Yokoso Japan!

Posted on 10 April 2009 by christao408

While it was an early morning Thursday, we made it to the airport and onto our flight with no problems. I’ll write at a later date about the experience on United’s new business class as I know it isn’t the most pressing news to cover.

It was still sakura (cherry blossom) season when we touched down at Narita airport north of Tokyo. A row of trees lined the runway, their light pink blossoms at their peak.

We passed through immigration and customs with no problem, located the post office where I picked up our rental mobile phone, then we headed to the train station. Ninety minutes later we were walking to our hotel, the Ueno First City Hotel, located in the Ueno district near Tokyo University.

The Ueno First City Hotel wasn’t our first choice. Several of the recommended ryokan (traditional Japanese inns) were full. But this is actually a nice hotel. We have a Japanese style room that is tiny but comfortable. The staff is friendly and helpful and we’re less than a ten-minute walk to three different rail stations.

We met Taro for dinner, a friend who used to be the Assistant Director of the SF Int’l Asian American Film Festival. Taro took us to an izakaya in the neighborhood that specializes in lotus root dishes. Izakaya – literally, “drinking houses” – are pubs that serve small plates of food. Kind of like tapas bars, you order a few small plates at a time to accompany your drinking, until you are full.

We had some excellent food and, really, the food is just about the most important thing to experience in a culture.

Burdock root with pork, carrots and sesame seeds

Hokke – a type of sashimi from a fish from the northern island of Hokkaido.

Fried lotus root with grated fish meat.

Yamo-udo, a mountain vegetable that is known in English as jicama.

A super-sized shui mai, a minced pork meat dumpling that is borrowed from Chinese dim sum.

New potatoes fried and served with chili salt.

Mizuna (Japanese mustard greens) salad with vinaigrette.

Lotus root steamed shinjo (dumplings) – this is unusual as they are usually fried rather than steamed.

Cabbage with ponzu sauce and bonito flakes.

Lotus root soba.

It was an amazing meal and really a nice start to our trip. It was nice to visit with Taro and we’ll look forward to seeing him again Saturday.

Friday we spent a lot of time exploring our neighborhood. Starting out with the local area, which is relatively low density, allowed us to get our bearings and explore a lot of wonderful little back alleys and side streets. I’ll write more about it in the coming days, but one of the highlights was a chance to see the sakura up close.

Sadly, the ones in Tokyo are past their peak, but they’re still beautiful.

Finally, one of the cutest shots of the day: a little girl waves to us as she crosses the street with her grandmother.

Off to Tokyo

Posted on 8 April 2009 by christao408

Well, my apologies for running out of time. I was going to write about Sunday’s adventure to the Northeast of Thailand with Stuart, a combination train ride and bike ride that was a lot of fun. The good news is, I have the photos and video and the memories, so I’ll write about it upon my return.

Meanwhile, I’ve been rushing around getting loose ends tied up for the trip to Tokyo very early tomorrow morning. I still have to pack (14 hours before departure – plenty of time!) and to top it off, a couple from Hong Kong arrived this morning so we’ll try to meet for an early dinner tonight.

Biggest excitement besides just being on holiday in Tokyo for eight days? The opportunity to try United Airlines’ new business class. You’ll recall that I got a bit of a run-around with them in booking these mileage award tickets. Thanks to a helpful UA representative, a few strings were pulled and the situation was resolved nicely.

So I was especially pleased when I checked seat assignments this week only to discover that we are scheduled to fly both ways on the new business class configured planes. I was surprised as these are in only about half the fleet right now and BKK-NRT isn’t on the list.

The seats are lie-flat, which United’s researchers determined was the number-one criteria for business travelers: the ability to sleep on the flight.

The potential downside: in planes that competitors have in a 2-3-2 or 2-2-2 configuration and a few competitors (Singapore Airlines for example) have in a 1-2-1 configuration, United has optimized in a 2-4-2 seating arrangement. For business class! Considering that they usually charge quite a bit more than many competitors, I’m curious to see how they’re going to really make that work, but we’ll see.

The other unusual aspect is that the seats face different directions. Unlike most airlines where all the seats face forwards, or even British Airways that uses a “herringbone” pattern in which individual seats are nested in opposite directions, each row on United’s new business class faces the opposite direction. Ostensible this creates a greater sense of privacy. We’ll see.

I’ll try to keep postings as up to date as possible. Apologies in advance as I know I’ll fall behind on my subscriptions. Happy Songkran and Easter to those of you who celebrate them!

Italian Food Porn – Delicatezza

Posted on 7 April 2009 by christao408

Oh, my friends, Saturday night I had a good meal, a fun meal, a wonderful communal dining experience that began with spicy tomato sauce and ended with tart gelato. It was at Delicatezza, an Italian restaurant on Soi Thong Lor 10 (Between Thong Lo and Ekkamai), a restaurant past which I had driven a hundred times and yet – foolishly – at which I had never dined.

It was a bit spontaneous, a gathering of some random friends, some of whom had yet to be introduced. Truthfully, though, it was just an excuse for me to carbo-load before Sunday’s ride. Ken and Brian each shared a nice bottle of red with us, and not long after the appetizers, we were already giddily listening to Brian’s explanation of his different airline mileage credit cards and their relative merits.

Appetizers – click on a photo to see a larger, more succulent version.

From left to right: parma ham and sweet melon; mixed seafood with spicy tomato broth; mussels with spicy tomato broth.

The Cioppino-like seafood appetizers were amazing: the broth was rich and tomatoey, with lots of spice and pepper. The seafood was really fresh and the servings generous. The melon, which was so crisp that I thought it wasn’t ripe, showed why it is called a honey-dew. I haven’t had so sweet a melon in a long time, a perfect foil for the salty ham.

We enjoyed liesurely service and the modern, well-lit atmosphere. The crowd was mostly Thai families with lots of large groups. When our main courses arrived – and they actually arrived at about the same time in very un-Thai fashion – we were treated to even more wonderful delights!

Mixed seafood with angel hair pasta

Clams with squid ink pasta – Matt’s black lips were very Goth

Bacon, musrooms and olives with spaghetti and garlic

Penne with salmon and a vodka-tomato sauce

Pork chop with demi-glace and vegetables

These were fantastic mains. Very reasonable prices, generous portions, high-quality ingredients and very good technique.

Before Suchai arrived, we told the waiter that it was his 40th birthday, which was true a week or so ago. But it is fun to sing Happy Birthday and we knew it would annoy him so we did it anyway.

Below, Matt, Kobfa and Tawn – the ex-San Franciscans – pose before dessert.

Dessert was simple: homemade gelato. The orange is a flavor that is just like taking one from the market, throwing it in the freezer for an hour, then biting into it. The lemon was super tart and so refreshing after the relatively heavy meal. The strawberry and rasperry were very good, too. The chocolate was heavenly rich.

I think that Delicatezza has just become my new favorite Italian restaurant in Krungthep.

A Week in Photos

Posted on 6 April 2009 by christao408

They say a picture tells a thousand words. In that case, let me share about 10,000 words worth of pictures and catch you up on recent events. There’s a big story to tell you about my trip to the Northeast on Sunday, but I still have some video to edit so let me get these loose ends tied up first.

One of my Xanga “blogrings” to which I belong is “I Never Leave Home Without My Camera”. This is true. There are simply too many fascinating things to see, especially in Krungthep!

Another entry in my “Overloaded Trucks of Thailand” coffee table book series. Here a bunch of laminated particleboard armoirs make their way down Asoke Street.

There are lots of street vendors here, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone selling honeycomb from the back of a bicycle.

Also along Asoke, a man and a woman are rescued by a tuk tuk driver as their motorscooter has a mechanical. Somehow the driver is able to secure their scooter to the back of his tuk tuk.

Six weeks ago, this tree outside our bedroom window, in the driveway to the neighboring condo’s car park, was barren. I wasn’t sure if it was dead or just going through winter. Sure enough, the green buds of new leaves started appearing as the cold weather disappeared, and last week there was a profusion of yellow blossoms. The recent heavy rains and wind of the last three days have already knocked them off, though.

Friday night Tawn came home from work and I prepared dinner. I almost always have a few portions of homemade pizza dough in the freezer as it makes for an easy and relatively quick dinner. This time was vegetarian: instead of the typical tomato sauce, I used a pureed roasted squash, seasoned with Italian spices. Throw some tomatoes and fresh mozzarella on top, then garnish with fresh basil once out of the oven. Serve with a mixed arugula salad and you have a pretty healthy meal.

The next morning I made use of some leftover buttermilk to make waffles. I tried a new recipe that substitutes 1/4 cup of cornstarch for some of the flour, which gives it a crispier texture. Also, the egg is separated and the white is beaten before being added, giving it more volume. Sadly, the cap on the canister of Vermont maple syrup I brought from the US (and which has been stored in my refrigerator) is stuck. I was unable to open it and so we were limited to preserves and honey as toppings.

Saturday we headed out to run some errands for Trish. You’ll recall that we’ve been trying to chase down the owner of a silk factory who sold Trish 60 yards of ostensibly 2-ply white silk, that upon inspection ended up being 1-ply. After months of the run-around we finally met up with her last weekend at Old Siam shopping center and made the exchange, picking up 2-ply navy blue silk instead of white. Old Siam is shown above, with a large floor of clothing for sale. This is kind of like MBK Shopping Center and a little of Chatuchak Weekend Market but all in an air conditioned environment. There are many silk stores on the second and third floor.

Can you spot the foot massage station at the top of the photo? There is one in each of the four corners of the main shopping floor. Not fancy at all, but cheap!

Driving through the old section of the city, we passed many shop houses, some of which have beautiful tilework on the ground floor. This one in particular caught my attention.

While waiting at one traffic light I saw this colorful scene unfold before us. Red, orange, yellow and green. Bangkok: a city painted in primary colors.

Maybe We’ll Get Married in Iowa Instead?

Posted on 3 April 2009 by christao408

Last year I wrote about Tawn and I planning to get married in California when we returned to visit family over the holidays. That plan was upset by the voters of California, who passed Proposition 8 thanks largely to the help of a (possibly illegal) injection of funds by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

That said, it looks like we may have another marriage option when we return to Kansas City this summer to see the family: Iowa.

That’s right, restrictions to same-sex marriage have been overturned by the Iowa State Supreme Court and marriages will begin before the end of the month.

Does this surprise you as much as it surprises me? It seems it shouldn’t. Iowa has a history of being a progressive state. It was one of the first to allow interracial marriage and women to own property. It ended segregation shortly after the Civil War. It was the first state to allow a woman to practice law and it was a leader in school desegregation. The governor and legislature are Democratic.

Based on the first news reports, those opposed to same-sex marriage aren’t rushing to the “activist judges” defense quite as quickly. For starters, the court issued a 7-0 ruling in favor of striking down bans on same-sex marriage. There was no split decision.

Furthermore, the state constitution requires a lengthy process to be changed: two consecutive legislatures have to pass the amendment and then it has to be approved by voters, too. That’s at least a two-year process and current Democratic leadership has indicated that they’re not inclined to introduce such an amendment.

The third reason the same-sex marriage opponents probably haven’t done the “activist judges” route is that the court’s decision addresses the role of the court to make this decision, walking step by step through the role of the three branches of government in the State of Iowa. The full decision, which is interesting reading, can be found here. Quoting from that decision:

A statute inconsistent with the Iowa Constitution must be declared void, even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion. Iowa Const. art. XII, § 1 (providing any law inconsistent with the constitution is void). As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote over two centuries ago, “It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it . . . .” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177, 2 L. Ed. 60, 73 (1803).

Like any journey towards equality, this one is a long, slow march. But today, we’ve taken another step to the point where we look back and ask ourselves, “What was all the fuss over same-sex marriage about?”

Op-Ed Feature from The Nation: Without Equality, Tolerance is Just A Myth

Posted on 2 April 2009 by christao408

Since you may not have a chance to read it yourself, I’m sharing an op-ed piece byPaisarn Likhitpreechakul written for The Nation, one of Thailand’s two English language daily newspapers.

Without equality, tolerance for gays is just a myth

By PAISARN LIKHITPREECHAKUL

SPECIAL TO THE NATION

Published on April 3, 2009

Thee’s a myth, especially among foreigners, that Thailand is “tolerant” towards gays and transgenders. After all, hardly a day goes by without one seeing ladyboys or katoeys (male-to-female transgenders). Most Thais also like to believe in such a feel-good story, as well as spin it to foreigners. To say anything to the contrary will cause a loss of face. However, that kind of simplistic rationale based on visibility is akin to reasoning that Thai women must have equal rights to men because every other Thai appears to be female.

Even long-term foreign residents aren’t likely to have heard about, for example, a bisexual woman who was burned alive in 2006, and the rape, murder and burning of a lesbian last year. Both cases were reported only in the Thai dailies. Continue reading →

Ministry of Labour Epilogue

Posted on 2 April 2009 by christao408

The day after my two-day fiasco with the Ministry of Labour (and side trips to the Department of Business Development and my lawyers’ office), I learned that another expat in a similar situation went to extend his work permit by 90 days.

The result: the MOL clerk insisted that he needed to do a 1-year extension instead and gave him a week to pull together all of the financial reporting that is required for the 1-year extension.

This, even though his last 1-year extension was less than a year ago!

We discussed. My theory is that the MOL is being instructed to crack down on foreign work permits in order to save more jobs for Thais in these tough economic times.

The flip side of this theory, of course, is that they are trying to drive away foreign investment!

Above: From my “Interesting Sights in the Big Mango” series, here’s a picture of a man napping in the back of a pickup truck loaded with veggies, on his way to a market in the late afternoon traffic on Rama IV Road.

A Village Called Versailles – First Public Screening

Posted on 2 April 2009 by christao408

A Village Called Versailles is a full-length documentary about the struggles and triumphs of the community of Vietnamese refuges in Versailles, located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River just east of New Orleans.

After Hurricane Katrina, Versailles residents impressively rose to the challenges by returning and rebuilding before most neighborhoods in New Orleans, only to have their homes threatened by a new government-imposed toxic landfill just two miles away.

The film recounts the empowering story of how this community, who had already suffered so much in their lifetime, turned a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change and a chance for a better future.

A 15-minute version of Director S. Leo Chiang’s (left) film has aired on PBS Frontline’s “Rough Cut” series. You can watch that version here.

The full-length version of A Village Called Versailles will have its first public screening at 3 pm on Saturday April 11 at the Vietnamese International Film Festival in Irvine, California. It will be followed by a panel discussion.

Please tell your friends and family in and around Orange County to go see this powerful film. Ticket can be purchased online at the ViFF website.

Me and the Thai Bureaucrats

Posted on 1 April 2009 by christao408

In the past two days I’ve spent about eight hours engaging the Thai Ministry of Labour and other bureaucrats in order to learn how to get a 90-day extension to my work permit. Previously, I’ve just gone to a law firm and paid them about 2000 baht (US$58) to do this work for me. Over time, I wondered whether I could learn to do the renewal myself and save money. After the past two days, I’m not sure the “savings” are worth it.

Some background first:

In order to live and work in Thailand, you need both a non-resident visa as well as a work permit. The visa is issued overseas from a Thai embassy or consulate and is good for one year. However, you are required to physically leave the country every 90 days. Ostensibly this is so Immigration can run a criminal check on you when you come back in, to make sure your record is clean. In reality, there’s no reason you need to leave the country to do this. It is just a ploy to inject more money into the tourism and travel sectors.

On top of the visa, you have to get a work permit. It is also applied for at the Ministry of Labour once a year but it can only be valid for as long as your visa is valid. Since I can only get a 90-day entry with my visa, my work permit is only valid for 90 days at a time. So after returning from a “visa run” I have to get my work permit extended to match my new 90-day stamp in my passport.

Confused yet?

My friend Stuart is in a similar situation as me and he’s been going to the Ministry of Labour and extending his work permit himself for some time. He agreed to go with me and walk me through the steps, so we set off yesterday afternoon. The MOL’s website doesn’t contain a list of requirements but a little searching online gave me a simple list: copies of my company’s articles of incorporation, copies of my passport and all the pages in my work permit book, and the completed application form.

We arrived at the MOL, picked up the application form, which is in Thai and English, and I filled it out. Some parts are confusing (in both languages). For example, I am asked to fill out the name and address of my employer on one line, then am asked to fill out the company name and address two lines below that. These would be the same information in most cases. Additionally, there was a second form that Stuart hadn’t seen before.

Arriving at the counter, the lady went through the paperwork, discarded a third of the sheets in the articles of incorporation (“no need”), then pointed to the form which Stuart had never seen. “This has to be in Thai.” Even though the instructions are in both Thai and English and there’s no indication of what language was required. This new form requested some financial data from my company, which I didn’t have memorized.

I returned home from the MOL and spent the evening reviewing the forms with Tawn, making sure they were both completed correctly in Thai.

This morning I switched partners and brought Kobfa along, figuring that a native Thai might be helpful. When I went up to the counter at the MOL (different lady this time), she asked whether I wanted a one-year or 90-day work permit extension. After reviewing the work permit book she determined that I was only eligible for the 90-day as it had to match my current visa expiration date. For a 90-day extension that extra application form with which Stuart was unfamiliar, wasn’t necessary. Would have been nice to know yesterday…

She then looked through the articles of incorporation and discarded several more sheets. “Not necessary, not necessary…” Then she came to two documents in the articles of incorporation. “Wait a minute,” she said, “these documents from the Department of Business Development were prepared 16 months ago. You can’t use documents that are more than six months old.” She explained we had to go to the DBD and get new copies.

Leaving the MOL, I decided we had best go to the law firm I used in the past and seek some clarification: they have been renewing my work permit every 90 days for the past 16 months, since I started my company. It that’s the case, then these 16-month old documents had been more than 6 months old for the last 10 months! How were they getting the work permit renewed? Or were they getting updated documents and not giving them to me afterwards?

The law firm was surprisingly helpful, considering that I wanted information that would enable me not to use their services in the future. The young man who is the work permit contact explained what the DBD was and gave us a number for them. He didn’t, however, really answer my questions about how they had managed to get me a work permit in the past.

Kobfa and I headed to the DBD, which thankfully had an office not too far away. This was something I would never have been able to navigate on my own and I’m in debt for his help. Everything was in Thai only. While I read and write Thai, government language is not my strength. The process for getting updated copies of the documents was surprisingly easy, though, complicated only by the fact that we arrived at 11:50 and the office closes for lunch at 12:00.

After retrieving the completed documents at the DBD after lunch we took a taxi back to the MOL. The lady with whom we had dealt in the morning asked if we had all the other documents we had given her (and she had taken) that morning. No, we replied, she still had them. She pointed to a row of baskets in the working area behind her, each basket given a different date of the month, and indicated that we should go back there and retrieve them. We were both a little confused: we were supposed to go back into the clerks’ working area and rummage through a bunch of applications? Yep. So I sorted through a stack of work permit extension applications (and personal data) until I found mine.

After another thirty minutes of bureaucratic back and forth – go to this window, no not complete yet, take it to that window, go to the cashier then come back, etc. – we finally walked out with my 90-day work permit extension. Which means that sometime in the next 90 days I’ll have to do this all again, except for the trip to the DBD, which shouldn’t need to be done until the end of September.

Whew! And who said living in paradise was easy?

Pancakes, Waffles and Facebook

Posted on 31 March 2009 by christao408

Last week I shared a picture of a pancake vendor I discovered near the Thong Lo Skytrain station. Well, I went back yesterday and bought some of her pancakes. For comparison’s sake I walked upstairs to a vendor at the station and bought a waffle, too.

The pancakes have little slices of pumpkin throughout. They are pretty thick but not too terribly sweet. The waffles are a yeast dough and are really undercooked and doughy inside. About two bites into the waffle and I had had enough. Both are pretty heavy snacking but if I had to choose, I’d go with the pancakes.

Maple syrup anyone?

Let me deviate for a few moments to another topic that has been on my mind lately:

Facebook

In the past eighteen months or so, I’ve discovered how wonderful a tool Facebook can be. I’ve reconnected with literally a few hundred former colleagues and classmates who I had not seen or heard from in years. It is really nice to be able to see what they’re up to.

It is the perfect level of “in touch-ness” for most people: I want to know what they are up to but I really am not so close that we need to be emailing or talking regularly.

Sure, there’s a part of me that thinks, “Lord, what’s the point?” and wants to just cut the ties. I have so many other things to do with my life. But I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, so drastic actions aren’t necessary… yet.

But a recent redesign by the powers that be at Facebook has made life difficult and might make drastic action necessary.

The new design finds them chasing after Twitter, the faddish “your life in 140 words or less” networking service. Now I face an endless stream of updates form my 400+ friends and unless I log in to check this stream at least every other hour, the updates pass me by like corks floating in the Colorado River.

The problem with this came to a head this weekend when I missed an update from a former colleague about her going in for chemotherapy this week! I hadn’t been aware that she was battling cancer and if another friend hadn’t mentioned it to me, it would have completely escaped my attention.

Something had to be done, otherwise there would be no point in staying on Facebook.

“You can filter the updates,” Facebook assures us. Well, I ended up spending five hours this weekend, sorting through all my friends and lumping them into categories based on where I know them from: family, high school, university, online, current job, former job, etc.

Now, after all that work, I have a much more manageable stream of updates. Logging on once a day is enough to see what people have been up to in the past twenty-four hours.

I’m still tweaking the friend categories. There are some people who post a lot of extraneous stuff. One guy likes to post underwear ads. Sure, the models are cute, but there are really more pressing things I want to know about from my friends. There are other people like Jason who post a lot of interesting things, so I need to create a category to more easily sort out the underwear models from the BBC news reports. (Interestingly, I just realized that he’s the second Xangan I subscribed to…)

That’s my little Facebook rant. Thanks for your attention…