing on to India. Yesterday, exhausted with the noisy and crowded city, I took the end of the line Mo chit - whatever that means. There is a v. large park there with some nice birds who have not yet succumbed to the foul air here. Just give me a nice little finch to look at and my whole day is better. There is a moat there with a lot of quite large turtles. There are also a lot of really beautiful trees. It allows one to kind of feel what Bkk must have been like before the utter destruction caused by autos overwhelming a space.
Bkk is one huge flea market. In addition to millions of stores, there are sidewalks stalls packed in on the sidewalks so that there is little place to walk. The sheer volume of dreck here is hard to comprehend. I think if all the crap being sold here was stacked in equal piles, there would be about 20 mountains and each would dwarf Everest. There is at least one part of the City where stalls have been cleared and sidewalks repaired - which is called Siam Square. Yesterday there I saw two Christmas displays. One inside a mall and another in the square. The one in the square is a giant Xmas tree which must be the most striking one I have ever seen. I have to go back this a.m. and photograph it. It is no wonder they put it up Nov 1st as the effort to build it must have been immense.
The Siam sq. mall is a really high end, quite handsome and giant mall of all the famous brands that Asians love to ape - D&G, Channel, etc., but even the big money like piaget and all the famous jewellery co's. The place was pretty empty except oddly Breitling had three different male customers looking at their $100,000 watches - watches so huge that you need a medical wrist enlargment just to carry around the time and month with you.
Tonight will be hard as my flight does not depart until 9 p.m. and gets into Chennai near midnight and I leave again in the a.m. at 9. But once that is done, I will try to be tropical in Indian and take it easy again for a few days.