Noisy Neighbors

00.46 : jolted out of sleep again , as the Chinese opera below my window gets a new jolt of energy. At first I thought they were winding down after a mere four hours , meeting one of the actors going home. Not so. So : Bangkok, Chinatown . I know nothing, which also is fine. In by taxi ( big billboard near the airport : "Buddha is not furniture" ) and dumped at the beginning of a maze of narrow alleys , but some of the people sitting by the road recognised the name of the guesthouse : it will work out somehow. And it did. The guesthouse is jammed up against the temple on one side , and with the river on the other. The view from my room : corrugated steel roof with a crest of dragons immediately outside , the temple. From the roof the view expands to the hangar style roof of the temple courtyard ( with a tree breking thru ) , and nearby houses : concrete , but still with Chinese curved roofs and tiles. The river is not only lapping at the sides , bur breaking through at high tide.

The skyline is high rise country , skyscrapers reminescent of British sci fi covers from the seventies , and with a few touches of pagoda style : add a hint of Wiliam Gibson. The plan is a quick jaunt to the Myanmar embassy the next morning to arrange a visa : actually I won´t move beyond a one kilometer radius the next 24 hours.

Soundscape : the opera ranging from fulfilled expectations of classical Chinese style to slapstick , talk to the hand scenes to pure Asian Spike Jones stuff. The volume take some time ( read : a decade or so ) getting used to.

In between spaces with birds chirping in the trees , and thai pop.