Four Years in Seven Posts... (7)

Bangkok, Ding Daeng, May 24th, 2013.

Just after 7 am here... Didn't sleep too well. The AC machine has an overhaul scheduled next week, it's a bit noisy, so I switched it off , which resulted in 77 degrees in the bedroom (felt like 95), and I awoke from a dream that felt suspiciously like Annakin's almost drowning-in-lava-scenes in Lucas' "revenge of the crith"... So I'm on the roof again, where the soft breeze almost makes me shiver. The migrant Lao or Burmese runaway boys who sleep here now and then are off to work, like anybody else: the soi below is crowded with pedestrians, bicyclists and bikers, and the occasional pink taxi. From high above, some of them are hidden under their cargo, from rainbow-colored upscale plastic shopping bags to sacks of Jasmine rice. Some of the bicycles have a side car stacked with lightweight goods. On the other side of the alley, an ageless beauty (I wear the wrong kind of spectacles to say/see anything more concrete) is doing her laundry on the roof, the antique way involving two buckets and a lot of wringing.

It's been a while that I last saw village women do laundry by the river, banging the wash-goods endlessly against rocks. Maybe I should go out in the countryside more often. This German and Singapore experience has somewhat interrupted my integration. Well, maybe next month... The soup vendor down the alley is already doing good business, and I'm contemplating to pay him a visit. Nah, too early. It's just too nice and quiet up here. Relatively speaking, of course - there's the cacophony of voices from below, the screeching of grand predator birds above, a Boeing descending towards Don Muang Airport, and the blaring of radio, dvd, ghetto-blasters and TV sets, all woven into a thick but gentle sound carpet that would make micro-polyphonists like Györgi Ligeti blush... And then the smells: burning incense and waste, CO2 from bike-exhausts, dark diesel fumes from the traffic-blocked trucks running idle, a certain note of tomcats' piss, birds droppings, decaying vermin, ants poison, overlaid by the flowers that line the roof, and an early notion of kitchen scents, garlic, lemon grass, hot cooking oil, sweet mango, blood and fish. If I hadn't kept my olfactory instrument low by life-long smoking, I'd run amok with scents. You can kill me with a generous dose of Patchouli, violet or musk. The only scent which I positively love is pure Amber. I remember three days in Cairo, Egypt, 1974, when we checked hundreds of different amber perfumes, with our bare arms covered with all those fragrances. Me and Bobby, the voluptuous Austrian redhead. Where I learnt that any perfume will smell different on a blond, a redhead, a brunette skin. Or an Asian, as I might add these days.