About christao408

An expat American who moved to Bangkok in 2005 with his partner (now husband). Life is a grand adventure and each experience is worth having if for no other reason than to remind us that we are alive.

Ann Landersish – What to Make of this Dilemma?

Posted on 7 July 2010 by christao408

Just before heading to the US for my grandparents’ 90th birthdays, I received an interesting message in my inbox. It seems I’m turning into an ersatz Ann Landers. What advice would you give this guy, whom we will call Reader X?

Long-lost relatives?

Hello Chris. You and Tawn both seem to have really insightful perspectives on life. I have been reading your blog for a few years. I never comment on your entries though. Hopefully your wisdom and advice will guide me through this dilemma. You could even post it on your blog to see how other readers would do in my situation. But please keep me anonymous. Thank you!

I have been taking road trips with this group of friends every summer (about 6 of them) for a few years. This year I was excluded and never invited. In fact I didn’t even know that they were on a trip until they updated their facebook statuses.

Considering all the planning and coordination involved, I am pretty sure they didn’t just simply forget to invite me.

My questions are:

1) Should I confront them or play dumb?
2) Should I even hang out with this group of friends anymore? I would think that by excluding someone deliberately was an obvious hint that they didn’t want that person in the group anymore. Would I appear clueless and stupid if I hang out with them again?

…

Now, I responded with some initial thoughts to Reader X, which I won’t share with you at the moment. The next day, he replied with the following message:

Hi Chris. Thanks for the reply. … It would be great if you could present your readers my dilemma. Sorry I don’t mean to hijack your blog. Your readers seem really mature and level-headed when facing life problems as well.

I decided to hear the truth so I messaged one of the girls in the group. I said “I can’t help but notice that I wasn’t invited on the trip. I’d like to know why. I’m prepared to accept any answer, but I want to hear it from you.”

She said it was thrown together quickly. But with hotel booking and coordinating each other’s schedule, it definitely didn’t happen spontaneously. In the past, they would plan the trips weeks ahead.

Then she said they only had one car. That explanation doesn’t really make sense because they know I have a car as well. Also why would they invite 6 people in the first place when the car could only accommodate 5. The explanation is clearly flawed.

So what now? Accept and believe. Or accept and move on?

…

So let’s put it to you, the “mature and level-headed” readers of my blog. What initial advice would you have given Reader X and, now that he’s confronted one of the girls who left him behind, what advice would you give him for going forward?

Escape the Rains

Posted on 7 July 2010 by christao408

A news report in Wednesday’s paper indicated that a weak La Niña system is building up in the western Pacific, which will result in heavier than normal rainfall throughout Asia. Sure enough seems to be the case here in Bangkok where, despite reports of a severe drought in the northeast of the country, we have had quite a bit of rain to kick off rainy season.

Late Monday morning we had several hours of nonstop torrential rain, much more than we usually get at one time. As you can see from the picture taken from my balcony, the soi (alley) on which we live was flooded enough to brush the undersides of passing taxis.

My poor maid was caught in the rain while eating lunch on her way from one of the other houses she cleans to our condo. She was eating at a streetside vendor and stayed there under and umbrella, hoping to wait it out. When the vendor asked where she was heading, he shook his head and told her that the area floods and that she had better head out right there and then, or else abandon all hope.

Sure enough, when she arrived at the condo she was soaked. I told her that next time it is raining so hard she should just call and cancel; no need to brave the floods. A bit later she pointed out that where she lives out by Sukhumvit Soi 101, the sois don’t flood. With all the expensive condos around here, she tsked, the streets shouldn’t flood.

So much for location, location, location!

I’m headed to the airport. Talk to you soon.

Food in BKK: Rex Hotel

Posted on 6 July 2010 by christao408

Yesterday I promised a retro meal and this is just the place for it: the Rex Hotel, an establishment that dates from the 1960s, one of a large number of hotels that offered fixed rates for foreign GIs who were on rest and relaxation breaks during the Vietnam War. The Rex Hotel is still in business, still owned by the original family, in fact. It has undergone some remodels but has never lost that 1960s charm. Its coffee shop, the Rexa Coffee Hall, is still famous for its khao tom, boiled rice.

Located on Sukhumvit Road between Sukhumvit Soi 32 and 34, the Rex Hotel is just a short walk from the Thong Lo BTS Skytrain station.

Despite fresh coats of paint, the Rexa Coffee Hall screams 1960s with its delightfully unselfconscious menu design, booth upholstery, and table dividers.

We ate at an off hour and there was only one other group dining. The Rex Hotel focuses mostly on package tour groups these days and with tourism way down, I’m sure there is a low occupancy level. Notice the staff, wearing the classic red jackets and bow ties.

The Rexa Coffee Hall has a wide menu of both Thai and Western items – eight types of sandwiches, for example – all of which are decent without being flashy and all of which are inexpensive. They are most famous for their boiled rice, khao tom, a Thai breakfast favorite. The rice porridge is served with a variety of side dishes. You can mix and match to get whatever flavors you want to contrast with the backdrop of bland rice.

One must-try is jab chai, which literally means “leftovers”. A mixture of whatever is left over, the Rexa’s version includes bitter greens stewed with tofu, pork belly, and chicken feet. Not very pretty but it is very tasty.

Pad tua ngoc – Bean sprouts stir-fried with pork and tofu. Clean flavors and very refreshing.

Kai jiaow – omelet with fried pork Omelets here are fried in plenty of oil but they always seem to come out without being oily. I guess they keep the pan really hot.

Finally, my choice, some gun chien tod – Fried sweet Chinese sausage

The Rexa is going to get some return visits from me. With a menu so inexpensive and varied and a location so close to my home, it would be a good break for when I need to get out of the house for lunch.

I’m on my way to the United States today so there may be a few days without an entry. Stay tuned, though. Next stop, Omaha.

Nongmon Market in Chonburi

Posted on 5 July 2010 by christao408

In yesterday’s post about eating seafood, I mentioned that after eating we went for a stroll through the adjacent market. Nongmon Market is in Chonburi province, a coastal province southeast of Bangkok. Like all markets, there is a lot to see, plenty of pictures to take, and not a few things to try eating … if you are brave enough!

A view down one section of the market, which stretches over several blocks. It is a busy place and if you aren’t careful you could easily get run down by a motorbike.

It is all about the fresh seafood. Here are some very large prawns, ready to be grilled.

There are many kinds of fish available. I watched for a minute as this skilled fishmonger quickly cut the tails and fins off the fish, moving as rapidly as a machine.

There were bushels full of hoy dong – marinated/pickled clams that are a popular dish.

Lots of vendors sell hor mok – a fish mousse steamed in a banana leaf or mussel shell. Tawn made this for me using salmon shortly after he moved to San Francisco in late 2000. It was tasty, but I have to say that he struggled to find a banana leaf to use.

Visiting the market is fun for the entire family – especially when you can get four members of the family squeezed onto a motorbike. See the second child in there?

A sweet treat called khanom jaak – The leaf is”bai jak”, a type of palm frond. A mixture of shredded coconut, palm sugar, and coconut milk is folded inside the leaf then it is grilled until it becomes a sticky, toffee-like mass. Tasty stuff. Watch out for the staples.

Dried shrimp – Thais use these in dishes like nam prik (chili dipping sauce) and som tam (green papaya salad) to add a salty and fishy flavor.

A fruit vendor slicing up fruit to go. The orange fruit above the pineapple is called gratawn – a summer fruit with a bitter, tangy exterior layer of flesh. Closer to the seed it is very sweet with a cottony flesh. The bananas in the lower right are known as gluay nam waa, which has a sticky flesh similar to a plantain. There are many different varieties of banana here.

Finally a dessert called khanom chan – “layer dessert” – a jello-like dessert, very auspicious for promotions and other things where you go up a level. The green flavor is pandan leaf and blue flavor is an-chan, a type of flower also known as clitoria ternatea.

I hope you enjoyed the stroll through the market. Tomorrow, a retro 60s meal back in Bangkok.

Dining in Chonburi: Seafood Extravaganza

Posted on 4 July 2010 by christao408

The family of one of Tawn’s university friends owns a famous seafood restaurant in Chonburi province, about a 90-minute drive southeast of Bangkok. In all the years he has known her, Tawn has never been down to visit the restaurant. A few weeks ago we decided to finally accept the friend’s offer and drove to the restaurant. It was, to say the least, a seafood extravaganza.

The unassuming restaurant is in a busy market area near the Gulf of Thailand. An open-air shop house, the restaurant looks like it has been there for ages, which it has. It is clean but not fancy. The counter between the kitchen and the dining area is lined with bottles of their homemade chili sauce, a Warhol-esque decorating statement. Large photos of the dishes on the menu line the walls.

The first thing to be placed on the granite tables are a trio of sauces: the homemade chili on the left, a sweet “plum” sauce in the back, and a fish sauce with chilies. The small green chilies in the fish sauces are called prik kii nuu in Thai – literally, “mouse shit chilies”.

The restaurant’s specialty is a kind of seafood sausage, if you will. It comes in two types: Hoy jaew is the round one, and is made of crab meat; Hae gun is the flat one and is made of shrimp. Both are wrapped in tofu skins and steamed then deep fried.

Another batch almost ready to come out of the deep-fryer.

And interior shot of the hoy jaw – basically a crab cake. Large chunks of fresh crab meat.

Another menu item the restaurant is famous for is the bpuu jaa – crab shells stuffed with a mixture of crab meat and pork, then fried. The flavor is especially good at this restaurant because they mix the meat with coconut milk.

Goong ob wuun sen – baked vermicelli with prawns with a sauce made from oyster sauce, cilantro, and ginger. The secret ingredient is pork fat, which lines the clay pot to prevent ingredients from sticking while the dish is baked. As it is served, the dish is stirred and the melted pork fat is distributed over the noodles, which absorbs it. Yummy!

Tom yum talae – Traditionally “tom yum” soup with fresh seafood. Moderately spicy with a tamarind flavored broth.

Khao pad bpuu – Stir fried rice with crab meat. The owner spoiled us by making it stir fried crab meat with a little bit of rice in it. Tasty!

Plaa muk kai tod gratiam – Young squid that are filled with squid roe, fried in a sweet sauce and topped with fried garlic.

Plaa tod – Cotton fish filleted and fried…

and topped with yam mamuang – a sauce of green mango, carrots, cilantro, chilies, and dried shrimp mixed with fish sauce and lime juice. Perfect with the fish and not as spicy as you might expect.

The star of the show, a basket of steamed crab!

The mother of Tawn’s friend as an expert at cracking and peeling crab. She sat there at the table and opened a half-dozen crabs for us, making the choice bits easily accessible. Normally, crab is something I won’t bother with if I have to peel the shells and pick out the meat myself because it seems more work than it is worth. But with an expert peeling them – well, I’m all in!

Sauce of death! Chilies (loads of the “mouse shit” variety) blended with lime juice, fish sauce, and not much else. This is super spicy. And really good with the crab meat.

The strange interior membrane of the crab, which I was encouraged to try. Very astringent, briny flavor and not something I’ll have again.

For the most part, the food wasn’t very spicy but was really tasty. The sauce for the crab, though, is just spicy. There’s no two ways about it. This required a lot of water with lots of ice to cool down the mouth!

Growing up in the US, I didn’t eat a lot of seafood while I was growing up. I only came to appreciate it once I started having really fresh seafood prepared in simple ways that emphasize the freshness and flavor of the meat. Needless to say, this restaurant reinforced all the great things about seafood.

For dessert, some khanom niaow – basically, a Thai-style mochi (pounded sticky rice) served with a palm sugar sauce and fried cooked rice.

After lunch we strolled around the local market. I’ll share those photos tomorrow.

Happy Fourth

Posted on 3 July 2010 by christao408

Happy Fourth of July to everyone, especially the Americans in the crowd. Here in Bangkok it isn’t a holiday, of course, but the American Chamber of Commerce hosts an annual celebration, which was on Saturday. I was there for about four hours, volunteering to sell raffle tickets. We had cloudy weather with the threat of rain, which kept the Bangkok temperatures much lower than full-on sunshine.

I have three posts in the queue, written but not ready for posting since I need Tawn to clarify the Thai names of things. They are all food posts, so your wait for food porn will not be long!

My recent post on Gay Pride ended up on the front page – thanks to all of you who recommended it. The result is that there are many new subscribers to my blog. Welcome everyone! When I first start reading a blog, I’m always curious who the person is, what their back-story is, etc. A while back I wrote a post that addresses that, kind of a “Getting to Know Me” post. If you’d like to check it out, the link is here.

This Wednesday I’ll be traveling to the United States for two weeks. This will be a combination of a business trip and a family reunion, as my maternal grandparents are celebrating their 90th birthdays and their 67th wedding anniversary. What’s really amazing is not that they’ve made it to 90, but how active they both are. I guess age has a harder time catching up with you if you keep moving!

Tawn, unfortunately, will not be traveling back with me. This week has transitions to a part-time role at his job, something he has been wanting to do for more than a year. His work, in public relations, is both very rewarding for him and very stressful. Hopefully, part time will give him more time to explore other interests and also to see his parents. As their only child, I know they don’t see enough of him.

Reducing work will mean reducing salary, and we’re going to have to see how that impacts our life. That’s one of the main reasons I’m traveling to the US solo on this trip. We’ve done our planning and put a lot into savings, so I think we’ll be able to make the transition without too much trouble. But there’s always a little bit of stress knowing that the paychecks will be smaller in the future.

One geeky thing I’m looking forward to on the flight over is that I’m flying EVA Air through Los Angeles. The particular days I’m flying, they are operating their B747-400 aircraft. Unlike most airlines, which put business class or first class in the upper deck, EVA actually has economy class, and the seats there have about four extra inches of legroom compared with downstairs economy. Normally I fly their premium economy but when I saw which aircraft was being operated, I realized I could save several hundred dollars and still get much of the extra legroom. Let’s hope they don’t change planes on me!

Okay, aviation geek moment over…

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll get the first of those food posts up today.

My first two cars

Posted on 30 June 2010 by christao408

After writing a few days ago about the first car I learned to drive, that rusty old 1968 Ford Fairlane, I looked at the calendar yesterday and noticed that it was the anniversary of my first and only new car purchase. But before I finally scraped up enough to buy the new car in 1994, my first car was actually a 1981 Mazda 626 coupe.

This isn’t the actual car – mine was a light blue – but it is the same model and year. I bought my Mazda about a week before I moved from the Bay Area down to Riverside to start studying, right at the beginning of 1990. Previously, I had shared the Fairlane and a 1971 Mercury station wagon with my parents and younger sister and there was no way I was going to be able to live in Los Angeles without a car of my own.

I bought the car with a little help from my parents, from a guy who lived two blocks over. It was a stick-shift and I hadn’t driven one before so my father did the test driving and I had to learn to master the manual transmission in the few days before I left for LA!

My father, who is a pretty handy mechanic, inspected the car and we brought it down to the automobile club for them to do a used car inspection, too. It looked like it was in good shape and so we bought it for something like $2,500. What I ended up buying was a lemon and to this day it has left a sour taste in my mouth for used cars, even though I rationally understand that they are generally a good value.

Over the next four and a half years I kept sinking money into the Mazda, which set me back probably a year or more in my eventual purchase of my first new car.

I purchased my Honda Civic DX on June 30, 1994 at the Sunnyvale Honda dealership. Three months earlier I had graduated from university, I had been working at the same job for seven years already so credit was not a problem, and I had managed to save up a decent down-payment. My choice of a four-dour was practical: I often drove people around. I also decided to stick with a manual transmission, something that had grown on me.

It was a wonderful car that got great gas mileage. I lived in Los Angeles and then San Diego in the years after buying the car before eventually moving back to the Bay Area, and I tracked the mileage meticulously. On one of my trips from LA to San Francisco I actually got about 50 miles per gallon, thanks to careful driving and a good tailwind.

I kept the car as I moved into San Francisco proper in 1998, getting a street permit and fighting for the limited number of parking spots, trying to remember each morning where I had parked the night before. Eventually, after Tawn moved to SF and bought a car, I decided maybe I could live without one. For six months I made it a point to not drive all week, parking far away from the house in an area without daily parking restrictions. I would take the car out on the weekend to clean it and run the engine, but found I could get around on transit just fine, even when I had classes to train in the South Bay or Oakland.

In the autumn of 2001 (I think – it might have been 2002?) I finally put the car up for sale, selling it to a man from Belmont so his daughter could have her first car. We met at a rest stop off Highway 280, he inspected it and agreed to my price. I had kept detailed records of all the maintenance, oil changes, etc. so it was an easy sale. We signed the paperwork there, I handed over the keys to his daughter, and the man drove me back to my house. He took the above picture for me, the only one I have of my Honda.

To this day I sometimes see the same model car driving around and think how much I would enjoy having another one. It was a great car.

What is Pride About?

Posted on 29 June 2010 by christao408

Near the end of June each year, parades are held in cities throughout the US and elsewhere in the world to celebrate gay pride. These marches began as a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar in New York City rioted in response to a police raid and continued harassment. Originally these parades were knows as “gay freedom” or “gay liberation” marches, although over the last four decades they have come to be known more general as “Gay Pride”.

Pictures and stories in the media tend to focus on the most titillating aspects of the parade: the “Dykes on Bykes,” the naked or nearly-naked revelers, the fabulous drag queens, etc. With a mixture of confusion and derision, many in the heterosexual community (and even a few in the gay community) don’t understand what these events are about and the displays of outrageousness provoke the common refrain that gays should just “keep it to themselves” instead of “flaunting it”.

In fact, a recent post on the front page of Xanga asked the question, “Why Gay Pride?” Many of the responses echoed the themes of those who don’t understand what Pride is and its importance to members of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered (GLBT) community.

Let me share with you my answer to the question, “What is Pride about?”

Growing up gay is, more than anything, about invisibility. You don’t see anyone like you, you have nobody to confide in, and you often don’t realize that you are not alone in your attraction to members of the same sex. This invisibility is debilitating and while there are many more examples of GLBT people in the media and in everyday life than there were a few decades ago, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world who are GLBT or questioning, continue to grow up feeling invisible.

A friend I interviewed in a university project shared this story with me: Growing up in a large immigrant family, he was convinced that his homosexual feelings were an illness, a sickness that only he had ever experienced. He kept this secret buried deep inside and it was taking a toll on his health, his studies, and his wellbeing. One weekend in June he took the subway into the city to do some shopping and as he emerged from underground, he found himself in the middle of a large parade. As he stopped to watch, he had a dawning awareness that all of the people at the parade were just like him. Suddenly he realized that he wasn’t alone, that there was a huge, colorful, and proud community of others who felt they same way he did. Needless to say, it was a life-altering and possibly even life-saving event for him.

Why the drag queens? Why the blatantly sexuality? The media loves to focus on the things that are most outrageous and that will make the best photos and headlines. But these members of the GLBT community play an important role in Pride. The Stonewall Inn, the gay bar whose raid led to the Stonewall Riots, was frequented primarily by the most marginalized members of the gay community: the drag queens, transvestites, transgendered people, and effeminate men.

They were the ones who led the riots against the police, fighting back against years of abuse and oppression. Embracing this outrageousness is a way to remember that it was the most outrageous members of the GLBT community who first stood up for all of our rights. Plus, what’s a parade without some frivolity?

In my mind, the most important and most prideful parts of Gay Pride events are the contingents of GLBT families, friends, and straight allies, a representation of every stripe of the larger community, fulfilling the promise in the Gay Pride symbol, which is the rainbow flag. Is the man above a gay father? The brother of a gay sibling? The son of a gay parent? The friend of a gay person? Or just a member of the larger community who wants his daughter to appreciate the breadth of diversity in their community and to learn to respect each member of it?

We don’t know the answer to that question but the fact that there are so many possible answers tells every person who is still in the closet, who is still struggling with his or her invisibility, that he or she is not alone. And that, for me, is what Gay Pride is really about.

Alex’s entry about powerful ads

Posted on 28 June 2010 by christao408

Alex wrote a very interesting entry about three advertisements that got him thinking. While I like a lot of entries I read and recommend some, I felt this one was especially worth checking. I hope you’ll take three minutes to go read it.

One of the three ads he writes about is here

The Rusty 1968 Ford Fairlane

Posted on 27 June 2010 by christao408

Few stories so well epitomize my childhood than that of my first car, a rusted out 1968 Ford Fairlane. To be fair, it wasn’t truly my first car as my parents retained ownership of it. But it was the car I spent my entire childhood in, the car in which I learned to drive.

This was the first brand-new car my father ever bought. Everything else was a used car. It was metallic blue with a vinyl top, a “California edition” of the car, similar in appearance to the photo above except the color. Like pretty much all cars of the day it had a powerful V8, no air conditioning, Philco AM radio.

I remember that this car got scorching hot in the summer, back in the days before those cardboard foldable sun shades. (Thinking about it, I remember that the first time I ever saw those sun shades was in 1987 in the parking lot of Disneyland.) We would get in the car and the vinyl seats would be so hot we had to put beach towels on them, towels we kept in the car all summer long just for that purpose. Of course the metal seat belts were much too hot to wear at first so we had to wait a few minutes with the vents blowing before we could buckle up without branding ourselves!

Back in those days, metallic paint wasn’t terribly stable and a black vinyl roof wasn’t ideal for sunny California. Despite my father’s meticulous care and weekly hand-washing, the paint began to chip and the roof started to crack. By the time I learned to drive in it around 1985, large splotches of undercoat were showing through. A minor rear-ending after I got my license resulted in a missing high-beam light. A few years later a piece of the metallic side trim broke off.

Inside, the blue vinyl ceiling’s glue came undone and hung, canopy-like, from beam to beam. As the stitching came undone, my father used chopsticks to help hold up the ceiling, leading friends to call it the Chopstick Car.

My sister posing on her graduation day with the Chopstick Car.

Something about the transmission was fiddly and by the time I learned to drive, you had to reach over the wheel with your left hand, holding the gear lever just to the left of “Park” and turn the ignition key with your right hand, all the while gently pumping the gas with your foot. If you pumped too much, you would flood the engine and had to wait a few minutes before trying again.

The car was symbolic of several things: my father’s thrift – he liked the car because unlike the “new fangled” cars that had computerized components, he could get under the hood and do most repair work himself – as well as my parent’s lessons to me and my sister on sufficiency. The car wasn’t pretty. It was actually the ugliest car in our high school’s parking lot by far. But it was good enough to get us where we were going and we didn’t have to pay for anything other than the fuel for the tank.

In 1994, when the car was 26 years old, my parents were in the process of selling their house and packing for their move back to my father’s new job in Indianapolis. Just a few days before moving, by complete coincidence, a man driving through the neighborhood stopped and asked if they were interested in selling the car. This solved the problem of what they should do about moving it to Indy. If I recall, the agreed-upon price was something like 50 dollars, cash.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

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