BKK

I had my experience yesterday of the new Bangkok airport, and about the only nice thing I can say about it is that it makes the old Bangkok airport look good.

It's massive in scale, but it has that not-quite-finished look you often get Thailand. Exposed wiring, wall panels that don't quite join up, that sort of thing. And nothing quite works, of course, but in the old Bangkok airport you expected it: it had low ceilings and a vaguely makeshift 50s aesthetic. The new one, on the other hands, screams modern, or at least until you want to do something that's actually modern, like, say checking your emails. We had to go from one arm of the beast to the other, which seemed to be about a mile.

The other thing I miss (apart from the bizarre touch of having people playing golf between the runways, or was I just imagining that?) was the delightfully named Terminal Restaurant, where you could get uncompromising Thai food. It was the first place I ever experienced that thing they do with the baby eggplants, which I had never heard about before and thought may have been mutant leathery peas.

The food situation at the new BKK airport? Well, there are any number of places that will do antipasto, or sushi, or even gourmet hotdogs. But thai food? No! Is there some cultural cringe at work? Is this something to do with the fact that in Stockholm every restaurant is a Thai restaurant and it's actually quite hard to find swedish food? (I did however have a sublime lunch at the Riksmusuem. Herring with mustard; potatoes with dill. I felt very Scandy.)

The airport did remind me of something. Its doomed hubristic scale, and the way that it'll never be finished.. it reminded me of the Pyongyang pyramid. "Mr Lee, what's that huge building over there, it must be over 100 stories high.." "Err.. what building, Mr James?" (It doesn't officially exist, so we were supposed to ignore it. I must write more about my visit to the DPRK.)