"The Place to Disappear"

Kannu

This is an interesting story about a little street in Thailand. Full of young people enjoying themselves. 

Some thoughts about travel. I've done my fair share of it now, both business and personal. We have been on holidays to various places. When you go with somebody you love, like we went to Corfu or Chicago or Cornwall (interesting how our holidays line-up) I loved it because you all were with me. 

But till you have a regular girlfriend or a family, I would strongly advise you to think about going out on your own. Just a backpack and then you roam about on roads like this in Thailand or in Tibet or in Israel or panama or equador or USA. I haven't done that much but whenever I go on my trips, I sneak out of the hotel room and go for long walks around the cities. Just feel the city or place. Smell the food and trains and roads and people. Watch how they react. How the architecture has been built. Grab a slice of pizza at a local shop. Or a Philly cheesesteak at a kiosk. Or a burrito from a pavement seller. 

I think wandering around alone will not only help you know more about the world but also about yourself son. We are but our experiences and its these experiences which will help make you into a smart intelligent and great man. Plus you will find some very interesting 'company' when you are out there :)

Love

Baba

"The Place to Disappear" by Susan Orlean [Send Me a Story]

---

On Bangkok’s Khao San Road.

The Place to Disappear
On Bangkok’s Khao San Road.
Susan Orlean | New Yorker | Jan 2000

—

All languages are welcome on Bangkok’s Khao San Road, including Drunkard. “Hold my hand,” a man fluent in Singapore Slings commanded a Scottish hairdresser one night at Lucky Beer and Guest House—only in his dialect it came out soggy and rounded, more like Hole mah han. “Not right now,” the Scottish hairdresser said. She was a slender girl with the pinkish pallor of a milkmaid, blond hair, gray eyes, and a nose ring. She was on a six-week trip through Asia with two cute friends from Glasgow. They’d just arrived on a super-discount flight from Scotland and had checked into a seven-dollar-a-night room at one of the several hundred or so cheap guesthouses around Khao San Road-Happy Home Guest House or Nirvana Caf and Guest House or Sweety’s or Lek Mam’s or something; they actually couldn’t remember what it was called, but they knew how to find their way back. They also knew how to get from their guesthouse to the new branch of Boots, the English drugstore, which opened recently amid the T-shirt shops and travel agencies that line Khao San. Within their first few hours in Bangkok, the girls went to Boots and blew their travel budget on English soap and shampoo—same soap and shampoo they could get at home but somehow more exotic-seeming when bought in Thailand—and on snack packages of Oreos, which they worship and which are not easy to find in the United Kingdom. They thought Khao San was horrible because it was so crowded and loud and the room in the guesthouse was so dingy, but it was brilliant, too, because it was so inexpensive, and there were free movies playing at all the bars, and because they’d already run into two friends from home. On top of that, finding a branch of Boots right here was almost too good to be true. What’s more, Boots was super-air-conditioned, and that distinguished it from many of the other Khao San Road shops, which were open to the hot and heavy Bangkok air.