There’s a very tired joke I like to make whenever some friends and I are oot and aboot in Bangkok. If we see a construction site, I always say “Maybe it will be a museum or library!” and everyone laughs and I get high fives, because 99% of the time it will either be a mall or a condo. Or both. Some love it, some hate it, but you can’t deny that Bangkok’s efforts to overtake Singapore as Asia’s shopping hub are ambitious and persistent. […]
From time to time in Bangkok you see some odd signage…strange sentences or weird words or context that’s really inappropriate. Usually it’s an innocent mistake or a spelling error or an unfamiliarity with the English language, or cultural ignorance. But sometimes you have to wonder if it’s some weird amalgamation of all of the above. […]
Finding a really sweet pad in Bangkok is a rite of passage for anyone new to the city, as well as a draining and sometimes mystifying quest for old hands. Where to look? How to look? By local standards, what’s considered big or small, a good deal or a bad deal? What should you look out for? How “native” do you want to go? We covered this a few years back in an episode of Bangkok Podcast, but it remains one of the biggest issues facing expats here today. But recently a friend emailed me some interesting problems […]
Fortune telling – possibly an even older profession than the Oldest Profession – is huge in Asia. (The Oldest Profession is also huge in Asia, but that’s another blog post). In western cultures, fortune telling is relegated to circus side-shows and party tricks, a goofy remnant of a long-forgotten superstition. But if you read the daily headlines in Asia you’ll see that everyone from the girl selling coffee on the street corner to the leaders of most countries rarely make a major decision without consulting their favorite seer. […]
Bangkok’s history is fascinating. Its spaghetti-like maze of streets and alleys that have been worked and reworked since before the city was founded in 1782, and peeling back the layers of 230+ years of history reveals some incredibly interesting stuff.
One of the best ways to appreciate this is with a book called Bangkok Then & Now by Steve Van Beek, the 4th edition of which was just released. Steve is an old Bangkok hand and in his forty-plus years in Bangkok has amassed an impressive collection of photos and information on the capital throughout the years. (Read this post where […]
Update 2018: This whole experiment lasted about six months. It was fine while it lasted, but let’s be honest – it’s just a numbers game. As I’ve said before, riding a bike in Bangkok isn’t deadly, but it isn’t safe, and the more often you ride, the higher the chances are of something happening. With a toddler at home and a nervous wife, I decided to just submit to The Man and take the BTS to work.
If you’ve read my site before you probably know that I ride my bike a lot in and around Bangkok […]
As the world’s 9th-largest exporter of coconuts, it’s no surprise that they’re available pretty much everywhere in Thailand. But recently I’ve noticed something interesting – it seems that the resourceful Thai coconut industry has melded the humble drupe (I looked it up, it’s a drupe, not a nut) with some pretty crazy technology to produce some very weird and unique consumption possibilities. […]
Anyone who has spent any time in a Thai 7-11 has probably seen those little bottles of…drink…stuff. Everything from bird’s nests to collagen to essence of things. They’re peddled on television, usually by alarmingly young women wearing tight clothes who seem to be having just a wonnnnnnderful time hanging out and laughing together. Anyway, every time I walk by there seems to be another type of colorful little box, so I decided to find out what the hell they were. Also, it’s a long weekend and I have a new baby, so I’m stuck at home. Don’t let it […]
If you’ve read some of my previous posts you may have noticed that I’m fascinated by maps and the data that’s used to make them. I even went to so far as to use a bike and a GPS tracker to write my name across all of downtown Bangkok. But recently I stumbled on an amazing project by artist Eric Fischer that used maps and data in such a unique way that I just had to dive in and explore to see what I could learn about Bangkok. […]
For westerners, there are no animals more exotically Asian than elephants and monkeys. Usually only glimpsed behind thick glass or from a distance at some cheesy zoo, to be able to get up close and actually touch one of these beasts is a truly unique experience. This is why I was excited when a recent visit by my beloved family (hence my long online absence) allowed me to visit not one, but two animal sanctuaries where I could interact with monkeys and elephants in ways you normally can’t, and which I had never done despite being in Thailand nearly […]