Frequently when walking along the sois of Khrungthep, one encounters things that make you stop, scratch your head, and wonder, “What is that all about?”  One of Thailand’s more advanced efforts to discourage smoking among the populace is a restriction on the display of smoking advertising or paraphernalia, including cigarettes themselves.  Retailers can sell cigarettes, but the packages must not be visible to the public.  Instead, they are allowed to put up signs – specific ones designed by the government – that say “Cigarettes Sold Here” along with a health warning.

Walking down Sukhumvit Soi 12 on Sunday with Aaron, we passed a small convenience store that had just such a sign in the window.  Above it was a hand-lettered sign that read, “Frozen Green Peas Available Here.”

What does that mean?

Is it some sort of commentary on the owner’s feelings about the government’s paternalistic restrictions on cigarette advertising and display?  Or are frozen green peas a difficult commodity to find in that area and carrying frozen green peas lends this retailer a special competitive advantage?

Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, a holiday that is well-celebrated in Thailand for all its commercial potential.  Tawn explained that it is filtered through a uniquely Thai lens: since “status” and “face” are such important concepts in this hierarchical society, the purpose of Valentine’s Day especially for young women, is to receive large bouquets of flowers that they can then carry with them the whole day, showing off in a peacock’s tail feathers-like way that they have a very loving boyfriend.  A bit like having the biggest rock on your engagement ring, but more prominent and preliminary.

Since they have a farang teacher (me), the teachers at Bangkhonthiinai School thought it necessary to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  When Tod and I arrived, a table was set up and each of the children in turn queued up to present us with a rose, a flower, a gift, a card, a candy, etc.  It was very overwhelming, especially when you consider that these children do not have a lot of money.  We wound up with three over-stuffed vases, which Tawn make good use of once I returned home.

Above left: Students lining up with roses and other flowers; Right: The sum of all the flowers Tod and I were given

As part of the day’s lesson, Tod and I worked with the vocabulary surrounding Valentine’s Day – “flowers,” “chocolate,” “roses,” “cards,” etc. – and the sentence construction of “(I/you) give (a) _____ to (you/me)” and “(I/you) receive (a) ______ from (you/me).”

With the older students, we had them line up with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other, the lines meeting at the front of the room, and they practiced these sentences as they gave a rose, a vase of flowers, a card, or a chocolate to each other.

Left: One student gives flowers to another while Khruu Kobfa (“Teacher Kobfa” – Tod’s given name) looks on.

We also practiced the question and answer patterns: “Who would you send a Valentine’s Day card to? / I would send a Valentine’s Day card to _____.” and “What would you write in a Valentine’s Day card?  In a Valentine’s Day card, I would write, “_________.””

Afterwards, we practiced saying and writing the various greetings and endearments you would use for a Valentine’s greeting “Sweetheart” translates literally into Thai.  “Mon petit chou” does not.  Finally, we sat down to write Valentine’s card, using some cards that Ken had brought back from the United States.  (Note to Ken – I learned Tuesday that you can buy Valentine’s Day cards in bulk at MBK Shopping Center.  Who knew?)  The younger children had goofed around too long with their spelling test so only had about 30 minutes for cards.  The older children had about an hour.

It was fun as the children are very effusive and draw pictures and add stickers to decorate their cards.  Hopefully there are some happy mothers, fathers, siblings, friends and sweethearts out there.  When I asked the younger children if any of them had a “tii-rak” or “fan” (literally, a “one that I love” or a “boy/girl friend”) many enthusiastically said they did.  When I asked the older children, most of them blanched and made a face of disgust.

Left: The flowers after Tawn did his magic with them. 

Wednesday evening Tawn and I met up at the Esplanade and had Japanese food at Wasabi Restaurant and then watched a sneak preview of the new Drew Barrymore / Hugh Grant movie, “Music and Lyrics.”  It was witty and well-written except for the problem that the romance between the two characters just didn’t feel plausible.  But we enjoyed it nonetheless.

Interesting thing, though: In one scene of the movie a younger pop singer who has asked Hugh Grant’s aging 80’s pop star character to write a song for her, is performing a concert.  Her stage is done up in a vaguely “Asian” theme with a mishmash of Hindu and Buddhist iconography.  (The film actually makes a brief critique of western artists who appropriate symbols from eastern religions.)  There is a large Buddha statue in the background and Buddha imaged on the dancers’ shirts.  But – and this is what’s interesting about it – the film was censored and the Buddha images were digitally masked, much in the same way that certain parts of an adult movie might be masked with these large pixels.

Interesting because the mis-use of Buddhist iconography is prohibited by Thailand’s film review board, espcially since in this case the young pop star is prancing around in barely more than a bikini.  There was an incident back in 2004 when the Thai government demanded that Victoria’s Secret remove a photo showing a scantily-clad model in a swimsuit with an image of Buddha on it.

Contrast this with one of the previews for an upcoming Thai language comedy called “The Bodyguard 2” in which we see the main character shoot another character in the chest three times.  The scene shows the fake bullet wounds exploding in the man’s chest.  They do look a little obviously fake, but it is still quite graphic especially for young viewers.  That is okay, however, but we had best not show the Buddha statue onstage with a scantily-clad woman.

No judgement.  Each culture has its own values. 

(Worth noting, too, that smoking on movies and shows airing on Thai TV is similarly masked.) 

Concluding a busy weekend of movie-watching, house cleaning, house hunting, and spending time with a visitor from New York, by way of Hong Kong.

I met Aaron in early 2001, when I took a trip to New York with Stephanie to visit her friends Keith and Claude, as well as to meet up with her friend Monica who was visiting from Australia.  Aaron is one of Keith’s friends and on an afternoon when we all met at Danal for brunch, while everyone was chatting in Cantonese, Aaron was the only one who wasn’t conversing in Cantonese.  Not that I need to be catered to; I’m perfectly fine not understanding the conversation.  Still, it was a considerate gesture.  To top it off, he was also really interesting to talk with.

Some time later when Keith and Aaron visited San Francisco, I learned about Xanga from Aaron and about six months later, started this blog.  So he deserves credit as the man who started it all.

Thursday evening I picked Aaron up at Suvarnabhumi and then he, Tawn and I had dinner at the Joe Louis Puppet Theatre restaurant at the Lumpini Night Bazaar.  Frankly, the food was okay and a bit overpriced.  But the company was good.

On Friday, we went to Bangkhonthiinai to teach.  An extra class this week, arranged because Aaron wouldn’t be in town on Wednesday but really wanted to go to the school.  He proved to be a most excellent teacher and the children took to him quickly, perhaps a bit frustrated that he wouldn’t speak any Thai with them, though.  “Speak English,” he would say in response to their questions.

One of the major exercises was to practice constructing sentences using the words, “who,” “where,” “when,” “how,” and “what.”  It is interesting how some students picked up on this really quickly while some of the students couldn’t grasp the pattern of using the article “the” in front of the nouns.  “Where is the apple?  The apple is on the table.”  Thai doesn’t have articles.

Top left: Aaron and a fourth grader practice making questions with plastic fruits.  Top right: Students practice introducing themselves to Aaron.  Lower picture: After class, Aaron poses with his new posse.  Notice that one of the girls didn’t want her picture taken and hid behind Aaron despite efforts to get her to stand to one side or another.

Friday evening, Tawn and I went to watch “Dreamgirls” at the new Esplanade Cineplex.  The showtime was in one of their luxury theatres with tickets running a horrendously steep 500 baht each, compared to 140 for regular tickets.  The cinema, which normally would seat about 180, instead had 32 recliners arranged in pairs.  Each pair had a privacy wall around them so you couldn’t see any of the other pairs.  Recline was about 160 degrees and included a cushy blanket and pillow.

Even more over-the-top, when you arrived at the cinema you waited in a small lounge outside.  The waiter approached your chair on his knees and took your order: complimentary tea or coffee with cookies, as well as all the traditional movie snacks.  Our tea and cookies were delivered by a waiter who was again on his knees.  This is the way royalty is served in Thailand, literally.  Way over-the-top.

Anyhow, the movie was quite good.  Jennifer Hudson (on the far right in the picture to the right), playing the role of Effie, has a dynamic voice and really stole the show.  The production design was also very good.  We had seen the show in the Bay Area and were interested to see how well it translated to film.  Dreamgirls is the latest in a stream of movie musicals over the past few years, stretching back to “Evita” in 1996 and including films such as “Chicago,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Delovely,” “Phantom of the Opera,” and “Rent.”

I’ve always felt that film is a medium very well suited to musicals and am buoyed by the apparent revival of the movie musical.

Saturday evening we took in a second movie, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s brilliant “Babel,” written by Guillermo Arriaga with whom he also collaborated on 2003’s “21 Grams.”  The complex narrative is a web of four interconnected stories that center around the dueling themes of the power of familial love and the inability to communicate, between cultures, within families, and even with ourselves.

What works so effectively is that the four story lines are not told in a synchronous time line.  In an early scene we witness a telephone conversation between a maid and her employer, who is thousands of miles away in Morocco.  It is only near the end of the film that we witness that same conversation from the employer’s side. 

Realizing that most of you have seen this movie already, since Thailand is the last place on the planet to get films, I’ll say that I thought there were two masterful scenes in the film.  The first was the one at the end of the film (left) where Brad Pitt’s pit character calls from the hospital and speaks with his young son, trying to silence a relieved sob while he son tells him about the mundane affairs of elementary school. 

The second was the scene (right) in which Rinko Kikuchi’s deaf-mute teenage girl goes to a nightclub with her friends and a friend’s cousin on whom she has a crush.  A little stoned and a little drunk, she is at first infatuated and intoxicated with the moment and then crashes when she sees her friend making out with another guy.  All of her feelings of loneliness, isolation and being unloved come rushing over her.  Suddenly, the pulsing lights and motion, which had seemed so liberating, cause claustrophobia.

The most effective part of that scene is that the director alternates between having audio – when we see the scene from a third person’s perspective – and having a nearly-muted audio track when we see things from the girl’s perspective.  It is very powerful and Kikuchi’s acting is stellar.  Hopefully she wins the Academy Award for which she is nominated.

Sunday afternoon we met up with Aaron one final time for lunch at Crepes and Co on Sukhumvit 12.  Had a very nice visit and took this picture in the garden before heading home.  It was really nice to spend more time with Aaron and hopefully he will visit again soon.

After lunch we were in a bit of a rush to get home and meet up with Khun Yo, our real estate agent.  I’ll have to talk more about the process of house hunting in future posts, since the process is a bit different in Thailand. 

We saw four places today, one located on Sukhumvit 53 (one soi over from Thong Lor) that is really nice and reminds me a lot of the apartment I lived in on Eureka Street in San Francisco.  It is 70 square meters, 2 bedroom / 1 bath (although the second bedroom is pretty small), has nice light and a compact but efficient kitchen.  5.4 million baht is the asking price.  US$155,000.

A little more than we were hoping to spend.

Yesterday was cram day for the sixth graders at Bangkhonthiinai school.  Next Tuesday they have their National Test and so Tod, Ken, Khruu Somchai and I spent the entire day working with the ten sixth graders, reviewing sample test questions.  By the end of the day, the poor things were dazed and it was clear that the three boys don’t have much of a chance of scoring well.  The girls are in better shape, though.

In the morning I told Ajarn Yai that a friend is visiting from New York later in the week and would like to come down and teach, but wouldn’t be here next Wednesday.  Would she mind have another English class this week – an especially good offer since only the sixth graders received English instruction this week?  Of course, she was fine with that and said she’d like to have me come teach every day.

Over lunch, Ajarn Yai asked Tod why so many people knew about her school and Tod replied by “outing” this blog, explaining that I keep a website and that people around the world read about the school and see pictures of the event there.  This caused a bit of a stir – not in the way that it would in a litigious society like the United States, but rather in an “Oh, really? We’re famous?” sort of way.  Khruu Somchai wrote down the address and then fired up the one working computer and started the dial-up connection.

Slowly, slowly, slowly the first page loaded.

My mind raced as I tried to think of what content on this page would be deemed inappropriate for young children.  Nothing too bad.  A picture of Tawn, his mother, and I at the Italian restaurant, a little red-faced.  Some “huggy” type pictures.  If the students actually browse much of the website they’ll form a more well-rounded picture of me.

The real question, though, is how this will affect their behavior in the future.  Just like contestants on a reality TV show or subjects of a documentary film, can you ever really forget that you’re being recorded and be completely yourself?  I would assume that, children being children, they’ll continue to be themselves.  But maybe it won’t quite be the same again.

The first sign that things are changing: Ajarn Yai hiring a media consultant.

Speaking of documentaries, last night Tawn and I went to watch “Final Score,” a Thai documentary by Soraya Nakasuwan that is currently in mainstream release (even English subtitled at some cinemas) about a group of grade 12 boys in their final year of secondary school and the pressure they go through preparing for and finally taking the “A-Net” or “O-Net” tests. The major exams to access universities.   

While it wasn’t perfect, it was certainly a world-class documentary and had many particularly well-constructed scenes.  It was especially nice to see a film by a female Thai director, which is quite the rarity.  Having a female director made it even more interesting that the film focused exclusively on a group of four boys and provided almost no exposure to the story of similarly-aged women, even though one of the main characters, Per, breaks up with his girlfriend right before the tests, leading him to the edge of a breakdown.

The challenge with the documentary genre, of course, is that you can’t script out what happens and you may or may not end up with footage that charts the story you expected would be told.  In this case the director encountered a few hiccups, but generally extracted very interesting stories and told them effectively.  I’d assume that the film will get some play overseas, at least in film festivals.

Above: Small statues of the Boddhisatva Quan Yin, arranged in neat little rows at Kek Lok Si Temple, Penang, Malaysia.

Seeing a quiet weekend with no visitors as our opportunity, Tawn and I slipped away to Penang, Malaysia for a few days.  Thanks to an Air Asia fly+hotel promotion, we were able to secure a really good price at the Cititel Hotel in downtown Georgetown.  Arriving with no expectations, no “to-do” list, and no agenda, it was a truly relaxing weekend.  And thanks to the mixture of cultures, we were able to try all sorts of good food!

While in Penang, we spent a lot of time with a couple of friends whom we have met in the past few months.  Much more relaxing to visit a city in the capable hands of locals.

Our flight down was on Air Asia, the major budget airline of southeast Asia.  Think Southwest in the US or Ryanair in Europe.  The interior of the airplane has advertising on the tray tables and the overhead bins.  This particular plane was interesting because it had advertising for a series of epic Thai historical dramas about King Narisuan by the same director of “Legend of Suriyothai.”  What’s interesting is that the advertising includes logos for several major sponsors of the film, companies such as 7-11, Siam Commercial Bank, and THAI Airways.  Since THAI and Air Asia are major competitors, the THAI Airways logo is conspicuously absent on the King Narisuan advertising aboard the Air Asia plane.

Our flight left early on Saturday morning.  It has been particularly foggy over the past few days and as the sun rose over Suvarnabhumi Airport we were treated to a very hazy sunrise.  No sign on our taxi out and take off of any of the pavement cracks that have been reported at the new airport, but the terminal still has no shortage of problems.  We did enjoy a pastry and latte at a cute little cafe that sits amidst the expensive duty free stores and looks like an old fashioned diner done up in modern lines and dark wood.  Below: On the tarmac in Penang.

When we arrived in Penang, Teh was waiting for us with his car and took us into town.  We had brunch at a hawker center, a brand new one that is apparently the largest hawker center in Penang.  Hawker centers are essentially food courts but the quality of food tends to be very high and because the facility is licensed by the government, there are inspections to ensure the cleanliness and hygiene of food prepared by the vendors.  We sampled a lot of different things including char kway tiaw, a local fried noodle dish; chicken and wild boar satay; fried turnip cake; and roast duck, to name just a few. 

Right: Teh and Tawn with a feast of local dishes at the hawker center.

There was no particular agenda to our day.  Instead, we just looked at some sights, spent some time at one of the local malls, and visited.  One area we spent a little time was Chinatown and the adjacent Little India.  This older section of Georgetown is full of colonial-era buildings, most only two or three storeys tall, and is very walkable.  The shop houses have some tremendous architectural detailing, much of which is in disrepair.  Some building owners, though, have done a good job of maintaining these details, which are very flattering.

Above: Tawn posing in front of two of the different brightly colored buildings.

Above: This building’s storefront and columns were composed of small tiles.  From a distance is appeared that the Chinese characters were painted on the tiles, but upon closer inspection the characters were actually tiles that had been carefully cut and inserted in the white tiles to create a brushstroke effect.  Talking with the owner, he told us that the tiles were installed more than fifty years ago.  Below right: Detail of the tile characters.  Below right: On another building, the characters are actually poured in as part of the concrete columns.

In the evening, we stopped by the famed Eastern and Oriental Hotel, above.  Originally built in 1884 by the same brothers who later opened the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the E&O was known as “The Premier Hotel East of Suez” and catered to notables such as Rudyard Kupling, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham, who featured the E&O is some of his stories.  After falling into disrepair in the 1990s, the E&O was remodeled and reopened in 2001 and is once again the beautiful anchor of Georgetown, nestled along the ocean at the eastern edge of town.

In addition to taking nighttime pictures in front of it, we came back for a lunchtime visit and had their famous tiffin lunch, a set lunch that features an elaborate buffet of appetizers and desserts along with a choice of three main courses.  The lobby in particular is beautiful with a large dome and a very nice melange of Asian antiques, Victorian wall treatments, and more contemporary furniture.

Andrew joined us for Sunday lunch at a cute traditional Chinese tea shop.  The food was really tasty, all small plates.  Best of all, we enjoyed a set of rose tea, served the traditional way in a special teapot with small cups that required constant refilling.  Right: Andrew poses with us in front of Lao Sher Tea House, located at 217 Burma Road.

In the afternoon we went to Kek Lok Si Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia.  Located on a hill overlooking Georgetown, the temple is 100 years old.  One of its main attractions is a giant statue of Quan Yin, the Boddhisatva of Compassion.  The bronze statue is 120 feet (35 meters) tall and they are in the process of erecting an octagonal room that will cover the statue, resting on enormous carved granite columns.

Above: Tawn standing in a moon gate at the Kek Lok Si Temple.  Below: hanging lanterns for the upcoming Chinese New Year’s festival.

As I woke the first morning in Penang, I looked up at the ceiling in our hotel room and noticed a small sticker on the ceiling – near the top of the left picture, below.  “What is that?” I thought.  It wasn’t until I looked closer that it occurred to me that it points in the director of Mecca, so that Muslim guests know which way to face when doing their prayers.

Back in Khrungthep, life returns to normal.  Thai language class this morning.  Work in the afternoon and evening.  Good news, though: Aaron will be arriving on Thursday.

This from the Associated Press:

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.

The implications of this are astounding.  We’re heading towards a massive number of baby boomers who will soon be retiring, but are not saving for the future.  A ridiculous number of people are buying houses with no down payment and/or buying houses that are beyond what they can afford.  People are buying more cars than they have drivers and more televisions than they have toilets.

Speaking from personal experience – I spent the first decade after graduating from university saddled by personal debt that increased for a lot longer than it should have before I finally learned my lesson – a person sleeps a lot better at night not having the nagging worry about debt or financial obligations that are beyond their ability to meet.

Where is the point where we wake up and realize that all of this consumption – especially consumption beyond our means – will not bring us any happiness or fulfillment?  Any satisfaction we feel at the purchase of a new toy, gadget, car or plasma screen TV is hollow and temporary, quickly giving way to yet another desire.

I hope more people open their eyes soon, close their pocketbooks, and learn to live within their means. 

“But what will we do without the extra car, tv, cusinart, etc?” we say.

How about taking a walk, reading a book, going to the library, visiting a retirement home and spending some time with someone who doesn’t have any family or loved ones, preparing food at a local homeless shelter, or tutoring disadvantaged children? 

How about saving your money for the future and investing your time in the present?

Yesterday I was the solo English teaching at Bangkhonthiinai – khon diaw as they say in Thai.  Tod was otherwise engaged, Ken was at home waiting for a plumber to come repair a leaky drain, and Markus was with Tam in Japan.  It reminded me of the “early days” of my teaching, when I was often the only person there.

One lesson I had to relearn yesterday is to tune out the background noise when working with the children.  It seems that a group of children that age are incapable of working quietly unless they are being specifically engaged by their teacher.  Sometimes I cannot work with the entire class at once and instead need to work with smaller groups or individuals.

Homework – gaanbaan – is a case in point.  It takes a minute or two to review each child’s homework with them, but without that time to check and correct pronunciation, spelling and penmanship, the homework is wasted effort.  But while I’m doing that, the rest of the children are talking, playing around, and constantly needing to be told haam kuey, khian dai!  (Stop chatting; write!)

During one exercise where a group of children was practicing what to say when someone tells you they have a test or a competition (“good luck!”), the classroom suddenly went from ebullient to silent.  I turned around: sure enough, Ajarn Yai was standing at the doorway.  It takes the principal to bring order to my classroom.

For awhile Tod and I had requested that another teacher be in the room to help maintain discipline.  That lasted for a few weeks but has faded away.  I don’t blame them; when I (or we) am teaching it creates an opportunity for the regular teachers to get other things done.  Still, the incessant din in the background makes it harder to the children to learn because they don’t hear or pay attention to what’s being said.

Thailand’s version of “No Child Left Behind” – George W. Bush’s education policy that mandates testing of U.S. students at various grade levels and teachers will tell you results in them simply “teaching to the test” instead of educating the children – is the Sixth Grade National Test.  The sixth graders at Bangkhonthiinai will take their test on February 13th and last week I was given a copy of the English language section and asked to review it with the students.

Next week, in fact, we’ll do a special cram session just for the sixth graders.  Reviewing the test as a native speaker, I find some of the questions a bit… awkward?  For example, in one question there is a cartoon showing a man who has just bumped into a woman.  The woman says, “Ow!”  The man’s response should be which of the following:

1. Excuse me!
2. Oh! I’m Sorry.
3. I’m very sad.
4. I feel bad.

The best answer is number 2, but I’d argue that number 1 is completely appropriate, too.  Maybe I’m just overanalyzing the test – I did that in elementary school, too – but I’m not sure it is measuring what’s really important.

Just as I had given up all hope that ruuduu naew (cold season) would continue and had resigned myself to the arrival of ruuduu ron (hot season), I’ve been pleasantly surprised at its brief reappearance.  Sunday morning temperatures were down to 65 F / 19 C and very breezy.  This is possibly the coldest I’ve seen here in Khrungthep.  And the forecast is for similar overnight lows for the next four or five days.

It was perfect riding weather and Sunday morning about 7:30 Markus and I set off to try urban cycling in the Big Mango another time.  Our last outing to the old city several months ago was beset by heavy traffic including a university graduation, a parade, and a marathon. 

Our 24 km circuit was not physically that difficult – all the streets were level and paved – but the mental alertness required when riding in an urban environment makes it much more challenging, I think, than riding in the countryside.

We headed up Asoke to the train tracks and then paralleled them (and the construction site of the new Airport Line inner-city terminal, pictured here) until we reached Thanon Si Ayutthaya, which we followed all the way to the Chitlada Palace Complex, noted on the map below.  This includes Chitlada Palace, where the King currently lives, as well as (across the street) Dusit Zoo, the Parliament Building, and the Throne Hall.  We were able to ride through some of that complex before heading to Khlong Phadung.

Geography Lesson

The older part of Khrungthep is a series of three islands, bordered on the west by the Chao Phraya River and on the east by three concentric, man-made khlongs (canals).  The smallest island, labeled “A” on the picture, is Rattanokosin Island.  It contains the Grand Palace (indicated by a marker), the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Sanam Luang parade grounds, and Silpakorn and Thammasat universities.  It was the original city founded by King Rama I in 1782.

The next island, labeled “B” on the picture, is Phra Nakhon Island.  It contains many additional government buildings, City Hall, and the Democracy Monument.  There is a fine self-guided audio tour you can take of this part of the old city.

The third island, labeled “C” on the picture and defined by Khlong Phadung (dotted line to the right of the island), is actually two different islands as Khlong Mahanak (which becomes Khlong Saen Saeb further east) bisects it near Golden Mount.  The north portion is Pom Prap Sattru Phai and contains the UN Conference Centre, the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, and several government ministries.  The south portion is Samphan Thawong and contains the Temple of the Golden Mount (the only hill in Khrungthep) and Chinatown, called Yawarot by locals.

Markus and I followed Khlong Phadung along the border of the third island.  The khlong changes names a few times but we ended up by Hua Lamphong Railway Station.  All along the khlong, the city is doing major reconstruction to improve the area and make it more attractive.  This includes installing new pedestrian bridges (pictured left, waiting to be lifted into place), repaving walkways along both banks of the khlong, installing new lamp posts, and planting more trees.  When it is completed, it will be a very nice walk, a smaller version of strolling along the Seine in Paris.  With better curry, too.

I’ve already written one self-guided walking tour (no audio recorded yet) for the Rama I / Phloenchit area including the Jim Thompson House.  I think the next one I write will be for a walk along Khlong Phadung.  It passes many interesting sights including a variety of architectural styles and types of markets.  Future visitors stay tuned for more developments.

Tawn and I have taken some concrete steps towards finding a condominium to purchase.  Yesterday we met for the first time with an agent and went to view condos at four different locations.  Unlike in the United States, you don’t work exclusively with one agent because there are not universal listings.  Any given agent will only be aware of a limited number of available properties.  In this case our agent works for Plus Properties, a developer of medium-sized projects usually aimed at the mid-market.  He also handles some properties that aren’t developed by Plus, and he seems very willing to work with us to look at a variety of places.

We’ve been frank that we don’t expect to purchase anything in the next three months.  We’ve also been firm about our price range: 4-5 million baht.

The challenge, I think, is that what we’re looking for needs to serve two purposes.  Our strategy is, in the short term (3-5 years) for the condo to be the place we live.  After that we anticipate buying another place, possibly an actual house or a larger condominium or maybe we’ll be living with Tawn’s parents by then – who knows? – and using this first condo as a rental property.  So it needs to be sufficiently large to meet our living needs now, but also has to have features that would make it appealing for high-end renters (read: expats) in the future.  Unfortunately, those features such as a swimming pool, fitness center, etc. are not necessarily important to us personally yet they help drive up the price.

Two places we saw yesterday were in the Phra Khanong area (Sukhumvit 67-69), which is an appealing loation, just one stop from the end of the Sukhumvit Skytrain line.  The first, at Plus Sukhumvit, is a mid-rise building (17 stories) only 3-4 minutes walk from the Skytrain.  The 2 bedroom, 2 bath is a little small at 60 square meters (multiple by 10 for square feet) and the kitchen would be frustratingly small.  But the facilities are very nice and the location is super-convenient for a renter.

The second place, Plus 67, is on the north side of Sukhumvit and is a little deeper in the soi, about a 6 minute walk to the station.  The 2 bed / 2 bath condo there is larger, 73 square meters, and the kitchen is a little more workable.  But the facilities, while okay, aren’t that special.  The slightly longer walk would be a drawback in renting, although not terrible.  Both locations would require some remodeling work to replace cheap laminate floors and improve the kitchens.

We’ll continue to look, especially along the Skytrain and subway lines, and see what else we can get for our money.  With potential political and economic instability here, I’m not in a great rush to buy, but we’ll see how that plays out.

My new responsibility is home nurse, taking care of Tawn over the past twenty-four hours as he’s been recovering from a bout of the stomach flu.  I don’t know if it was something he ate or just a bug he acquired somewhere in the course of his day, but he was finally able to eat some plain congee last night and keep it down, so he must be heading towards health.

As a result, we had to cancel dinner plans last night with a friend from San Francisco who is now working in Jakarta.  He and his partner own a condo here in Khrungthep so no doubt there will be another opportunity to visit.  There’s also dinner plans this evening to cook with Tawn’s friend Ja at her cooking school.  Hard to believe it has been six months since we last did that.

After my Thai tutoring yesterday, an intense two hours learning about the Thai educational system – lots of technical vocabulary – Ken and Markus met me at Bitter Brown, the coffee shop / bistro where I do my lessons, for lunch.  I decided to invite them to meet me there so they could meet my teacher, Khruu Kitiya.  Ken is now living here and wants to start studying, and Markus studies intermittently but his tutor charges half again what Khun Kitiya charges.  So hopefully they make some connection.

Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to planning and urban development issues here in the Big Mango.  Urban planning is a field I briefly considered entering, and I took some prerequisite sociology courses at University of California, Riverside, during the six months I studied there.  It build nicely off my experience doing architectural drafting during high school, which ended up being an area of emphasis.  Ultimately, I won’t go back at this point and fulfill the educational requirements to work in the field, but it remains an area of interest.

On my street alone, the seven-minute walk from the apartment to the corner of Sukhumvit Road, there is a ferocious amount of building and renovation activity.

For example, across from the Siam Society there is a project (I think a condominium but maybe a hotel?  You can never tell the way they market buildings these days) called Millennium Sukhumvit.  I posted this picture of the construction site in November 2005, shortly after I moved here.

They were still building the foundation and under-structure, which has to stretch down quite far to reach more stable soil as the entire Khrungthep area is a massive flood-plain.  Below is a picture from Thursday of this week, showing the project in its current state (with the green shroud):

Just up the street from the Millennium Sukhumvit, on the opposite site, are a pair of older office buildings.  One was occupied as a branch of Thai Military Bank until just a few months ago and is about eight stories tall.  The other is about twelve stories and has been unoccupied since I moved here, but  its car park in the back serves as overflow parking for the Siam Society (located next door) when they have events.  Between the two in the front part of the property is a small one-story hawker center where I sometimes eat lunch – the yellow wall in the photo below is the hawker center.  The Thai Military Bank building has the narrow windows behind it.

I’ve noticed over the past week or so that workers have been gutting both buildings.  Everything from insulation to HVAC vents (probably no heating, just VAC) to desks have been removed into dumpsters.  Yesterday they started the process of breaking up the sidewalks and driveways surrounding the buildings, which leads me to believe that a full-scale demolition will occur soon. 

How would they do that, use explosives to implode the buildings?  Maybe the other buildings are too close, though.

On the corner of Asoke and Sukhumvit, right next to the Skytrain and subway stations, on what must be one of the most valuable corners in the city, is a new construction site.  I think the entrance is technically one block over on Sukhumvit Soi 23, but it will front the main intersection.  No signs indicating whether this is office space, condos, a hotel, retail, or a combination of things.  It would be a good location for a mixed-use building although the footprint is a little small.  What is interesting is how the property is key-shaped, the developers apparently not being able to buy the smaller abandoned shop houses to the right of the construction site.  The entrance to the MRTA (subway) is on the far left of the picture.

Interestingly, there is a billboard for The River, a high-end 70-story condominium complex to be build across the river from the Shangri-La Hotel.  To put it in context, the Shangri-La and surrounding hotels are maybe 25-30 stories tall, if that.  The State Tower (with the golden dome and outdoor bar and restaurant), which is the tallest building nearby and the second-tallest in the city, is only 68 stories.  Baiyoke II Tower is 81 but is further away.  Subsequent to its approval, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority has capped future riverside construction at eight stories.  That’s right, eight.  We’ve seen one project so far that makes it look like they will enforce that cap.

In my neighborhood there’s also been a lot of properties that have been recently renovated and cleaned up.  This picture is on the corner of Asoke and Sukhumvit 21/1 (i.e. the first sub-soi off Asoke), location of the dueling 7-11’s.  (One on the right hand side of the picture, the other directly across the street.)

This building, which used to be the Asoke Art Gallery and seems physically connected to the Phra-Samit Tower (behind it), has been ugly from day one.  Dirty exterior concrete, broken sidewalk area around it, etc.  They’ve been doing interior work to transform it into something and the inside is looking nice.  This week they started painting and updating the exterior.  Sadly, no amount of work will remove the hideous web of cable and telephone wires that are tangled in front of it, so this building is destined to always be ugly. 

Of course, we recently had the recent renovation of the Asoke Bazaar building on Sukhumvit 21/1.  I haven’t been in to see what is actually being sold there but the building has added some color to the neighborhood. 

Unfortunately the building owners put someone on the street corner most of the mid-day with a megaphone to bark announcements at passers-by about the grand bargains to be had at Asoke Bazaar.  Noise pollution in a city that already has a plentiful supply of it.

Bangkhonthiinai is located in Samut Songkhram, the smallest province in the Kingdom of Thailand and, befitting its gulf-side location, one of the largest producers of sea salt.  Near the highway are an endless field of shallow pools, filled with seawater from nearby irrigation canals by the use of a rudimentary but age-old system of windmill-powered “buckets on a chain.”  When the pools sit empty during rainy season they are just shallow fields, but during the rest of the year they become a thousand mirrors, reflecting the hazy pink sunrises and the brownish-blue late afternoons as I go to and return from the province.

At least twice a year the salt is harvested, a manual process with long handled scoops that results in these orderly lines of small salt pyramids that are visually very appealing.  The salt is then washed and processes and while most of it is shipped off for sale elsewhere, the highway is dotted by small stands selling bags of locally produced sea salt in every size from a few grams to fifty kilos.

A comprehensive evaluation was the order of the day on Wednesday.  Tod and I had created a seven-part process for measuring students’ comprehension of English:

• Dictation and spelling of ten words
• Identifying the correctly spelled word out of three, printed next to a picture of the word
• Viewing pictures and correctly naming the item
• Reading flash cards with words written on them
• Seeing a set of pictures and identifying the correct picture when that word is called out
• Making sentences about pictures in a small booklet of photographs

We also evaluated pronunciation as well as confidence, behavior, and participation.  Some interesting conclusions we’ve drawn:

We have spent a lot of time focusing on vocabulary acquisition, to the detriment of sentence construction.  There were many cases where students could identify elements of a photograph but lacked the verbs and prepositions to tie them together.  Thus, we had “dog” and “man” and, in Thai, “sleeps on.”  But we couldn’t put that together in English.  I think that each week we need to practice making sentences about a photograph or scenario, as well as practicing vocabulary.

The other thing that everyone, even the otherwise high performing sixth graders, had trouble with was the spelling.  So we’re going to institute spelling quizzes every week.  Spelling English is a bear, I realize, but once you know how sounds are constructed it makes it easier to read unfamiliar words.

All in all, the tests were well-received.  No anxiety, little whining.  The way we did the testing, since it involved a lot of one-on-one work, meant that the students had a pretty relaxing day.  Several did origami and one student made a large paper lotus that was surprisingly intricate.  I think he has a crush on his teacher!

After school a group of students were playing a game that was similar to jump rope except they used a long elastic band stretched between two students and a third jumped into and out of it.  If you looked really close (if the picture resolution was that high!) you would see that the elastic band is actually a chain of several hundred rubber bands carefully put together.  How laborious!

Construction of another condominium is commencing in our neighborhood, two blocks over on soi 23.  There are currently five or six projects I can see from our balcony.  The specific area for this project is directly in the center of the picture, with a blue tarp on a small building that is being demolished to make way for the condo.  The small green fences on either side of the condemned building mark the periphery of the construction site.

As this neighborhood sits right at the crossroads of two rail transit lines, both of which will be expanded soon, and is just one subway stop from what will become the in-town terminal for the airport express train, I’m very supportive of the idea of in-fill growth.  Increased density of housing will make much better use of land and promote the use of transit.

The problem is, the projects being built here are upper mid range and higher.  If the in-fill is going to help reduce overall traffic, there needs to be housing built here for the middle and lower-middle range (as well as the low-end but those areas are actually well-established in Khlong Toei).  Without it, the spread of middle and lower-middle range suburban style housing estates will flourish on the outskirts of Khrungthep, and with them an army of citizens and their fleet of cars that have no good transit options and opt to drive in to work every day.

Speaking with my sister this morning (Sunday evening Kansas City time) she was telling me how they received about six inches of snow the previous night so had taken my four-year old niece Emily out to make a snow man during the day.  While on the phone with my sister, there was suddenly a long silence and then I heard the door open and she shouted, “Hey!  Stop that!”

Never having heard her shout like that, I feared that perhaps my niece was being particularly naughty.

As it turned out, while she was sitting in the living room talking to me on the phone, a group of teenagers pulled up in a car, ran out and slaughtered the snow man in their front yard.  All this while my niece was watching.  Imagine the trauma and scarring!

So I spoke with her a few minutes later and she was recounting how her snow man, named Frosty, had been made with a carrot nose and coal eyes.  Then she told me that some boys had “bashed” Frosty and next time she would build the snow man next to the house, behind a wall.  Good planning.

I’m shocked, though, with such callous vandalism.  What does that forbode for when they become older?  Thievery?  Knocking over old ladies in their walkers?  Child abuse?  It isn’t a good sign.

Note: the photo is for representative purposes, only.