Archive for October, 2007
Bangkok Goes Nobel
Warning: This post is not your average Bangkok topic. It’s about Bangkok’s Nobel laureates. Nobel Prize laureates who will hold talks and dialogs in Bangkok. Bangkok goes Nobel. Quite a challenge for our beloved, not too intellectual capital of freedoms and pleasures. This post is about some serious brain challenge: About an upcoming series of
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Gosh Bangkok, You’re Pricey!
If you trust Thailand’s official inflation rates, you live in one of the world’s cheapest places with one of the world’s most stable prices. Cheap east, so to say. Truth though is, prices in Thailand creep up constantly and quietly. It remains a mystery to me how the hell Thailand’s inflation rates are calculated. Take
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Novelist Burdett: Mission Soi Cowboy
Don’t tell you don’t know Sonchai Jitpleecheep. That cop with a Thai prostitute mother and an American soldier father who is a devout Buddhist and always left standing. That Sonchai, a half-Thai, half-American copper living in surreal Bangkok, city of glamor, brothels and temples, where Sonchai is at his best behind bar counters, in members-only
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Pornpim, Our Bangkok Danseuse
It was a most remarkable performance recently at Bangkok’s Festival of Dance and Music: The performance of the Zurich Ballet’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. With a leading danseuse from Bangkok on the stage. BangkokDan had been flabbergasted. After Saturday’s show (with his wife) he went there again on Sunday (with his son).
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Hua Hin’s Bangkokization
The royal sea resort town of Hua Hin is irrecoverably changing. The Royals, Khunyings and Phuyais still give the formerly very sleepy town its unique charme. Hua Hin – Bangkok’s veranda of detente – is still the Bangkokians’ favored place to get their doses of fresh air and space. But that past long Chulalongkorn Day
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That Damn Old Bangkok Cliché
Why is it that Bangkok still has that reputation of being a paradise for abusers and a city of whores where nobody has to work hard to make a living. With that Canadian Interpol ped caught in Thailand the world again pointed the fingers against Thailand, implicitly calling the Kingdom all sorts of bad names.
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Bangkok’s Political Pundits
Ever lost in translations? Ever struggled, when another major political scandal rocked Bangkok, to fully understand what was going on? Does this sound familiar: All you understand turns out to be the contrary of what is actually going on? Take the coup d’état on September 19th, 2006. The whole world was panicking. Thailand kept its
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Bangkok’s Probably Best Burgers
A burger is not necessarily a burger. This is the lesson you’re about to make when paying a visit to MOS Burger – Japanese Fine Burger & Coffee. And you ever doubted the Japanese were perfectionists? One of many delights at MOS: Not one burger, not a single French fries, is pre-prepared. It’s all made
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A Visit To Bangkok’s Death Row
It’s not your average excursion in Bangkok, I must confess. A visit to Bangkok’s death row. But do you have a spare few hours once in a while? Are you sometimes bored? Endlessly pondering about life’s whethers and ifs? There is a lot of meaning out there in the world. Sometimes life’s meanings are so
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Bangkok’s Columnist Gods
He was the greatest of them all. The if not best known farang in Thailand: Bernard Trink – the one and only Nite Owl, who lead an impossible life between Bangkok’s bars and a hysterically jealous wife. Trink wrote a weekly column in Friday’s Bangkok Post. For some time he symbolized Bangkok’s nightlife itself. That
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