Podcasts have so completely taken over my iPhone that it’s almost sad. The thousands and thousands of songs that I’ve worked hard to collect over the years are sitting neglected, covered in digital spiderwebs, as I load up on podcasts about history, movies, art, comedy, and science. I may be biased, of course, as I co-hosted the Bangkok Podcast for nearly 2 years, but I really think that this format is an underrated game-changer. […]
A lot of time people feel the need to get out of Bangkok and catch a break from the constant buzz of traffic, the crowds, the highways, and the cement. Oh God, the cement. Some people go to great lengths to catch a break, like a friend who will gladly travel all night in a crowded minivan and half a day on a boat to spend one night on a beach. I’m a bit lazy more pragmatic, in that if I leave town, it needs to be easy, cheap, fast, and worthwhile. A few months […]
Every high school kid has an idea for a dream career that probably won’t come true. My friends wanted to be singers or dancers or actors or film directors (I went to a performing arts school, obviously), but my dream was a bit odd. I wanted to move to Japan and live in a little hut and learn how to make swords. Surprisingly, sword-making isn’t easy to learn in small-town Canada, so I made up for it by taking Japanese language courses, reading Japanese history books, and studying Japanese martial arts (stop laughing, I was surprisingly good). At […]
After living in Bangkok for so long I sometimes forget how lost I was when I first got here. As I wrote in 2001 when I first arrived: “Walking down streets I can’t remember past landmarks I don’t recognize to order food I can’t pronounce.” But now that I’m comfortable here all of that is forgotten – except when I travel out of Thailand. If you relish the raw unfamiliarity of making it on your own in a strange land, more power to you, but I got that out of my system a long time ago. Now when […]
When I first came to Thailand in 2001, Lonely Planet was the authority on travel. Their books dominated travel sections in book stores, their television shows were on my schedule every week, and their burgeoning Thorn Tree forum was the place to go for travel info. A lot has changed since then – both in the wide world as well as in the travel industry. The company was bought out by the BBC in 2007 and the internet and smartphones have revolutionized how info is digested by travelers, but LP is still […]
Recently, a friend of mine who was visiting for my (now postponed) wedding had his grand travel plans derailed in a rather spectacular way. B, as I will call him, had planned to stay for a month in Thailand, with a side trip to India. I’ll detail his travel derailment below, but it got me thinking – when you're traveling, is there a point where you get so much bad luck that you just give up and cancel? It’s a relevant question because travel is not, as the TV shows would have you believe, a seamless, stress-free experience. And as an expat in Bangkok you meet a lot of travelers – from first-timers to round-the-worlders to full-time travel experts. To get a bit of perspective, I asked B a bit about his attitude during the whole thing, as well as a few of my professional traveler friends to see what they had to say about how much fate dictates their next move and how they deal when they just can't seem to catch a break.
On July 26, 2001, I stepped out of Don Meuang (then spelled ‘Don Muang’) airport into the Bangkok heat. It was the first time I had been out of Canada since I was 4 and I was eager to explore, to find places and see things few had found and seen, to blaze new trails and sink into the warm bath of all things new and strange. As soon as I got out onto the congested sidewalk, with the oppressive heat, whistle-blowing security guards, snaking taxi queue, and humid air thick with exhaust, I turned around and walked right back inside, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. Not a great start for an intrepid explorer. Forgive me if this turns into a bit of “When I was young…” but this is a quick look back at how Bangkok – and myself – have changed as I pass my tenth anniversary in Thailand.
Ahhh, the new year. Time to put the diseased, pockmarked wreck of the last year behind us and stare at the glorious, unspoilt landscape of the next 12 months in front of us. In the spirit of new beginnings, I finally completed a little project I've been working on for a while. I've had on my desktop for some time now a high-resolution map of the proposed future of Bangkok's mass transit lines. The original was all in Thai, but I whipped out my mad Photoshop skillz and roughly translated the names of the stations (with a bit of help) into English. It's still a bit busy, and I'm not sure what the timeframe on all these routes are, but it gives you an idea of what Bangkok's overlords have in store for the future. Bangkok right now is woefully underserved by its mass transit network, but when/if this is all complete, it will likely rank up near Tokyo and Hong Kong for mass transit awesomeness. Take a look.
Back when I was living in the motherland, I was a media junkie. I had subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly, full cable on my TV, a membership at Rogers Video and a fast (for then) internet connection. I stayed current on new music, television, movies, celebrity gossip, fashion, scandals and gadgets, and never missed the season premiere of a hot new show. But one of the things I wasn’t prepared for when I moved to Thailand was how quickly I would fall out of touch with the things that used to allow me to fit in to western culture so well. As an expat, you often get sharp reminders of just how disconnected you are, and then one day you realize that you might not fit in so well if you ever moved back home.
Well, that was a long break. As previously stated, I took a wee vacation to the far-off land we call “Europe” with my lady, and am only now getting back into the Bangkok groove. I only manage one big vacation every few years, so it was a long time coming. Enjoyed it a lot, spent too much money, but it was worth it – you know the drill. At any rate, it was interesting to me, living in one of Asia’s biggest, most culturally important cities, to experience some of Europe’s biggest, most culturally important cities. I had a few thoughts on Bangkok while there…