How was the food?
Food was largely fantastic. The hotel had the best and most elaborate communal breakfast I've ever had - mostly Thai cuisine.
Few more of these to go:
Highly Industrialized ThailandTaxiing further on, the miles nearing the cargo port strongly attest to Thailand’s expansive industrial state: factories for Mitsubishi Motors and Fujitsu Electronics, receiving yards for imported vehicles, distribution warehouses, food-processing plants, a tire manufacturer, staging yards for construction materials, smokestacks pluming, and finally, entering the port, rows of many-colored shipping containers stacked along the rails of dockside cranes. Thailand is a highly industrialized nation. The Second World is more industrially productive than either the First or Third World by a combination of harboring a large population of skilled labor that the Third World cannot effectively develop while also not being restrained by the stricter environmental and labors laws that the First World holds themselves to.
Thailand is too often (and too lazily) categorized as an emerging economy, a term I dislike for several reasons. First, it frames nations primarily as investment opportunities rather than societies with already successful economies and developmental realities. Second, the term is applied too broadly across both the Second and Third Worlds, flattening major differences between obviously different nations. And third, when applied to Second World nations, the term often assumes that eventual First World development is both realistic and inherently desirable.
Yet Thailand’s economic success remains deeply tied to the productivity of its industrial state that provides countless livelihoods to a population whose economy remains more labor-driven than the professional-class economies of the First World. The Second World is, in many ways, the Working-Class World to the First World’s professional-class world. To assume all nations must eventually develop into First World societies risks dismissing the vital industrial role countries like Thailand continue to provide within their regions and to the global economy. Meanwhile the surface of Thailand’s Second World is noticeably punctuated by unmistakably brighter sectors of world-class achievement: Bangkok’s gorgeous airport, a globally recognized hospitality industry of luxury resorts and beachfront hotels, a modernized highway system connecting the nation, and a distinct cuisine that is appreciated nearly everywhere in the world. In my experience here, Thai people stand out as particularly welcoming toward visitors and each other—it’s cultural to be outwardly hospitable, and that probably isn’t credited enough when praising the success of Thailand’s tourism industry.
