Dear friends and family,

On the 18th of this month we will have been in Bangkok for a full year, so to mark the occasion I want to tell you something about life in this city.

Somewhere between its smells, its pollution, its noise, and its impossible crush of people, this city, like every great city in the world, is by turns loathed and loved. The eternal contradiction. Those of us who enjoy what cities have to offer do enjoy them, but for those of us who have also lived in places far removed from all this (though not always quieter), the whole thing together can feel a bit aggressive.

Within this chaos we are lucky enough to live somewhere considerably calmer than Los Encinos, where the neighbors have no interest in making unnecessary noise, dogs are not allowed, and parties require the consent of everyone in the building, and on the couple of occasions over the year when someone threw one, everyone was invited. In truth I can't say what it would be like to live surrounded by Thais, because here in our building, ninety percent of us are foreigners.

For all the disorder this city generates, Thais seem to genuinely want to live in harmony with those around them and with their surroundings. The trouble is they also adore noise, and since this is a city where eighty percent of the population is under thirty-five, nobody out on the street or in public spaces seems to mind in the slightest. Everything is loud: the motorbikes, the tuk-tuks, the trucks, and so on, so having a conversation while walking, depending on where you are, is nearly impossible.

Thais always want to be having fun, and any excuse is a good one for a party, an outdoor show, music in every restaurant, bar, and entertainment venue.

Of course, once you actually live here, you start finding the quiet corners, the places with little or no noise, that slightly peculiar people like Juan and me require.

Where Thais transform entirely and respect nothing is the moment they get behind the wheel, and if there's an engine involved, so much the worse. As in most developing countries, they operate on the assumption that the car comes before the pedestrian, so you have to be careful even on the sidewalks, because when traffic backs up badly enough, motorcycles and bicycles use them without the slightest hesitation.

The food, as some of you already know, is delicious, but with combinations that in certain cases we find too strange for palates trained for a long time in other culinary traditions.

Just as in Mexico, people here eat all manner of little toasted or fried insects. People also, as back home, love to eat at all hours and in all places, so wherever you go (even in law offices and serious businesses) it is perfectly acceptable to eat at your desk or in places that would not be permitted in other countries.

For that reason, you will almost always encounter smells everywhere. The strongest ones tend to come from taxi drivers, who on top of eating and drinking and who knows what else, use air fresheners in their vehicles. So those of us who take taxis regularly occasionally have the misfortune of climbing into one and realizing, once inside, that the journey is going to be a kind of ordeal.

There is a fruit here that in many Asian countries is considered extremely precious for a variety of reasons; it's called durian. They say it's worth trying because it is one of those things where, once again, human beings take the risk of putting something in our mouths to see if we can discover something beyond the straightforward pleasure of tasting something that smells and tastes good from the very first bite. I say this because this fruit, from the moment it appears on the street, and worse still in any enclosed space, smells like rotting garbage (to our Western noses, at least), which on its own makes it difficult to bring to your mouth. Then, apparently, the flavor itself isn't easy to appreciate unless you grew up with it. Another reason people try it is that it is credited with aphrodisiac properties, though that has not been sufficient motivation for us so far.

Thais eat two things you might think of as entirely Western, though now I'm not so sure it isn't the other way around. One is waffles, the other is crêpes. Waffles are eaten at all hours, with every kind of strange combination imaginable, none of which appeal to me. They can be sweet or savory, or both at once, hot or cold, tiny or large, in all sorts of different shapes: the most creative range I have ever seen. Some have a kind of sweet potato inside, which is very popular here and is called taro.

Much the same goes for crêpes, and there are desserts here that almost always have one savory component and one sweet. This is one of the things you have to get used to when you live here, because for those of us who sometimes just want something purely savory or purely sweet, I would say that within Thai culture that practically doesn't exist. The sweet always carries a hint of salt and the salty always carries a hint of sweet, and it does wear on Juan and me after a while. For instance, I almost never order non-Thai salads in restaurants that don't specify the dressing, because even if it says Caesar salad or any European-style salad, it will be quite sweet, and I really dislike that.

From street carts people buy and drink a lot of coconut water, which is excellent. I had never tasted coconuts as sweet as the ones here. They come in many sizes, with different thicknesses, flavors, and so on. Mandarin juice is extraordinary, and everywhere you go someone is squeezing them fresh on the spot.

People also eat a great deal of corn on the cob, and you might think it resembles esquites (Mexican corn cups), but surprise: the kernels themselves are already sweet by nature, and whatever they put on top will be sweet too.

From those same street carts, they sell rolls that look like hot dog buns, and in the middle, can you guess what they put? If you haven't spent enough time around here, I don't think you would, so I'll tell you: ice cream. Yes, one or two scoops of ice cream. I have never tried it and never will, not only because it doesn't appeal to me but because I am not particularly dexterous when it comes to eating with my hands, and Thais are the complete opposite. In this heat, nestled inside a bread roll, I don't know how they manage it, but with more skill than we Mexicans show eating tacos or tostadas (and I can't even manage those), they don't drop a thing or get a drop on themselves.

They barely use napkins here, and not everything is eaten with chopsticks, nor is a knife used at the table. Thais say the knife belongs in the kitchen. In all restaurants, even the elegant ones (if they are Thai), you are given only a spoon and a fork. You eat everything with the spoon and use the fork as best you can to assist, even for peeling shrimp. The forks, accordingly, are flatter, without sharp tines, and somewhat difficult to use in the way we do back in Mexico. They don't pierce things well and you'll drop a lot, so you're better off watching how the locals do it and following their lead.

Because when it comes to noodles, you had better pick up your chopsticks unless you want the entire room watching you eat. You get used to being the odd creature in any social situation, but if you don't know these small rules you will hear the word "farang" (meaning foreigner) and see the knowing looks that go with it, frequently.

The word "farang" comes from "farangset," meaning French. Just as in Mexico people began calling Spaniards "gallego," another coincidence between us, where "gallego" stuck for all Spaniards and later warped into "gachupín," so "farangset" in Thailand was shortened to "farang" and came to mean all of us foreigners indiscriminately.

The people of Thailand who have adopted Buddhism as their religion are extremely devout and superstitious. Taxi drivers have their cars blessed at the temple. As part of this process, Buddhist symbols that look like prayers or good-luck inscriptions are somehow imprinted onto the vehicle (in a way that, to me, has the distinct feeling of ruining your car's ceiling).

To this we must add that everywhere you look, people are selling small garlands of jasmine (very strong-smelling but entirely natural), which taxi drivers also buy. These are used as amulets and are supposed to help attract more passengers. These drivers are just as laden with talismans and sentimental objects as their Mexican counterparts; only the specific items differ. Here, instead of little saints, Virgins, and Christs, the dashboards are filled with Buddhas and Buddhist objects, along with photos and mementos related to the king and the monarchy.

Walking along Bangkok's sidewalks is something of an obstacle course, since everyone appears to have the right to set up a small business on them. Food stalls and fried-food stands dominate, though on Mondays, at the king's request, there is a truce and most vendors respect it.

Some of these stalls are really small restaurants where people don't eat quickly and leave, but can spend hours over their beers or their Thai whiskies, since in many restaurants you are allowed to bring your own drink, which keeps the cost down considerably.

Beyond the climate that makes being outside so inviting, Thais don't like staying at home; they are very much an out-and-about people who eat out constantly. We have imitated this, and I rarely cook anything at our apartment, even something simple. Eating out here is cheap (even at good restaurants), clean, and delicious.

When my friends from Los Encinos visited, they asked why I don't cook more here. The answer is that the kitchen in this apartment isn't really a kitchen, it's a kitchenette, and we live ready to move at any moment, so I don't have many cooking utensils. Another reason is that I don't know how to cook Thai food and have no particular desire to learn, which means anything I would make would end up costing much more and require considerable effort to find the ingredients (which you can almost always find, but only in French supermarkets). The tortillas in these supermarkets, supposedly authentically Mexican, sometimes look like crêpes and are made by Americans.

On Juan's birthday (I'll include a photograph here), I decided to make pasta with garlic and parsley, the way we used to make it in Mexico. It hadn't occurred to either of us that the parsley here (since when Thais use it they must mix it with other things) has a completely different flavor from the parsley you know in Mexico, the United States, or Europe. So nobody complimented the pasta. Afterward everyone (my family at least) confessed they had been expecting the flavor of the pasta I used to make back home. There were only four of us for dinner, plus two friends who restore art. I put a couple of yellow candles on the cake, the kind they sell everywhere to offer to Buddha in the temples, so everyone looked at me very strangely. They asked if I didn't know where to buy normal birthday candles, to which I replied: "These seem much more original and different to me," but they all stared back with a look that said, "What?" The advantage Juan and I have is that we are not big eaters and we adapt to whatever food is in front of us, though we absolutely savored the day I made a Spanish potato omelette. We always have breakfast at home because we like a European- or American-style breakfast, and here the Thais start eating strong-smelling food first thing in the morning, which kills our appetite.

The Swedish neighbors below us have housekeepers who start cooking this from very early on, and when we first arrived we would close everything and turn on the air conditioning so the smell wouldn't get in. Now we've adjusted and leave everything open, because it doesn't bother us nearly as much.

Something that strikes me constantly is the confidence with which Thai cats (which have short tails and are somewhat different from the cats I know) approach people without fleeing, as they would in Mexico. The dogs, at least in the areas where we spend our time, are not aggressive, which is genuinely pleasant. I have come to the conclusion that this is because in this country people have more respect for the lives of animals and plants. On any sidewalk, alongside trees of whatever size, even if they make walking difficult, there are pots of plants that people bring out from their homes or businesses.

As some of you already know, in the area where we live you regularly see birds, pigeons, parakeets, crows, and a great variety of other birds throughout the day. Many mornings we are woken by the racket the crows make, and later by the whistling of the songbirds. They whistle in a way I have only ever heard in this country.

There is one bird whose whistle gives me a feeling of sadness and which I don't like; there is another that very monotonously whistles four notes, ascending them as if climbing a musical scale. It repeats this whistle continuously until it decides to leave, so that a few minutes later another bird, or others, takes its place.

At night, louder and more insistent, you can hear the croaking of frogs, which is also rather deafening but deeply pleasant.

We also coexist very amicably and respectfully with the monitor lizards (a kind of lizard-crocodile hybrid that can grow up to three meters long), which live in the canal running through our compound. Here where we live they are no longer than a meter and a half, but if they're angry they can kill you with a swipe of their tail. So when, crossing the little bridge inside our compound, I came across one stretched out full-length blocking my path, I prudently waited for it to move before I crossed.

All of this seems so contradictory to me in a city that is supposedly this polluted, and yet is teeming with animal life. Perhaps they are more abundant here where we live because the zoo is very nearby, and there is no skytrain, no metro, and no tall buildings. Military aircraft aside, planes and helicopters don't fly over us either, because we live in a zone full of government buildings, palaces, and the homes of people close to the king. For this same reason we had quite a spectacle during the coup, since we found ourselves surrounded by, and "supposedly" very well protected by, the army.

Going to the cinema has its own particular character, because there are cinemas of different categories with their corresponding luxuries. To begin with, every cinema here has numbered seats, as in a theater. Thai films, which are enormously popular here (we haven't watched a single one all the way through, though we've seen trailers, and find them rather silly and naive), almost never lack their dose of violence, which audiences love, though the films are constrained by censorship that is, most of the time, entirely illogical and deeply contradictory given the thinly veiled prostitution and sexual permissiveness that exist here. Good films are generally not made as a result.

Before the film begins, everyone must stand (the notice on the screen makes this very clear) out of respect for His Majesty the King (those are the actual words used), and a kind of anthem plays, different from a more martial-sounding one you hear in other public spaces such as the skytrain, the metro, and parks, always at six in the evening. While the music plays, images of the king and his family appear on screen, above all of him among his people: working in the fields, taking photographs, making calculations with surveying instruments, playing the saxophone (which they say he plays well), and other scenes meant to evoke Thai pride.

It is claimed that the king himself designed and engineered several of the bridges over the Chao Phraya river, especially the Rama IX bridge, one of the most recently built.

This is a society in love with uniforms. Beyond the expected ones for police and military, there are school uniforms, university uniforms, uniforms for office workers, employees, and all manner of other occupations.

Every Monday, in honor of the king, people wear yellow shirts or blouses, the vast majority bearing the royal crest printed on the left side. Everyone tends to wear these uniforms with great pride, including foreigners who work in places that require them. And then there is the other category of foreigner who, having no obligation whatsoever to wear any uniform or yellow shirt, does so anyway in order to feel part of the society, though they never will be, because Asians see us as "white demons," the literal nickname they give us. I find this quite funny, since back in my own country I never much cared about feeling part of anything like that, and I care even less here.

The university women's uniform is a short black skirt with a white blouse. The skirt is short and tight, following the curves of the body in the style of the 1980s, as are the blouses. Outdated as these outfits are, they give these young women an inadvertently provocative appearance. At the levels below university it is also black and white, but with pleated skirts.

The uniforms of some schools (especially Catholic ones) look like Boy Scout uniforms, but from an earlier era. This appears to be another instance of imitating the admired king, who was a Scout in his youth. They look quite amusing because some of the students are already quite grown, and to me as a Mexican they bring to mind the children's television character Chabelo. Most Thais are slim, but you're starting to see more fat on the bodies of children and young people (boys especially). The phenomenon reminds me of what happened in Mexico about twenty-five years ago, when genuinely overweight people started appearing as junk food took hold. So within a few more years, thanks mainly to hamburgers, pizza, soft drinks, and ice cream, I suspect these Thais will start having serious problems with obesity.

Every day in public parks, and especially in Lumpini Park, the most important one, both morning and afternoon, a teacher of something aerobics-like climbs onto a platform and the music starts through loudspeakers. Dozens of people gather, and in Lumpini, hundreds, so it is something extraordinary to watch them all doing their exercises as best they can. And if the anthem begins, all activity stops and it is heard with solemnity and respect.

These mass gatherings that happen here constantly are something genuinely worth witnessing, because whatever you are doing, you had better stop, because that is what everyone does.

This is a genuinely repressive society, and it can be a little tiresome for people like us who have no patience for repression, though I also have to acknowledge that it is probably precisely because of this that life here feels so calm and you walk around without any fear of being mugged or robbed. When you're not in your own country, you see and accept things more easily. "It's easier to see the dirt in your neighbor's house than your own." We know nothing is perfect and we're not in search of something that doesn't exist.

Finally, I want to tell you that on August 8th I will begin a Vipassana meditation (an ancient Indian meditation technique attributed to the Buddha himself) course at the Dhamma Kamala Center in Prachinburi.

This is to the northeast, about two or three hours from Bangkok toward Cambodia.

Being in Asia, and having always been curious about meditation, I decided to look into it. I researched all kinds of meditation and came to the conclusion that this one, being the oldest form in India and supposedly the one the Buddha himself taught, and being entirely secular, was the one for me. I remain very proud of my atheism and have no fear of divine punishment or divine reward.

I will spend eleven days there learning the technique and following the ethical code and discipline required for acceptance.

I am very excited and happy to have finally received my confirmation on the very first of this month, since you have to put your name on a waiting list (especially now in summer) and wait for a place to open up.

I hope not to return so changed that I no longer feel like sharing my experiences with all of you and telling you about this one. Though I do hope for some changes in myself that I would like to see and feel.

I'm including some photos of an island called Koh Kret, which is very close to Bangkok on the Chao Phraya river and which we visited shortly before our friends from Los Encinos came in April.

This was a year full of changes and adjustments in our lives. Experiencing a country so different from our own, together with adventures and the start of a new business, has been exciting, but also difficult in some respects. I want to take this same message as an opportunity to thank all of you for having read my ramblings. Thank you to those who also send me their comments, and of course I am equally grateful to those who over the course of this year have shared with us their own experiences and the paths their lives are taking. I think that this is what keeps us from losing, even across the distance, the ties that have connected us for many years.

Thank you to several of you for sending photos of family, friends, outings, travels, and other experiences from your lives; all the Ventosas enjoy them enormously.

Special thanks to those who visited us this year and not only gave us wonderful days and moments, but showed us their affection by coming expressly to see us, or simply because they were passing through and called us up to have dinner and share a little time together. Thank you to those who came loaded down with gifts, mole, beans, Mexican sweets, and tequila. But above all, for your interest.

Special thanks to Juan, who uploads everything, fixes the photos, and solves all my technical problems. You all know he is always helpful and patient.

He will check my emails because they have become very important to me, so if anything is urgent, just put "urgent" in the subject line and he will open it.

You all have Juan's email too, and those who have lost it or don't have it, it is identical to mine: just replace adriana.ventosa with juan.ventosa.

One of the rules of the course is that I will have no communication with the outside world for those eleven days; only a genuine emergency could interrupt that, and I hope one won't occur.

You can see the photos here, including some of art, because we remain as interested as ever and I have decided to see as much as I can of what is being made around here.

Photos here

Kisses and hugs to everyone, until soon,

Adriana.

Some original external links (Picasa Web, external sites) no longer work. The text is kept here for historical value.