In a seeming counterpoint to yesterday’s seriousness, today’s post is rather silly. You have been warned.
The great thing about Twitter, aside from connecting you up to all sorts of interesting people, is that it can help generate ideas – for places to go, things to see, blog posts, etc. Note that I didn’t say they were necessarily good ideas.
Take today for example. A thread started up about pet peeves in Bangkok. Now, I generally avoid Thai-bashing, and not just because it’s too easy. A lot of the things that annoy us Westerners are the result of our cultural differences, and isn’t that what makes travel "interesting"?
It all started with a complaint about how people here don’t stand to one side on escalators, so that other people can pass them if needed. This whole "obliviousness" to other people can be a constant source of frustration for foreigners who live here. My favorite are the so-called "PC’s" – Product Consultants – people the big health and beauty manufacturers hire and station in supermarkets to help push their products. The thing is, whenever I encounter them, they’re always just standing around talking to each other, and actually blocking my access to the products.
The discussion led on to complaints about people who get off the escalator and stop, which is a very dangerous thing to do, but I nonetheless encounter it once or twice a week. Then there’s the people who stop and hesitate before getting on the escalator.
Eventually, we got to the heart of the issues: the Skytrain. There was universal disdain for "pole hogs" – those people that wrap themselves around one of the center poles meant for standing passengers. Even worse were those who back onto the pole and seem to have some sort of grip on it with a prehensile monkey butt.
I have to admit that my own biggest pet peeve about the Skytrain are the people, who despite all of the signs telling them not to, stand directly in front of the doors on the platform, rather than to the side so people can get off the train first. This always seems to be the worst at Siam station, where almost everyone gets off one train to rush to another one. Every time I pull into a station on a train and see all those people blocking the exit, the little devil on my shoulder (we all have them, cartoons never lie) keeps urging me to bolt out the door as soon as it opens and use my considerable bulk (by Thai standards) to see how many I could knock down.
The knowledge that I was not alone in my feelings allowed my little devil to take flight, and come up with a "great" idea for a new game: BTS Bowling. It would be played just like regular bowling, except you don’t need a ball or special shoes, and instead of pins, the object would be to knock down as many people on the platform as possible. Scoring would be the same too, so if you knocked down 10 people, it’d be a strike. We’d have to think of a really special prize for the first person to "bowl" a perfect game. Bail money would probably be the most appropriate.
Leagues are forming now.
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