Arrival in Bangkok

I hopped on a night bus from Vientiane two days ago and arrived in Bangkok on Khoa San road early yesterday morning. What a sight I was in for!! I am not even completely sure what to compare Bangkok to, I suppose it is a completely unique place. It is a bit similar to Saigon in Vietnam, and also similar to Singpore in some ways.

After a 12 hour sleepless bus ride I staggered off the bus with 3 other travellers I had made friends with, all of us bleery eyed. We arrived in Bangkok at about 5 in the morning and there were no guesthouses open to get a room. So we decided to go sit around somewhere and have an orange juice and shoot the breeze for a few hours until all the guest houses open. As we walked down Khoa San road (the central "touristy" area of Bangkok) I observed a few things: some scary, some funny, some just plain weird. Things I saw on my first 5 minutes in Bangkok:
-Loads of young westerners about the streets with a beer in hand and their finest clubbing attire on.
-A scattering of homeless Thai people asleep in crevices or under tarps, their belongings spread out about them.
-A number of VERY drunk Thai people who looked like they had been drinking hard for 50 years, and their liver was about to go out on them.
-A group of older Westerns and Thai people, wearing dirty scraps of clothing, sitting in the middle of the street, strumming an old guitar, singing, drinking out of a bottle of whiskey. It seemed to me "Hotel California" was their life's theme song.

Anyway, what a sight! My friends and I went to a small restaurant and had orange juices and tried to keep our eyes open. The restaurant was still packed full of young Thai guys playing pool and drinking copious amounts of beer. By this time it was 7 in the morning. All in all, my impression so far is that Bangkok is a very high intensity place!

On Khoa San road: What a strange place this is! It rivals Granville street in Vancouver, BC as the best people watching I have ever seen in the world. I was sitting on the street, eating some street food and watching the rivers of people go by yesterday. I kept seeing something and thought: "Oh my god! That is so weird!" And then two minutes later, something even weirder would pass.
Another thing: Never in anywhere in the world have I ever seen a bigger collection of tattooed, pierced, dreadlocked, dyed, body-modified, crazy clothes wearing, international collection of people than on Khao San road. Everybody seems to be covered in tattoos and have intense manes of dreadlocks. I think alot of people come to Bangkok to get tattoos, because on Khao San road there is a tattoo parlor about every other shop. I have also never seen such a huge collection of tattoo parlors and 7-Elevens...

Thailand is incredibly different than Laos. Laos was the most laid back country I have been too, and so far (even though I have just been to Bangkok), Thailand is the exact opposite. Not a bad thing, just very different.