Phuket’s Chinese Altars

Phuket’s Chinatown is well past its prime, consisting mainly of old shophouses that seem not to have been touched, inside or out, for the better part of a century. It isn’t even that overtly Chinese anymore. What gives away its cultural background are the Chinese altars mounted in the sidewalk arcades around the neighbourhood. The pineapples and bright flowers laid as offerings speak of Thai influence, but the overall design of the altars belies the Hokkien origin of Phuket’s Chinese immigrants. In other parts of Thailand, most Chinese people are Cantonese or Chiu Chow, who seem to prefer far simpler, more conservative altars, like those in Hong Kong.

Morning Coffee: Bo(ok)hemian

Sometimes good things do come from the pages of Lonely Planet. Normally (in Southeast Asia, at least), visiting one of the bars or restaurants recommended in its pages will lead you to a place filled Lonely Planet readers of the most insufferable sort. Bo(ok)hemian is not one of those places. Despite its goofy name, it’s a nicely ramshackle hangout in the oldest part of Phuket, stocked with used Thai books and local art. The coffee is great, too, and cheap.

It was a quiet evening when I visited late last month. Most of the nearby shops had already closed for the day. Two Thai twentysomethings sat at a table on the sidewalk, eyes fixed on a white Macbook, while a Chinese couple looked through the books. Gig posters and indie CDs were on display near the cafe’s entrance. I couldn’t help but think that Bo(ok)hemian represented another face of globalization, the kind described in Andrew Potter’s book The Rebel Sell: a localized version of the same indie culture that can be found in Mile End, the Lower East Side and Kensington Market.

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Contemplation

I came across this guy in Phuket’s Chinatown, a quiet, crumbling reminder of the days when Phuket made its fortune from tin mining, not tourism. He might seem deep in thought but in reality he had just been picking his ear and was looking at the product of his excavations. We’re allowed to tell little lies in our photos, right?

Long Live the King

Although Canada has a monarch, Britain’s queen retains very little presence in Canadian culture. The kind of curiosity and adulation that inspired thousands of Montrealers to flood the streets when King George VI visited in 1939 has long since vanished. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to visit Bangkok and realize the exent to which the King of Thailand appears to be adored, with utmost earnesty, by the city’s inhabitants. Shrines to the king are found throughout the city, on streets and in shopping malls. Each Monday, many people in Bangkok—a significant minority, at least—wear yellow shirts in honour of the king.

Of course, it’s easy to forget that, as well-loved as Thailand’s king appears, he is protected by lèse majesté laws that are used to prosecute anyone who dares criticize any of Thailand’s royalty. This despite the fact that the king himself, an American-born, Swiss-educated man named Bhumibol Adulyadej, has admitted that “the king can do wrong,” and that “I must also be criticized.” Nonetheless, accusations of lèse majesté levied against Thailand’s former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, were among the motives behind the 2006 military coup against the country’s democratically-elected government.

Earlier this year, the king’s only sister died; shrines to her have been erected in the city’s metro stations. In one station, the shrine is accompanied by a book in which passersby can write their condolences. If only I could read Thai — what have people written?

Crossing the Street in Bangkok

Unlike people in most Canadian cities, Montrealers don’t take being able to cross the street for granted. For our own sake, we always assume that an oncoming car will not stop, so we calculate our trajectory accordingly when we attempt the seemingly simple task of getting from one side of the road to the other. This applies to jaywalking, of course, but also to crosswalks: the only cars that ever stop at zebra crossings have Ontario licence plates.

That gives us something in common with Bangkok, where pedestrians hold no illusions about being very high in the transportation pecking order. With roads clogged by a mind-boggling number of cars, trucks, buses, taxis, tuk-tuks and motorcycles (there are 50,000 death-defying motorcycle taxis alone), all of them moving very fast, pedestrians have a lot of adversaries to deal with when crossing the street.

Since there are so few breaks in traffic, the procedure is usually to step off the sidewalk as soon as the nearest lane is clear, then wait on the lane divider for the next lane to clear, and so on. Meanwhile, as you wait in the middle of the road, traffic will engulf you, so you’d better watch your step if you enjoy having intact bones in your feet. The scooters and motorcycles are what make this endeavour so complicated: they seem to come out of nowhere and always at top speed.

As long as you’re alert and you have good nerves, it’s easy to get used to it, and whenever you leave Bangkok you’ll be amazed at how calm the traffic is in other cities. But, as the opening scene in the great Thai thriller 13 Beloved so effectively indicates, when you cross the street in Bangkok, there’s very little standing between you and certain death…

Rainbow Jam

Thanks to its large, multi-hued fleet of taxis and tuk-tuks, not to mention the Thai tradition of exuberantly decorating one’s vehicle, Bangkok must have the most colourful traffic in the world. That’s a good thing, too, because the traffic is jammed so often it would be awfully monotonous without such visual stimulus.

A Street Market? No, a Railway Market

Mark Slutsky sent me a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.

Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams from from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes down some local roads, including a neighbourhood market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.

According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.

Photos by Richard Barrow