Field Trips in Bangkok

Monday 21st May: Orientation around Bangkok

Today was our first full day in Bangkok. After a week of travelling around Southern Thailand and no time to do washing, the first item on my agenda was to get all of my clothes washed. After this my friends and I had some time to explore the area around where we were staying.

It was not until late afternoon that I had my ‘academic work’ for the day. The work was basically an exercise in ‘reading the landscape of the area’, e.g. seeing how the tourist landscapes are taking over the more traditional Thai landscapes.

In the evening we went to have dinner at a Middle Eastern place before heading to the Suan Lum Night Market, where I bought the Thai royal family – yellow T-Shirt that all the locals wear on Mondays (because it was the day the king was born on). After that it was back to Suk 11 (the guesthouse where we are staying) because we had to eat my birthday cake that we were to tired to eat on the day itself.

Tuesday 22nd May: Polluted Khlong Project Work

Today was a very busy day as we were starting to prepare for our projects in Bangkok. However, before this we had a fieldtrip to see a Polluted Khlong. A Khlong is what the Thais call canals. When we arrived at the canal the stench of raw sewage was so powerful that it actually almost made me feel sick. The area was disgusting with a major road next to the canal, shanty towns on the other side and a motorway above us. However, it was very interesting to find out that people actually lived in these conditions, what caused the horrible conditions and how little was being done by the authorities to sort out the problems.

In the afternoon, the work was not done because we had two lectures to attend. Firstly, there was one on Positionality, Critical Reflexivity and Ethics and secondly one about Research Design. These were very geographical lectures, so I won’t bore you with the details. After that it was time to start working on our Bangkok projects with our groups. The project is basically a photo essay where we have to take 16 photographs of Bangkok on different topics, e.g. Cultural landscapes, social geography, physical geography, etc and then write a half page report explaining why we choose the photograph and what this tells us about the Geography of Bangkok. The projects will mainly be completed from Friday to Sunday because we have a couple more days of field trips around Bangkok first.

By this time I was feeling very tired, so I decided to get a quick dinner of ‘Chicken Rice with Chinese Sauce’ and then returned to the hotel. Good Night.