BKK - KOKO
バンコク情報
20261003
20260927
20260926
Bangkok Diary: Return of the Dragonflies
It's been raining for about three days straight now, and half the city is flooding. I've lived here roughly ten years, and I genuinely cannot remember it being this bad. This isn't garden-variety Bangkok rain — this is the kind that turns streets into rivers and parking lots into ponds.
Funny thing — the day before all this started, I remember seeing dragonflies everywhere outside. I even wondered at the time if the drainage-ditch-slash-canal near my place was breeding ground zero for all of them. Then the rain came down nonstop for three days, and I honestly forgot about them. Where do dragonflies even go during a flood-level downpour? I had no idea, and frankly no way to find out.
Today the rain finally let up for a bit, and suddenly they were everywhere again — like they'd been hiding out somewhere this whole time, waiting for a break in the weather to come back outside all at once.
Except now they seem to be laying eggs directly into puddles in the road and the parking lot. Which — no. That's not a pond. That's asphalt with standing water on it. I genuinely wanted to walk over and explain, "hey, buddy, wrong spot," except I don't speak dragonfly, and even if I did, I'm not sure how you'd talk one out of bad real estate decisions.
I don't actually know how long an adult dragonfly lives, but whatever the number is, I have to imagine they're feeling the pressure right about now. Three days of their presumably short adult lifespan, just gone, spent waiting out a flood instead of doing whatever it is dragonflies are supposed to be doing. No wonder they're laying eggs in parking lot puddles. At this point, I think they're just going for it.
20260925
20260924
Bonus Essay: Things You Should Never Do in Thailand
If you're coming from an English-speaking, mostly-white environment, Asia takes some adjusting to. If you're from somewhere like New York, LA, London, or Sydney, you've probably already got Asian immigrant communities around you, so the culture shock is softer. But if you're coming from somewhere more homogeneous — small-town America, say — the adjustment takes a little longer.
That said, the adjustment period doesn't last. Everyone's friendly, everyone's curious about you, and if you're a guy, you'll probably have a girlfriend within weeks. That part happens fast.
Case in point: a friend of mine, from what Americans themselves would call the middle of nowhere. Tall, blond, classically handsome — and also, by his own admission, a total small-town guy underneath it. Good-natured, easygoing, but back home he had no real job prospects and no luck with women. Just quietly stuck.
Then he landed in Bangkok. First reaction: pure culture shock at how enormous and dense the city is. Second reaction, much more useful to him: people here look at a tall blond guy and see a Hollywood movie. Suddenly he's read as some kind of effortlessly elegant city sophisticate, which, let's be honest, he was not. But that misread became an advantage.
With no particular skills to speak of, he did what a lot of guys in his position do — started teaching English. Not because he had any special command of the language, just because he happened to speak it natively, and that alone is marketable currency once you cross an ocean.
Job: acquired. Girlfriend: acquired, almost immediately.
So here's a guy who, for the first time in his life, has everything going his way — job, girlfriend, social status he never had back home. Naturally, it went to his head a little. You try telling a guy in that state to stay humble; he's not listening. Everything's finally working out for him, and it's the first time he's ever felt that.
Then the ex-boyfriend shows up.
One thing leads to another, words get heated, and it turns into a full-on shouting match. My friend, riding high on his new life, doesn't back down — comes across like he's telling the guy to know his place and get lost.
What he didn't know — what most newcomers don't know — is Thai culture around face and pride. Losing face in public is, for a lot of Thais, worse than almost anything else you could do to them. Pride runs deep here, arguably deeper than almost anywhere.
And the other thing he didn't know: Thailand quietly has a lot of guns in circulation. More than people realize. Incidents happen that never make international news.
What happened after that, exactly, I honestly don't know. We drifted apart not long after, the way friendships in this city sometimes just do, and I never got the full story.
But the lesson stands regardless of how his particular story ended: never, ever, under any circumstances, get into a confrontation with a Thai person.
Bangkok Diary: The Morning Panic That Wasn't
Woke up this morning with a strange, dull pain under my arm. For about thirty seconds, I genuinely panicked — the mind goes straight to worst-case scenarios before you've even had coffee. Lymph nodes, some mystery illness, the works. Classic 6 a.m. catastrophizing.
But no. It's almost always the same boring culprit: the air conditioner. I slept in a tank top again, which in hindsight was a mistake, because a night of cold air blasting directly onto exposed skin is basically an invitation for this exact kind of ache. Lesson relearned, not for the first time.
And it's never just the one thing. Once I'm properly awake and taking inventory, there's usually a small lineup of minor complaints waiting for me. The light feels too sharp for no reason — dry eyes, probably, from staring at screens all day with no real breaks. My lower back and legs feel stiff and cold, like the muscle itself got chilled overnight. It's a whole little parade of "wait, what's wrong with me today," and every single time, the answer is: nothing, really. Just the AC doing its quiet damage while I slept.
The annoying part is knowing the fix and still not doing it. Turn the AC off and it's too hot to sleep. Use the timer function and, more often than not, it just doesn't cooperate — welcome to Thailand. So the actual solution is embarrassingly low-tech: put on long sleeves and long pants before bed instead of sleeping half-dressed like it's still July back home.
And, like clockwork, by the time late morning rolls around, all of it — the aches, the light sensitivity, the general sense of "something's wrong" — just quietly resolves itself. Sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems sorting themselves out, apparently. My body's daily reminder that most of my problems are self-inflicted and temporary.
20260923
Random Bonus Essay: The Nomads of the Morning Walk
There's a certain type of person you start noticing on morning walks around here — the nomad worker. Not a lot of them, just a handful, scattered along the same stretch of soi, doing the same slow, aimless loop I am.
How do I know they're nomads? Honestly, it's not evidence-based. It's a look. Not Thai — usually white, sometimes East Asian. A certain posture, slightly hunched, like they've spent one too many hours hunched over a laptop in a co-working space that charges too much for coffee. You just know.
Why are they walking? I'm fairly sure it's the same reason I am.
For me, it goes like this: stay inside too long, and things start to curdle a bit. Bad thoughts loop. Negativity creeps in and takes over before you notice it's happened. It's not dramatic — just the slow mental fog that comes from too many hours indoors, staring at the same four walls and the same glowing screen.
And the fix, it turns out, is embarrassingly simple: step outside, get some air that isn't recycled through an air conditioner, and let the noise of the street knock the noise in your head down a notch.
So I figure the guys out there in the morning, walking with no particular destination and that same faint hunch in their shoulders — they're not out there for the exercise. They're doing damage control, same as me.