With traveling, thus leaving known places and discovering new ones, it is sometimes not so easy.
Just when we have worked out a place it already goes on again. We leave familiar streets, coffee shops and restaurants, people we’ve grown fond of, sometimes even the country, and with it we change currency and SIM cards. The fact is, as much as I love traveling, these little things get on my nerves, which would bring me one or the other gray hair every time again, if they weren’t all gray already.
Check and double check
I constantly have the feeling of forgetting something. We check and do another double check when we leave a room. I constantly check if my cell phone and wallet are still there or if the zipper on my backpack is closed properly. I know, where my passport is, but I check again and again. Some of this seems to be the only routine in life. The only knife better be in its place. When we do a reorder in our bags, it takes days to get used to it.
“New” or better “Different” is always exhausting as well
There is so much more new, so many more questions when we enter the next country: We have to take care of the next visa and maybe we need another passport photo format? Other religion, other dress code? Do we eat with spoon and fork, chopsticks or fingers? Is there an ATM at the border? And if there is, what are the fees? Can we pay with our credit card in the stores? Is our usual yogurt still available or the coffee machines? Can I, as a woman, organize things or do they just talk to Klaus?
We miss our old order at home
And the packing again and again gets me crazy. It’s not unusual for us to stand over our bags and grumble a curse word or two, because for some reason our stuff doesn’t fit properly into the bags anymore. We miss our old order at home, of course, but we also know if we were there we would miss traveling. But probably the worst thing about traveling is that it leaves us wanting more! The more places we’ve visited, the more countries we’ve traveled to – my personal list of destinations only gets longer instead of shorter. Then I dream of our next 4 months travel in the winter after this big trip. Maybe again India or Vietnam? Or maybe Russia and Mongolia? With every country I get more and more addicted to new smells, experiences, adventures and especially the moment recordings. And all the difficulties mentioned above can’t change that.
With routine, our brain switches to autopilot
But new impressions suddenly turn on all our senses. Especially smells, sounds, tastes we often perceive much more intensively when we’re on the road. We become fully absorbed in the moment or are completely overwhelmed.
Bangkok is intense
But, we can come back and explore and discover cities like Bangkok again and even more intensely. We were looking forward to this city during traveling Thailand, where we have already spent days and weeks on other trips. At the known we have set and simply further explored the city. Bangkok is definitely a city that is also worth to be visited again. A little bit of a “home” and yet foreign. Bangkok, we look forward to a next time to explore so much more.
Bangkok is dirty, noisy and also otherwise quite fabulous
The city is too dirty, too hectic and too chaotic for most people – the purest Moloch. So let’s go quickly from the airport to the hotel and the very next day on towards the beach in more relaxed corners of Thailand. But we wouldn’t be this kind of traveler as we are, if we wouldn’t have tried to find the reasons why to love Bangkok.
It’s true: smog hangs in the air, hordes of motor scooters constantly race past you at millimeter intervals and the tropical heat presses down from above. The modern architecture is generally not worth mentioning, the house walls are dingy gray and the smell is often borderline. The traffic seems completely insane to outsiders, crossing streets takes a lot of courage, and the crumbling sidewalks are the purest obstacle courses, where you walk single file over holes in the concrete and under low-hanging power lines. We wonder at the never-ending hustle and bustle around us.
We have to love a city so obsessed with food. There seems to be at least one street stall for every resident, and the offerings are correspondingly spectacular. In almost every street we walk through, people are cooking, frying, deep-frying, grilling or steaming at mobile kitchens. Flames flash from under woks, smoke is in the air. Whether it’s a glitzy neighborhood, a backpacker street, or a palace setting.
When we’re hungry, we just go out, knowing full well that the chance of getting something delicious for a small price is pretty good. Of course, there are not particularly hygienic conditions: everything is makeshift, dishes are washed in tubs full of standing water, refrigeration is done with ice, and following multi-level hygiene protocols is not something I would expect. But as long as the food is hot and the ingredients look good, there are usually no problems. All the scent of curries and spice pastes finally hits our nostrils around every corner. The moment we know, we are in Bangkok. Traveling can be wonderful.
