It's that sort of place

I never was into jigsaw puzzles even though I used to have a go at many. I guess I lacked the patience and could never really take the time to work out the total picture as there always seemed to be those last few pieces I just couldn't work out. Thailand is like that. You think you have it worked out and then you realise you haven't.

As I think of living in Bangkok, I think of a number of different lines:
-Ain't it amazing.
-All is not what it seems.
-Your life can change in 24 hours.
Bangkok is that sort of place. It is an unknown quantity.

Living in Bangkok, you see that not every Thai is always smiling while Thailand is the Land of Smiles. You see that not every Thai is always gentle and kind while we are told that Thais are a gentle people. So the list can go on. We all have our image to present and protect bnut that lead us into issues of identity - who am I? who are we?

That the people do not match up to expectation is okay for nobody does and what you see is that Thais are human beings like everyone else. They just have their own specific cultural context, with thier cultural strengths and weaknesses. Where they suffer is that they have been idealised to the world, and I suspect they have been idealised by their own inside forces. Such an image does not help anyone as when you are perfect you have a huge burden to bear. This has a message for me.

Maybe this reflects for me what becomes the basic question I face in living in Bangkok. It is not the moral agenda questions of right and wrong, good and bad but the more basic question of what is real and not real. In facing reality, whether mine or someone else's or that of a society or people, what I value is that we set our own agenda and not have it set for us by someone else. Otherwise we can go down the track of fantasy, down a track that leads nowhere. We need to keep in touch with where we come from and who we are.