Unperturbed

"You're heroes!" exclaimed a British lad we'd been chatting with at Sweety's Big Cocktails (just over 2 bucks for a frozen pink mai tai, oh mai!). We'd just shared what we were doing here: biking from Bangkok to Hanoi. "Nope", I countered, "we're heroes when we're done. We're idiots now."  Yes, our main objective is the biking, but we are still spending time in Bangkok getting ourselves ready for this. Buying maps, combing incomprehensible streets for alleged bike shops, stocking soap and toothpaste for 40 cents.

Being in Bangkok has me wordless. Both the diversity and the strangeness of what I see and smell is mind-boggling. But I itch to try and capture it. The city is busting out in four dimensions with activity. Everything is happening everywhere: food sellers and motorbikes and children and cats and dogs and police and potted plants and exhaust and golden buddhas. But I have not seen any aggression, no one is hurried, no one is busy, but combine this concentration of humanity and overall it seems busy. But really, individually, the word I would use is "unperturbed." 

Like the grayed old man drifting along on his rust bicycle in flip-flops at dusk, just about invisible, on a blustery road. But he was not hurried, he was not anxious.

Crossing these roads is also fascinating. Taxis and buses and motorbikes blow along in a seemingly impenetrable force. There are places reminiscent of cross-walks: white paint stripes on the road, but this is not Seattle, where you put a foot out and everyone obligingly slows down for you. Here it is a game of Frogger. But again, watching locals navigate this, nobody seems concerned.

Here's how it works. You stands expectantly at hopeful crossing location, looking left and right, then checking across the ocean for hopeful others. Eventually some join you on your side, and others congregate on the opposite. The traffic zooms along, disregarding, neon pink taxis studding the flow. At first this felt very hopeless to me. But--and this is the amazing part--once a critical mass of pedestrians has accumulated, and without any seeming acknowledgement of timing, everyone just pads into the street at the same time and the motor bikes lean around you, the buses slow down imperceptibly, and everyone gets across.

It's like a choreographed dance where everyone has a part but it's actually not choreographed.