It's hard to find a more pro-Bangkok apologist than I. Many people love Bangkok, but few have lived here for as long as I have and not grown bored. If you've read this site before you'll know that I still find it endlessly fascinating. But the annual Poison Air season, in which we often cannot go outside because of air pollution, has made even a Bangkok nerd like myself wonder how long I can take it.
Over on Twitter I’ve been posting a series of images comparing old photos of Bangkok with the same location as seen from Google Street View. It wasn’t a project I planned, but I stumbled onto a thread of old pics on TeakDoor.com dating from 2008 and started scrolling. I saw one that I thought might make a good comparison pic, and it worked out pretty well. So I kept going.
Back in the day, I used to ride my bike a lot. Like, every other weekend I'd be off on a 60, 80, or even 100km ride (my personal maximum). But after having a kid and getting busy with other projects, my bike riding took a back seat, and I only tended to get out once every six weeks or so. It's amazing how quickly your stamina drops off, because these days, I can barely manage to get up to 40k without wanting to pack it in. Granted, this is based on recent rides during the punishing summer heat, but still - my legs ain't what they used to be.
It's hard to escape the hubbub around ICONSIAM, Bangkok's newest mall. For those who aren't too familiar with Bangkok and may be laughing at the fact that a shopping mall is worthy of hubbub, well...you need to live in Bangkok a bit longer. Shopping malls are a big business here, to chagrin of many who think Bangkok has way too many malls as it is; to those people, opening a new one is just a needless waste of money and space. Well, in my opinion, those people are not wrong...but they're not right either. I think ICONSIAM is a great addition to the area that it's in (with some caveats that I'll discuss below). I also think that the "mall question" is much more nuanced than simply saying "too many malls", so let's look at some of the issues at play:
As I've said before, Bangkok is an interesting city, but it ain't a very pretty city. It has pockets of beauty, sure, but the cement:vegetation ratio is absurdly off-kilter. However, that's not to say you can't get inspiration from Bangkok's varied fabric, crazy infrastructure, and unique personality. Indeed, one might even say that - with the mix of smells, noises, sights, and people - Bangkok is a very colorful city, which got me to thinking...musicians, artists, and authors have been inspired by this for centuries, so why can't it inspire its own colors?
Over the Songkran break this past April, two biking buddies of mine, Andrew and Bill, set out on a pretty audacious adventure – to bike from Bangkok to Lampang (near Chiang Mai) over 8 days. First of all, I’m totally jealous. That seems like an incredible ride that I would love to do – but which, at my current level of fitness, would probably kill me. Second, that’s a pretty long ride, but the part that is most impressive about it is that they did it in April – the hottest month of the year.
Tuk-tuks and Bangkok go together like spaghetti and meatballs. So much so that even those who haven’t been to Bangkok can probably tell you the size and shape of your standard tuk-tuk. I thought it was a pretty easy too, until I was stuck in the back of a taxi and this tiny little beast roared by.
I mean, what is it? Is it like…a specially constructed tuk-tuk for navigating particularly narrow sois? A home-made one-off that some guy built in his garage?
It’s easily half the width of a real tuk-tuk, especially the newer ones with a roomier passenger compartment. And […]
On a recent episode of the Bangkok Podcast, which I co-host, we asked listeners to submit any questions they had about the show or us that we would answer during our 50th episode. We got a good number, and answered most of them, but I wanted to post a bit of an addendum to one of them that got me thinking.
Fair warning: This post is sort of a rage-filled rant against elements of western media, Asian governments, and the apathy that people show towards what’s really important in life. Why? Because I saw something today that broke my heart and got me mad. Cuss words may appear.
So, forgive me folks, I’m kind of pissed off now. I’ve written before about how a person changes when they become an expat; how living in a strange culture and being constantly exposed to new and different viewpoints can alter how one thinks about the world. It’s one of the great benefits of being […]
This is a story I wrote for the Toronto Star in 2006, reprinted here as a supplemental to an episode of The Bangkok Podcast on tourist scams. “Why are you being so stupid?” shouted ‘The Godfather’ through uneven brown teeth as he jabbed a gaudily-jeweled finger toward me. I sat across the rickety table from him, as a bead of sweat marched its way down my temple, sticky from the tropical heat. How did I wind up here?