Wintersummer

(Because it's Christmas, and because it's not-quite-hot outside today, I thought I'd share this little snippet of life in Bangkok that I wrote for my friend Christine's Summerzine project earlier this year. Happy holidays, wherever you are...)

Wintersummer

In Bangkok, we celebrate this fleeting hint of winter.

It is our summer.

But it is shorter than your summer. Sometimes it never even comes. When it does, we know it will soon be gone. And there is sadness in the almost cool air, like there is on the last day of vacation.

Our summer comes around Christmastime, except that it’s not Christmastime, unless you’re a tourist here on your Christmas vacation, or you're shopping. The city’s many shopping malls do play Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and fake snowflakes are strung from their ceilings. There might be a sale on bathing suits or flip-flops or plastic trees. And this reminds us that our summer is about to come.

Outside, in the thick and sticky air, beer companies erect monuments to themselves in front of the shopping malls to remind us it’s summertime. We come by the thousands to drink watery beer from toy-like plastic towers emblazoned with logos of lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Some of us wear wool hats while we drink, as if the beer might give us a head cold. The centers of those toy-like beer towers are filled with ice to keep the watery beer cold in the middle of our not-quite-sweltering wintersummer. This is the only time one might wish to sit outside on the baked concrete plain that is Bangkok. And so we drink to forget.

And the surest sign that it is summer in Bangkok is when our street dogs, who roam freely in our alleyways and block the jigsaw sidewalks as they sleep through the afternoons, put on their tee-shirts. The dogs might get cold if they didn’t, but in wintersummer they usually do. It’s like the plum blossoms in Japan, announcing the arrival of spring. But weirder. Funnier.

So if you ever find yourself in Bangkok, in the middle of winter, and you see drunks in wool hats wandering around shopping malls festooned with the roaring logos of jungle cats and surrounded by sleeping street dogs dressed in colorful tee-shirts, smile.

It’s summertime.   

Comments

[liuyan]

This is really interesting to read.

I myself is living and seeing the third type of winter, in Hong Kong, after Shanghai and southern Finland. We see hongkongers who can't wait to put on their down jacket when the temperature drops just below 20 celcius degrees, which is summer in Finland when people there really dress like in hottest summer days and swim in lakes. Then the weatherman on radio and tv would repeatedly warn people that it's Very Very cold when it goes down to 13 degrees, reinforcing the message by telling how many elders in the city have just called for help because of the cold. For us, it's like God (or whoever controls it) forgets to press the button when it's time to switch autumn to winter in Shanghai, and we get to enjoy a prolonged best time of the year. No fuss over winter gear this year.

[Jarrett]

Hey Liuyan,

Thanks for dropping by. Didnt know you were in HK!? Welcome back to Asia. Hopefully Candice and I will see you guys sometime soon. -Jarrett