A friend loves to tease me about my passion for Mexican and Japanese cuisine, and how I seem to circumvent local cuisine in my tireless pursuit of bean burritos, fish tacos, spicy tuna rolls, and teppanyaki fried salmon. He’s not entirely wrong, especially in countries where the food scene consists mostly of boring or fatty, meaty dishes.

In Thailand, great-tasting, lean food of all kinds is omnipresent and Charlotte and I eat a wide range of local specialties at least five days a week. Street food is still ridiculously affordable and we rarely spend more than SEK 120/USD 12 for both of us, including a tall, cold beer each.

Last night, after a 3-year hiatus, we returned again to ISAO on Soi 31, arguably one of Bangkok’s most well-known Japanese restaurants with consistently high quality. When we rented an apartment at the Oakwood on Soi 24 back in 2014, we probably visited ISAO twice monthly. Often, but not always, we’d order the above dish, ISAO’s signature Sushi Sandwich with fried rice and pouched salmon captured with available light with the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

On the way back to the Skytrain to get home to Silom and Saladaeng, we stopped by the iconic Villa Market for breakfast fruit and nuts. So glad to see that some of our old favorites are still around.

Shocking as it may be, for whatever reason, neither Charlotte or I had ever been to Old Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand. So, in order to remedy this, we took a northbound train this morning and arrived in Ayutthaya about midday, after two hours.

The ride itself was smooth, but the two blabbering old German dudes in front of us, along with the locomotive’s pounding diesel engines made it hard to do anything but hope the train was going to be on time. It was.

On our way to one of Ayutthaya’s many temple ruins, we met this chef who generously let me capture her wonderful, big smile.

By mere happenstance, I spotted this tall wall of jars, all filled with some kind of color, at a department store earlier today. We were heading to the famously intense Chatuchak Market (aka Weekend Market) to see if things there had changed much since our last visit some 3 years ago.

The simple answer? Not really. Sure, it’s a market, so obviously some of what’s sold there goes out of favor and is no longer available. That’s how it’s been since my very first visit in 1988 when finely woven t-shirts with Keith Haring’s artwork silkscreened on them were all the rave.

I knew of Haring from his design of the logo for 1983’s Montreux Jazz Festival, as I was there for a few crazy nights with a couple of American friends that I’d met in either Rome, Brindisi, or Corfu. Anyhow, I bought a Haring t-shirt during the Swiss festival and I want to remember paying about $20 for it. Then, five years later, I got a dozen different motifs by the same New York artist at Chatuchak for less than $2 a tee. That’s kinda how the market works. Right now it’s the bucket hat that’s selling like hotcakes.

The most striking difference and something I would argue is going on at a lot of places in Bangkok is a kind of upgrade. And when it comes to Chatuchak, if not the world’s largest open-air markets, at least one of the top three, the upgrade is more than welcome.

Yes, it can still get ridiculously hot, humid, and, above all claustrophobically crowded. But now there’s more physical space, more cafés, more places to rest, more public toilets, and as far as I could tell, generally speaking, a higher quality of wares on sale. It just feels like Chatuchak offers an overall better visiting/shopping experience.

But hey! What about them color jars? Well, since I didn’t have a great image from our visit to Chatuchak, I figured the jars would just have to suffice to illustrate today’s rant.

This is the Original Resurfaced Vehicle in Bangkok. This old wrecked and abandoned car which I saw for the first time more than 10 years ago in the capital’s Talad Noi neighborhood.

The car (Fiat?) is one of the very reasons why I initially started looking at what happens when a surface becomes so dilapidated that it offers me something new, unexpected and, if I’m lucky and catch it, an interesting composition with potential artistic value.

I saw this hand yesterday while walking around Talad Noi, one of my favorite Bangkok neighborhoods and a place I’ve documented for over a decade. The outstretched hand reminded me of how hard it can be to accept change. Even if it means abandoning the very hand that feeds you, change aka evolution aka iteration, is an inescapable part of life

Let me explain.

In the three years since my last visit, Talad Noi has clearly gone through a sanitation process. It’s still wonderfully gritty, smelly, and rough, but also a little less soulful. I stumbled onto a new trendy café where coffee was priced like in downtown Paris and a small bottle of soda water was USD$5:50. Later, Charlotte and I spent a small fortune on a few basic, yet quintessential beverages (beer) at a riverside restaurant with an über-cool retro decor and a playlist chockfull of easy-listening FM tunes.

While there, I thought of how ironic it was that the audience these new, trendy, high-end places are targeting come so geographically and financially far away from the people that live in Talad Noi. These high-end establishments have chosen a market segment and pricing position that just feels arrogant and in complete lack of humility for where they are located. What happens when the very hand that feeds these chic, hotspot hangouts, i.e., the working-class ambiance disappears and the only thing left is juat a vague hint of a life non of their patrons can relate to?

I doubt the working-class vibe will ever completely abandon Talad Noi. I certainly hope not. And the transition the neighborhood is currently going through was, as aforementioned, unpreventable. It’s a classic case of gentrification that I’ve seen happen firsthand in other Bangkok neighborhoods like Rattanakosin and in other cities, most notably Berlin, Copenhagen, and New York City.

While walking back to Bang Rak last night, weaving through the crowds along the Chao Phraya River where tens of thousands were gathering to celebrate Loy Krathong, I saw a few locals of Talad Noi. They were sitting in front of their shophouses, chatting away, enjoying the cool, evening temperature while sharing a meal. Those fleeting scenes gave me solace.

Today is our daughter Elle’s twenty-second birthday. We had a wonderful, pre-birthday Italian-themed dinner about a week ago in Malmö, so today, Charlotte and I will celebrate Elle via a video call this afternoon, Bangkok time (Sweden is six hours behind us).

I’d barely recovered from the flight to Copenhagen from L.A. and I’m now once again jet lagged beyond belief. As topsy-turvy as the next few days of existence here in Bangkok will inevitably be, it’s totally worth it. Existing in this wonderfully balmy weather, in a sea of spontaneous smiles and with an abundance of affordable dining opportunities on literally every street corner, is something I’ve been looking forward to since we left Asia (pre-pandemic) in early 2020.

We flew here in an Airbus 380, an insanely humongous flying vessel, and among the movies I saw was the excellent and eerily relevant film “The Darkest Hour”. While watching the cast’s outstanding performance in scenery easily on par with what is portrayed in Peter Morgan’s The Crown, I sipped through two tall gin & tonics, munched through a small bag of Emirate’s popcorn and though I’d seen it once before, badly wished for the epic movie never to end. I’ve been a fan of Gary Oldman’s work for a long time, at least since his 1994 roll in Léon: The Professional, along with Jean Reno and Natalie Portman. I highly recommend watching Oldman in the Apple+ espionage show Slow Horses.

Above screen grab courtesy of Chinese (!) film finacers Perfect World Pictures.