Photolog

HOMEWARDBOUND

I can't believe i'm going home in a month! this is probably the longest i've ever been away from home, one year on end. the only thing between me and home now is the master's dissertation which will define the next stages of my life in many important ways if it hasn't already. can't wait to get settled down and not have to live out of the suitcase again. Things will feel permanent . Yes, that's the word. I'll build my own collections of books and magazines, put posters and pictures up on the walls, organize my music and photo on my macbook. pimp out the interfact of my blogs. And basically do things i've always put off. More like putting the things that already exist into perspective than starting something new. one year goes so quick.

Oh well.

A few weeks ago I received an email from a magazine I sent my application to saying that they were interested in my application and had been trying to contact me to come in for a chat. Unsuccessfully of course. To which I replied, what an unfortunate lapse of time (read: fate) as I'm already in another country doing what I think is right for me. Man if only she had sent out that email a few weeks earlier our paths would have crossed. To which she replied, it's okay, you can still try and send in some writing/reviews seeing as London has a vibrant art&design scene. I think she's also put me on their staff email list, because I got newsfeeds on events and such. To be honest, I would love to work here rather than Wallpaper* since I appreciate its relative solid focus on art&design while Wallpaper* caters significantly to the international jetsetting elite. Plus it's a bilingual magazine and of course I write so much better in English. Below is a newsclip of an event co-sponsored by the magazine and other bodies that I received in my email. Oh well, i guess.

The World's Best City

I've never read Travel + Leisure magazine, so I have no idea what to make of their tourism ranking. That said, it's always good to be loved. Congratulations Bangkok!

"Each year readers of Travel + Leisure magazine are invited to complete an online survey to determine the best of the world’s cities, hotels, airlines, islands, spas and more.* Consistently among the top global cities in this global survey, Bangkok is the #1 destination and the winner of the World’s Best City 2008.

To give you an idea of the competition, the top 5 world cities in order are Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Sydney and Florence. Scoring is evaluated on 5 characteristics; sights, culture and arts, restaurants and food, people and value. Bangkok boasts an incredible diversity and quality of the first three characteristics, friendly people and exceptional value, all of which combined clinched the top ranking for 2008."

But then i can't help but think about another plausible yet much less glamourous explanation why Bangkok tops the list. you know, the usuals: VERY easy/lax entry; money laundering & illicit economy; differential power purchasing parity that turns the average Westerner a royalty overnight. Of course, the radical in me wants to go so far as to quote the whole exotification/commodification of culture and the nationally concerted willingness on our part to project the image of the smiley welcoming Host ("the Land of Smiles"). I don't know how much these unconsciously factor into the readers' voting decision. Seriously, for a city that doesn't have direct public transportation (train, bus route, subway) from the airport to downtown, or reliable, adequate, tourist-friendly downtown transportation (i.e. subway), it surprises me that these major drawbacks are overwhelmingly outweighed by a combination of factors like "food, art, people, culture, value" - all of which are unique to a locale and highly subjective to personal taste. Not to mention pollution, hygiene, etc. But then again, it's good to be loved! thats how "lightheartedly Thai" i can get :)

The full list can be found here.

Two of my favourite areas in Bangkok:

Wish listed

If there's one thing i absolutely HATE about living in Bangkok is its notorious traffic. owing to poor planning, ultra fast growth, in-migration or whatever, getting around in the city gets more and more hideous with each passing year. yesterday on my way back from Central Ladprao I got stuck in a cab which in turn was stuck among other cars on the street for NO REASON. ok, there may have been some reason. it was 6PM, hence rush hour blah blah blah. but isn't it ABSURD that in 30 minutes we couldn't move from point A to point B which was literally 20 meters in length i kid you not! all i could do was listen to the chaffeur bitching mindlessly and watch the meter go up from 53 baht to 73 baht. a distance of 20 meters in some 30 minutes are you SERIOUS? it normally costs me 65-70 baht to get from there to here but last night i had to pay 103 baht. it's not so much the money as the general ridiculousness of the situation that made me flip.

Solution? I need to buy a car. And to sound absurdly bourgeois and disgust communists, socialists, and Buddhists alike, I need a BWM. yay euro cars. so i checked the price tag on www.bmw.co.th. the cheapest model is BWM 3 Series Sedan which is graciously priced at, can i have some drum roll, THB 2,400,000. Dead. That means, if i succeed in hunting down the world's most generous donor (i.e. my parents) and make them pay the highest down payment of 30% of the original price, I would only need to pay the rest of 2,400,000 - 719,700 = 1,680,000ish. To make the figure less horrendous and myself less likely to faint, i should do the longest installment payment for oh god 60 months (5 years?!). And that will boil down to... 33,446 baht per month (VAT included). And where do i find this appalling amount on a monthly basis you tell me!

But seriously can you find a better looking car? I thought I would eventually get a black or greyish one but I've seen too many of those in the streets of Bangkok already and of course i want to be different! Look at the sparkling smoky varnish and the sleek design. if it is not the vehicular impersonation of Glamour, i dont know what is! Since a picture is worth a thousand words or so goes the saying, I'll give you three pictures and those are worth more than three thousand words still!

More than straights and bends.

The exterior of the BMW 3 Series Sedan.
One can learn a great deal about the BMW 3 Series simply by looking at it. Follow the line of the silhouette, and its remarkable power becomes tangibly evident. Rest your eyes on the individual details, and the elegance of each one reveals itself. Even when it is motionless, the short overhangs and characteristic wedge shape express sporting dynamics. But who wants to experience the BMW 3 Series Sedan only when it's standing still?

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Man i'm sure the person who wrote the description was some sort of art historian.

小籠包

I like chinese food so much it's not funny. i generously allowed myself to gain five whole kilos during my two months in Beijing last year. my cheeks were much chubbier than they already had been becos man is Chinese food there so awesome. i'm a sad excuse for being Thai, for i despite spicy food to death. and thanks goodness I live in Bangkok where good chinese food is usually within a walking distance. ok i lie, how about a reasonable driving distance? so it's never a problem for me when i have a sudden craving for chinese.

One of the fast food-style Chinese restaurants that i like to frequent is Shanghai Xiao Long Bao. They have a bunch of branches throughout Bangkok and fortunately a few of them are conveniently located close to where i usually find myself at. malls, that is. Needless to say their specialty is xiao long bao (小籠包), literally "little basket bun" or as i prefer to call or illustrate it to the uninitiated "dumplings with soup inside." The chain has been around for a while and attracting more and more curious eaters who want to find out what a soup dumpling is like. And recently, the restaurant introduced a new creation nicely adjusted to Thai tastebuds by injecting Tom Yum (Thai style hot & sour soup) in place of normal clear broth. Of course, I didn't hesitate to order a basket...much to my disappointment ack... Thai people are too creative for me, what with satay burger at McDo's or Tom Yum pizza at Pizza Hut. I dunno, I just prefer the original xiao long bao with normal soup inside. Thai spicy soup doesn't go well with Chinese dumplings dammit!(although i gotta say the McDo's satay chicken burger is rockstar. so was the pork burger from years ago that used sticky rice as bun. too fresh.)

Anyways, so on top of the xiao long bao we also ordered a bunch of dishes to eat along, the photographic evidence of which is as follows. but guess who was enough of a retard to forget to take a sole picture of, uhm, xiao long pao? ok lah, i'll make up next time. on a sort of related note, i was the only one at the table to eat rice with chop sticks! a habit i picked up from China. overall, i found the food that day to be unusually salty. i don't see myself going back again until...i have my next xiao long bao craving attack. click for full effect.

A day in Bangkok

I can say that if i am in Thailand most of my time will be spent at the hang out place of Siam Square. not only is it arguably the biggest shopping/eating center where trends are set and ideas bred, but it's also conveniently located close to my high school and a college campus . so each afternoon when school is over you will see swarms of kids in crisp white uniforms head towards Siam Square where they stop by to eat, shop, and flaunt their youthfulness. i too grew up here.

But after all these years of teenaged anxiety and pubescent romance, i didn't get to eat at Baan Khun Mae Restaurant until yesterday. Well, I had every reason not to since they seem to cater specifically to tourists and the food is obviously pretty Americanized. I showed up an hour late because I wasn't feeling well and had slept in. By the time i got there, they had finished nearly all the food which i didn't mind at all, since i could get all that anywhere for cheaper and most definitely better-tasting. So i ordered a plate of shrimp fried rice with garlic rice - to no one's surprise. therefore, my first-time presence at the restaurant was perfunctory and the fried rice was strictly utilitarian. but i was kind of sad still that i didn't get to eat one of their specialties:

The fried rice was 78 Baht (overpriced). And the rest of the table paid 280 Baht each (10 people). so yeah, the next time i'll come back ever again i would most likely be with non-Thai visitors who i don't want to disillusion from the "authentic thai cuisine" they glorify back home. one culture shock crisis averted.

Another thing you can do at Siam Square is karaoke which is part of every Asian pop culture. I went sing k a couple several times when i was in the US, but to be honest it was never as fun as at home. Back in the USA, some people who go sing k or are ostensibly "dragged" to go seem to treat the activity as a less serious matter; they treat it along with things like ping-pong and badminton,much less seriously than, say, tennis or sudoku. of course, i should not judge what is better but i can make no mistake about what i find more comfortable. Oh please, who doesn't want to sing to Bye Bye Bye and jump up and down like pre-SexyBack Justin Timberlake? (Trivia: lots of karaoke places in Beijing are open until 6AM and serve buffet-style food at intervals.)

Today karaoke in Bangkok is taken to the next level when bowling is incorporated. Yes, they stick a karaoke station and two bowling lanes together, successfully eliminating the now passé dilemma of "should we go bowling or k'ing?", for you can now enjoy the two choices or cater to two crowds of people who enjoy different things at the same time.


If choosing between bowling or k'ing cannot be easily settled, there is at least one thing that everyone can agree on. Thai hot pot of the chain restaurant MK seems to be everyone's favorite. As i was bidding my friends goodbye because i had been kind of ill (fever) and tired (unsatisfactory lunch) and dragging all day, one of them asked if i wanted to get dinner at MK first, to which i said yes without much hesitation if at all. I've been back for a month and yesterday was the first time, so i was stoked. My family would go every so often when i was in high school, since like i said, it's everybody's favorite. everyone has the choice of ordering whatever meat and veggie they like to boil to perfection and then drench in the restaurant's super savory dressing and then eat. some of the stuff we ordered includes: roast duck, BBQ pork, roast pig, assorted fish balls and fish cakes, assorted veggies, thinly sliced pork, shrimp, eggs, and muchhhh more. the quality is great, quantity very filling and most importantly the bill very wallet-friendly. that's how i went home with a happy stomach.



note to self

• Adobe InDesign would make a post like this a much easier, more enjoyable, and less time-consuming experience. learn it.
  
• i just realised how majorly i suck at taking photos in indoor lighting. gotta do sumth'n. below is a picture of myself from that day. sexy much?
  

dude this is first rate.

New release by Som Ammara (featuring joey boy). sums up best the contemporary urban culture i live in. i like to see thai cultural status quo being challenged, conventions questioned, especially gender role and seniority. why should girls not go out and have fun and why is a younger person supposed to bow and apologise when he's not wrong in the least? so refreshing and self-righteous. and american. totally the mind of an age, in GWF Hegel's words. 

twenty-something women come to New York City in search of the two L's

Labels and Love. or so begins Sex and the City with the voice of Carrie Bradshaw the protagonist of the infamous uberfeminine TV series-turned-film. so i saw it a few days ago and liked it. in the past i tried to bring myself to get addicted to the series (yes, it's a conscious effort) in hopes of at least understanding what about it that drew in such crazed fans single and married alike. as it turned out, i was somewhat disappointed because i got the impression (perhaps a wrong one) that the series was a little too much on the drama side. so, unlike the suburban Desperate Housewives  or recently the ultra-cosmopolitan socialite Cashmere Mafias, SATC failed to win me over, for it didn't have this sharp witty biting edge to it that i'm personally fond of as a viewer. 

To be sure, the movie version also doesn't possess such quality. But perhaps it's the cinematic pace of it that does the trick for me. Very swift, assured, and to the point, SATC managed to hold my undivided attention throughout the entire two-hourish session (quite a challenge if u know the ADD me). The protagonist's voiceover works really well as, uhm, the guiding voiceover and more importantly as the meta-structural self-reflection and doubt of the protagonist herself. 

The art direction is of course overwhelmingly praised. From the costumes, which naturally outshine other aesthetic elements, to settings (classy bars, cafes, and the New York public library) and lavish decors, the viewer can tell where a large part of the budget went. If the lives of these women can be described as superficial frivolity, what other alternative could have been employed to convey such decadence if not the dazzling of the actual "surface." Better yet, the dazzling display gets a little too, well, dazzling on occasions. Yes, i'm talking about the graphic scenes, all of which were made blurry by the censorship unit of Thailand's Ministry of Culture, the cultural watch-dog who is notorious for its history of banning movies, songs, and other media from Thailand and overseas alike. In a country where political democracy has been obsessively preached and fetishized (but not necessarily practiced), cultural democracy is suppressed and dictated to the extent that a ministry was established to inform the people of what is right and wrong culturally. If hypocrisy is not the right word to label the current state, i don't know which will. 

Despite the blurred scenes, SATC fortunately was not banned altogether. Given the number of Thai fans sworn by the TV series, to disallow the movie from our theaters would sure cause some roar. Much as I hate to compare the film version to its original version, for I believe there'll always be something lost "in translation" necessarily entailed in the cross-media appropriation/interpretation (which is not always a bad thing), lots of my friends think that the film does the series justice. Of course, I have no authority to comment on this seeing that I have yet to finish one episode of the show. But for what it's worth, I enjoyed it a lot. And this is not a "chick flick", mind you. because the ladies are no longer chicks? or the movie itself doesn't fall under that category? i'll ponder in my sleep. bonne nuit tout le monde. 

Home

Providence -> Newyork -> Bangkok
these past two weeks flew by me in a swift blur.

Yes. it's official. i graduated beautifully and now am kicking around at home. i have so much to say about graduation, but that needs breaking down into levels and issues. so it will eventuallyunfurl in the form of and/or as part of general reflection and tangents in which i talk about life. brown will now always be part of me. pictures are up on facebook. i decided to put some that can speak to me on a personal level, something so intimate it can blow me back to May, 2008 - the key month of my life where i felt most confused, daunted, and of course, proud and fulfilled.

Going out for the first time tomorrow since i've been back. getting dinner with amigos at Siam. what else?