Today I went to visit two sights of a very different nature: the National Museum, and the infamous tourist trap Khaosan Road.
The first part of the National Museum provided me with a detailed overview of Thai history, with a special focus on the monarchy and its two predecessor kingdoms: Ayutthaya and Sukhothai. I learned a fascinating bit about Thai history that I wasn't aware of, but that perfectly explains why Thailand is more developed than many of its neighbors: they haven't had major disruptive events for more than 200 years - no civil wars, no colonization, no occupation during the world wars, and most certainly no genocide.
The newest really bad event seems to have been the invasion by the Burmese, leading to the fall of the Ayutthaya kingdom in the 18th century. But after retaking the city of Ayutthaya a few years later and founding a new royal dynasty (which is still ruling today, incidentally), things went rather smoothly for the Kingdom of Siam.
When the Europeans came to South-East Asia to colonize, Siam negotiated smartly and gave away parts of its territory in exchange for independence. Siam territory was a plentiful resource back then: it included much of what today is Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. (Wikipedia has a map if you're interested in details of what was given away when.)
Many of the objects on display in the history section are items used by one of the kings - such as this wheelbarrow:
It was used when the king opened construction of the first section of Thai railway. Apparently, you can't just use any old wheelbarrow when you're king; you have to have a properly ornamented one.
One of the other buildings on the National Museum grounds is a Buddhist temple - Buddhist temples in Asia may even be more prevalent than Catholic churches in Latin America, incredible as it may seem.
The remaining buildings were dedicated to the display of art objects from all periods of Thai history. Most were gathered at various archaeological sites, like this beautiful statue:
Leaving the ordered sanity of the National Museum behind, I then plunged into the tourist abyss of Bangkok that is Khaosan Road.
Khaosan Road itself is a rather short stretch of street, but it is filled with guesthouses, western food chains, bars, and street stalls - and with too many tourists who seemingly invested all their money in drinks instead of decent clothes. The crowd frequenting Khaosan Road, I'm sorry to say, seems to be exactly the type of crowd that gives tourism a bad name.
The locals adapt, of course, and offer exactly what the spoiled tourist brats seek - and what they seek seem to be fake documents:
There were at least five of these little stalls. They offered everything you can imagine: student cards, press cards, driving licenses, TEFL certificates, bachelor's and master's certificates. I have to say, I was a little shocked by two aspects of this: first, that there seems to be a fairly high demand for document fakers; and second, that they seem to be tolerated by the police - how else could they set up shop in broad daylight like this?
