I’ve been in Bangkok the last two weeks, and three times in the last six months. The city is incredible. It’s well over 10 million people, approaching that of Istanbul, which is the largest city in all of Europe. After a certain threshold size, you get to a point where anything humans do on Earth happens here. Every instrument that exists is played, every language that is spoken is spoken, every cuisine that is cooked is cooked. Everything happens here.

The density in Bangkok is on par with any place I’ve ever been, Tokyo included. The breadth of activities in Bangkok far surpasses any other place I’ve ever been. I’m not euphemistically talking about the infamous sex work (I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine), but the relative freedom here compared with places of equivalent density that I’ve visited, such as Tokyo or Beijing or London. The general practical permissiveness of this city was a surprise to me, given just how tightly controlled most cities of this type are, and how conservative and authoritarian I know Thailand to be.

I can see why people come and live here.

It’s incredibly convenient to exist in such a place. Last night, I had Georgian food delivered an hour before midnight, cooked and brought to my hotel in less than 40 minutes. I believe the entire (priority direct) delivery fee was around 100 baht (~$3), maybe less. I always tip the delivery drivers another 100 baht (~$3), which is the maximum the tip selector UI gives me. That’s around $7 all in.

The climate in Bangkok lends itself exceptionally well to plants. Plant matter here is bordering on too cheap to meter. The quality of fruits and vegetables is off the charts—it’s as good as any place I’ve ever been, the Mediterranean included. Greek salads actually work here. Pasta sauces made well in the Italian style are indistinguishable from those made on the Mediterranean coast.

Thai people (or cooks, at least) seem to resemble Americans in the sense that they’re more than willing to deep fry anything or cover it in cheese or put way too much refined sugar into a dish or a drink. Almost all the drinks that I get here are way sweeter than I would expect them to be, and there seems to be a trend of putting cream cheese (simply called “cheese”) on everything, even things it probably shouldn’t go on. This matches my palate exactly as a Midwestern American fat kid, but is somewhat surprising in a city this large and cosmopolitan.

This is definitely the most westernized place I’ve ever been in Asia, and it’s a gigantic city at that. I’m staying in a neighborhood called Phrom Phong, which has three of the largest and most well-appointed shopping centers that I’ve ever seen. One has a dentist and a nail salon and an indoor trampoline place inside of it. There are three of them all within a five-minute walk of each other. The food choices are mind-bending in their quantity.

I’ve never seen this diversity of food available in such a small area in my entire life. Parts of Tokyo approximate it, but Japanese people seem to be somewhat more fixated on specific types of cuisine—French pastries, for example. Bangkok doesn’t give a fuck. They’ve simply got everything here. There are tons of Japanese immigrants, and so there’s tons of really good Japanese restaurants.

In one building, you can get a tooth descaling, see a movie in IMAX, buy a Coach handbag or a new iPhone, eat incredibly good authentic Italian food, buy an array of macarons that would rival any place I’ve ever seen, and eat Chicago’s finest Garrett Caramel Corn. (IYKYK - Chicago mix all the way.)

In most cities of this echelon, you find yourself coping under the cast of a sort of economic damage-over-time spell. A few days in Paris or Hong Kong and you realize that your budget for your ten-day trip was, well, optimistic. A coffee here, a dinner there, and suddenly you’re in the red in a day. No such background preoccupations loom here, as even in the glittering center nothing exceeds manageable prices (for westerners, anyway—Thai people tell me Bangkok’s ridiculously expensive). The nonstop construction of luxury condos everywhere threatens to imminently alter this upwards, just like Beijing and Shanghai and Seoul before it.

I’ve played now in two underground poker games here that were run better than most legitimate casinos. The games here also run a little bit larger than I was expecting—about twice the size that I normally play in Las Vegas, which is surprising considering that the average daily labor income here is somewhere in the $15-$20 USD equivalent range. The cash games that I’ve played have blinds of 100/200 baht (~$3/$6). The level of income inequality here is breathtaking.

I’ve heard of such insane disparities in places like New Delhi, and of course in China, but in China, you don’t really seem to have it so much in one city. The Chinese government keeps huge masses of people from moving into places like Beijing or Shanghai. There’s a long waiting list, and I believe a lottery system for people who want to move to Beijing. The Thai government, as far as I understand, does not have any such restrictions, and anyone who wants can come (or move) to the city.

In most other places in the world where you’d see a construction site of 20–30 people, you’d have 10 of them working and a few standing around per worker. In Thailand, you see 50 people on the project all working their ass off covered in sweat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place with a work ethic as incredible as Thailand. This is not to disparage the salarymen of Japan or the 996ers in the Pearl River Delta, but the amount of labor that gets done in this city simply astounds me.

I can’t recommend it enough. The humidity is famously oppressive, but if you can get past that, the weather is always perfect. I was swimming in a rooftop pool on Christmas day here—it was somewhere around 80°F. That trip I actually came here from my winter home, Las Vegas, specifically because the weather is better. I think Berlin was under a nice dusting of snow.

I think it would be dangerously easy to move here and get caught up in life here, given the leverage of the huge disparity between western incomes and far east prices. Life here is phenomenally easy and exceptionally high quality. I see why so many Westerners move here. I can’t help but feel that it’s all built on the backs of a tremendous and invisible underclass, slaving away for pennies an hour to support the tip of the iceberg that appears in pristine retail towers.

The sheer extent of this place, though, is staggering. Just walking around, you can go from an exposed sewer in a back alley to a gleaming retail outlet of a global brand, sparkling and spotless, in 100 seconds of walking. I don’t know any other place in the world like this.

My favorite places in the world are the A-list world cities: Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Istanbul, Seoul. I don’t know all of them — I haven’t been able to come up with an authoritative heuristic. It’s not just the so-called primate cities, although Bangkok is indeed a primate city. I don’t know why Bangkok escaped my notice for so long, given my true appreciation for A-list cities. Perhaps the stigma of Thailand being a “poor country” (and it is, indeed, a poor country) made me assume that Bangkok was going to be shabby. That was a mistake.

I should have come here years ago. Visit it if you can.