Thailand with Ale

Finally I returned to Thailand after 2 years of Africa.  I missed this country as much as I loved Africa, this is the "curse"of travellers who leave part of their heart in each country, better, in each town or hamlet they visit. I didn't miss too much Thai people, I know it's a pity saying it, but I missed so much Krung Tep or Bangkok. This huge, frantic, polluted, megalopolis so greatly described by Lawrence Osborne in his "Bangkok Days". I also missed the delicious Thai food or better I dreamed it for so long that it really couldn't refrain from spending all the time eating and tasting food, although I was not brave enough to taste "maeng da"...insects!
It was an interesting travel ,even if we rushed everyday to visit too many markets and malls, because this was the first time of my African friend in Asia and Thailand...is NOT  a bad place to have a start! Whenever you talk with a friend of a country you put your experience, your feeling, your pieces of infos and advices in order to let him/her understand what he's going to expect and find BUT that's not enough, even at this time of internet, googlemap, youtube and so on, a first times will definitively have his cultural shock in the same moment he puts his foot on the soil of this new country, and it exactly happened to Ale too.
I could see his marvel and suprise everytime we were walking around Bangkok downtown at 2am without any kind of problem, any kind of danger, any kind of stressful encounter. Sure we were meeting plastic penis and viagra sellers, hookers (Nigerian ones pretending to be from Kenya ahaha), arabic tailors inviting you inside, bargirls asking your to have a sit and drink, Brazilian tourists but everytime "mai pelai", no problem. And We are talking of a 13 million city. His wonder increased whenever we took the skytrain (bts): It is a frequent, clean and perfect way to move fast around Bangkok, not to mention the huge and modern shopping malls, the clean and inspiring assorted food or the stunning educated people on the street or in the subway, entering in a perfect queue and keeping quiet during the trip (almost everybody was playing with his smartphone or Ipad actually, it seems a national sport here).
Sometimes I shared his amazed and bemused attitude...I was here in Thailand twice, didn't I remember it???? Maybe I did not, maybe I forgot it. Of course I was tantalizing myself that Thailand has not his load of corruption or traffic or pollution problems, of course Japan is probably a far better organized country but definitively we both appreciated so much our 2 weeks stay and we wished that Italy could be more similar to this country than the sad, corrupted and shabby place it started to be some years ago.