This is the air vent in the elevator between platforms 1/2 and 4 at Sydney’s Town Hall station. Do you like that layer of black crap?

Town Hall station is already hot, humid, smelly and dangerously over-crowded. Add to these risks the fact that you’re breathing whatever it is that’s accumulating up there.

While taking this photo with my trusty but battered Nokia N80 the other day, I expected someone to question me — concerned that I was a terrorist or something. I reckon terrorists are the least of your worries here.

’Pong’s movie Bangkok Express slices through the city at the height of the motorway. Yes, you can see urban decay, but it’s abstract, in the distance. The train slices the city differently: just above human eye level.

The photos I took from the train in Bangkok reminded me that a sign at Ashfield Station in Sydney has got it all wrong. That sign tells us that railway stations are for catching trains — and if I’m not catching a train right at that moment then I’m not welcome. I might be a terrorist. Move on, nothing to see here.

Bullshit.

Railways are the Grand Physical Arteries of the Industrial Age. While we can catch trains at a station, yes, we can also pause to marvel at this expression of industrial confidence. Railway signalling, for me, was a childhood geeky fascination. How do you keep this whole system running without crashing? Switching, signalling, communication, plans, timetables — all the things that computers do, but laid out before you on a scale you can comprehend.

And, as this photo (above) reminds us, in many countries today the railways are still all of that, and more. Here, they’re a walking path, a playground, a rubbish dump — the streets of Bangkok are swept clean daily, but not the railway — and in some cases a home. Where officially-sanctioned housing ends at the edge of railway land, the slum begins. Clearly, it’s been there for years.

CityRail, how dare you narrow the horizons of the next generation, so the railways are nothing more than a place to be herded, sheep-like, from point A to point B. They’re our railways, and if we want to stand and watch for a while, we will.

[P.S. Out of 9 "Unreliable Bangkok" pieces so far, at least 3 have featured transport. I suspect it's because being a passenger gives you time to pause a reflect upon what you're seeing.]

I read somewhere that when it comes to culture shock, little things have the most impact. So on my second day in Bangkok it still smells different, people speak Thai not English, but I take that in my stride.

In our emerging global culture, though, there’s also much that’s familiar. In this photo, for example, the style of street art is much like home — and I’ll publish a nice selection later this week. The office worker in her neat grey dress could be from any major city, anywhere.

So what are those little differences which matter most?

Here’s what I noticed on our first day in Bangkok, on a trip to the Siam Square shopping district:

• Security staff on the Bangkok Skytrain are busy, courteous and helpful, whereas Sydney’s CityRail equivalents are slow-moving, fat and rude.
• The streets are clean and generally well-maintained.
• On a footbridge over a busy intersection, two women with a bucket of soapy water were washing the railings methodically. In Sydney, footbridges are filthy.
• Stallholders don’t grumble if they have to change a large banknote, even first thing in the morning.
• Yes, electrical and telephone wiring really is strung randomly all across the city in ways which would be illegal in Australia. Nevertheless, I felt that I could see a method to the madness. After a while, my brain decided they were just exotic vines and they became invisible — until low-hanging loops nearly choked me.
• Even though Thai traffic drives on the left of the road (well, at least in theory — I’ll have more to say about the traffic another day), on a footpath or staircase you walk on the right. It took a lot of collisions and polite apologies to get my head around that one!
• Beggars are generally people with an obvious and often disturbing physical disability, rather than just plain lazy.
• Pepsi dominates the city, not Coca-Cola.

I also noticed something important about curved shapes, but I’ll save that for its own essay.

And what’s the same as Sydney?

• Shopping malls were the same brand stores as everywhere, and the staff were the same bored-looking kids. I avoided them wherever possible.
• The cool, arty café Oc-Co-Bots held the same slacking-off university art fags and their hags as those I remembered from my own time at uni in Adelaide.
• The higher the price of the coffee, the less service you actually get. Not that I’d actually go to a Starbucks in Bangkok, I’m not there there to experience American franchise businesses.
• Tourists are, in general, loud and ignorant self-centred wankers. Except for me, of course. Oh, yes, and you.

I took this photograph at Stanmore railway station the other day. It was warmer then.