BangkokAtoZ, or "Bangkok Made Easy"
Bangkok is one of the world’s major cities, a vast, sprawling metropolis of millions – nobody really knows how many, though most estimates put the population of Metropolitan Bangkok at the 10-12 million range – situated along the Chao Phraya River, the Kingdom’s major waterway.
The city is the capital of Thailand, and is the First City as no other capital city in the world is. Roughly 40 times larger than Thailand’s "Second City" (Chiang Mai), about 1 in 5 Thais live there. It has grown at a blinding rate, by any measure, since the end of the Second World War, particularly in the years beginning during the Vietnam War.
But it grew in a highly disorganized way; thus, one sees shanty towns in the shadows of the newest skyscrapers, dirt lanes leading of major boulevards, and the like. Little thought was given by anyone to orderly growth and progress.
As a result, Bangkok is about as confusing as a city can be. There is no "downtown" or "city center," certainly not in the sense of, say, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, of Washington. It can be very difficult to get your bearings in the chaos that is contemporary Bangkok. BangkokAtoZ is meant to help you find your way.
Organized dictionary-fashion, BangkokAtoZ is extremely easy to use. With the opening of this site, we have tried to start a complete source of information for both the foreign traveler to Thailand and the foreign resident of the Kingdom; we even offer a few Thai-language words and phrases. We say "Thailand" because eventually we hope to expand this site beyond the confines of the capital – indeed, beyond the borders of the country to provide useful information about the region.
In these pages you can read the usual traveler’s information, but much more as well; in these pages you will find entries for everything from "AIDS" to "Airlines," "Hotels" to "Hospitals," "Prawns" to "Prostitutes," and everything imaginable in between.
And links – lots and lots and lots of them, to everything from hotels to hospitals to the Thai Immigration Police. We provide links whenever we can; we’re constantly searching the Web for web sites useful to the traveler and the resident.
Eventually, we hope to make this site available in other languages, starting with Thai (of course) and Chinese, the native language of some immigrants to the Kingdom, and the mother tongue on an increasingly important part of the tourism sector.
In a city as huge as Bangkok, with its thousands upon thousands of hotels, restaurants, shops, shopping centers, apartment buildings, government offices, entertainment areas, and so on, it is hard to be absolutely up-to-the-minute every minute – but we try to be as current and correct as possible. We make no warrant or promise about the accuracy of this site, nor of our sister site [Dean-Barrett-Thailand.com]. And while we link to many other sites, we take no responsibility whatsoever at all for the information contained in any of those sites nor for your use of such information. If you find a broken link or factual error, please let us know at mekhongkurt@bangkokatoz.com Also, if you would like to recommend an entry, please send it to the same address with the word "Entry" in the subject line. But do check first, please, to be sure we don’t already have it included.
Finally, please read our "Promise" page (we make only two). By using this site, you are saying that you have read and agree to all conditions in that page.
Then get started, clicking on the letter you want to browse! Enjoy!
Mekhong Kurt, Web Master