The New York Times ran an article about bento boxes, the Japanese style lunches in a box that seem to be gaining popularity with families in America. Talk about having fun with your food!
If ever there was someone who would appreciate his food being prepared this way, it is Tawn. Maybe that’s how I should start preparing his dinner?
It has been a strange week full of lots of errands and events. A friend was in town and his visit came to an unexpectedly abrupt end, so we had to get involved and help sort that out. A trip to the old city to buy coffee beans from Mari Green Coffee early Sunday morning ended up with our car having a Denver boot put on it, requiring a trip to the local police station to pay a 200 baht fine. Another friend was having troubles in his love life, the type that are so typical between people of different cultures but, despite being typical, are still heart-wrenching. It has just been one of those weeks.
At my recommendation, a guest stayed at the Windsor Suites Hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 20. This hotel is owned by a friend’s family, so I’m biased in my recommendation, but I find it to be a clean, comfortable, reasonably-priced hotel that is in a very convenient location. Several of my visitors have stayed there and all have been pleased. This guest’s room had a sweeping view which I stitched together from three pictures, below. I know the stitching job is terrible – I didn’t use any fancy software for it- but the view itself was fantastic.
On the weekend, while running our errands, we were sitting in some traffic in Yaowarat (Chinatown) and, glancing in the side mirror, I spotted this man driving a motorcycle with an incongruous choice of stickers decorating it. Playboy and Ghostbusters?
Needing a quiet evening at home after several nights dining out, I prepared a caprese panzanella salad – the Italian style tomato, fresh mozzarella and bread salad – using a recipe from Joanne’s Week of Menus blog and a dish of Italian sausage served with lentils with fennel and asparagus.
Both were very tasty and I thankfully have leftovers for lunch today!
You’ve seen them, those tattoos that people sport featuring words or characters in a language other than one in which they are fluent. You may even have one yourself. I’m telling you, though, that’s a mighty dangerous path to tread.
Leaving aside questions of cultural appropriation and exoticization (and there is some potentially rich academic soil to till about this issue), what I’m talking about is the plain and simple, practical reason to not get a tattoo in a language you don’t read: It may end up being incorrect.
Now, I know someone to whom this happened. Because of that, I realize that bright, intelligent, thoughtful people can make that mistake. And because I know that readers of this blog are equally bright, intelligent and thoughtful, I’m providing you this warning: Don’t get a tattoo in a language you don’t read!
Don’t believe me? Let’s consider this object lesson:
My friend Jack is a Thai who lives in the American midwest. Note that this is not a picture of Jack’s back. While he was on holiday, Jack spotted a young caucasian man with this tattoo and curious, asked him about it.
It seems that the young man, a native of Springfield, Missouri, was a basketball player and he went on some program to Thailand where he played ball with Thai high schoolers and spoke to them about basketball and life in the U.S. Returning to Springfield, the young man decided to get a tattoo, using Thai script.
So far, so good. Glad to hear that Thailand made such a positive impression on him that he wanted to immortalize the Thai language on his skin.
The problem is two-fold:
First, there are two spelling mistakes. The words ไม and อยาง are both missing accent marks They should be ไม่ and อย่าง. As a tonal language, the use (or absence) of a tone mark can often alter the meaning of Thai words. In this case, the misspelling does not change the meaning but simply makes the words incorrectly spelled.
Second, the phrase doesn’t say what he intends it to say. Based on the cross, I guessed he wanted the Christian phrase, “You will never walk alone.” When I asked Jack, he confirmed that this was the young man’s understanding of how the tattoo read. Jack, being Thai and characteristically too polite to embarrass someone, didn’t tell him that the tattoo says something else entirely.
The phrase reads khun ja mai duhn piang yang diaw, which means “You will never just only walk” – in other words, you will walk while doing something else at the same time, perhaps chewing gum or humming or whistling.
No word on how the young man managed to get this incorrect translation. My guess is he thought it would be cool and asked someone he met in Thailand – someone who doesn’t understand English well enough – to write the phrase in Thai. Given what I’ve learned while living here, I can see how “alone” could have easily been misunderstood as “only just”.
So let this be fair warning to you, your friends or family members. If you or someone you love is planning on getting a tattoo, stick with a language you can read so you are 100% certain that the tattoo says what you think it says.
That’s today public service message. Cheers.
“Shh!!” reads some graffiti located on a rooftop adjacent to the Siam BTS Skytrain station, the interchange station between the two Skytrain lines and home to blaring TV advertisements all day long. Of course, in this city of seven or eight million, there are few places where noise isn’t a problem. Even at many of the temples, tape recordings of sermons or Buddhist songs play throughout the day. If a denizen of the Big Mango was ever left alone with the silence of his or her own thoughts, they might freak out!
Above, the view from the station platform to the adjacent building. This is without using much zoom, so you have some idea of how close the building is to the platform and tracks. It is a business, though, not a residence, so you wouldn’t expect the noise to be as much of a concern.
You know how I always say that I don’t leave home without my camera. Well, yesterday I did leave home twice without my camera, both times missing opportunities to photograph blog-worthy things. The first was when my friend Paul and I went out for lunch at a tonkatsu restaurant on Sukhumvit Soi 39. The building maintenance people were caulking a seam in the car park. Unable to reach it, one worker balanced on the shoulders of the other while applying the caulk, a scene straight out of Cirque du Soleil.
Thankfully, Tawn had his Blackberry with him and was able to take a picture of the second blog-worthy thing.
We attended the opening night of the 11th Bangkok International Festival of Music and Dance, featuring the Ekaterinburg Opera Theatre from Russia performing Verdi’s La Traviata. It is common for a member of the Royal Family to attend these events (although being an opera, there were already plenty of queens in the audience… Ha ha ha!) and sure enough, there was an unusually long delay as we waited for the guest of honor to arrive and the show to start. While we normally see one of the various princesses, we were honored to have Her Majesty the Queen present.
During the first intermission, we stepped outside for some air only to see Her Majesty’s yellow Rolls Royce limousine and the twelve identical cherry red Mercedes that drove her entourage to the Thailand Cultural Center. Very impressive rides!
Sorry – the video was locked on YouTube. I have fixed that and you can now view it.
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see something while I’m out and about that is worth shooting. That’s why I almost always have my camera in my bag. Case in point, after having lunch with Tawn the other day and walking up to the Ploenchit Skytrain station, I noticed some very bright lights on a rooftop. Sure enough, they were filming a scene from a movie.
Turned out to be some sort of an action movie, based on the appearance of the main actor probably an Indian film. Our hero in the dark suit was chasing across a rooftop, firing his revolver wildly at a thuggish looking Asian gangsta (go stereotypes!) holding a machine gun.
Quite a crowd gathered on the station platform and surround car parks to watch the action. It looks like the filming was being done by a remote camera that slid down some cables (pictured below) from an adjacent building while the actors ran across the room, producing a sweeping shot. A lot of work just for one shot that lasted a few seconds.
Over the next few days, they shot a few more scenes at the same location – or at least filmed different takes of the same scene – but nothing so dramatic as this. I shot some footage and edited it down to a 90-second bit for your viewing:
I hope you enjoy it.
Matt wrote once that he likes weekend blog entries so he has something to read, so I saved this for Sunday morning my time / Saturday evening in North America.
In late July I made an overnight trip to Quincy, Illinois to visit fellow Xangan Zakiah and her husband Mohamed. It was a wonderful trip and is fully recounted in this entry here. In the entry I promised video, of which I shot quite a bit. Delivering on that promise, here is an exclusive peek inside Dr. Zakiah’s kitchen!
Thanks again to Zakiah and Mohamed for their gracious hospitality and friendship.
As I wrote earlier in the week, the potato, bacon and leek ravioli I made for Sunday’s brunch turned into a big mess as the dough started to disintegrate, causing the ravioli to stick to everything, tear apart, and be entirely unsuitable for boiling.
After the guests went home, fed with the other dishes I had prepared and some phone-ordered pizza, I went ahead and boiled the ravioli in a small amount of water, letting them break apart and forming a stew. The potato and disintegrating pasta contributed a lot of starch to the mixture, which began to thicken, eventually reaching a macaroni-and-cheese-like consistency.
After letting the mixture cool, I put it in a casserole dish, sprinkled it with cheese, and baked it. The result was actually very pleasant!
It was a little heavy, but combined with some salad (and the leftover bruschetta topping) it turned out to be a really nice dinner. How does the saying go? Failure is the mother of invention? Something like that…
No sooner had I written about Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World, than a friend shares with me an email he received, slandering President Obama and miscasting the book as some radical, decline of America tome. Zeesh. Anyone taking the time to read even just the first paragraph of the back cover of the book (let alone actually reading the book itself), would quickly understand that the premise of it isn’t about the decline of America, but rather “the rise of the rest” and how America should respond. If anything, it is a must-read for the more hawkish types.
Really! What does it take for Americans to start plugging in their brains and thinking independently?
Finally, things have settled down enough that I’ve started to go through the video I shot during my three-week trip to the United States. Many things to share – but of course it takes time to edit all them! One thing that I was able to pull together fairly quickly was this video.
After dinner at my nieces’ house (ages 3 and 6) and before dinner, there is time to read books… assuming nobody has lost their book privileges because of misbehavior! One night, my sister and brother-in-law took an evening out so I was looking after the girls. “Instead of books, can we perform a show?” asked Emily, the older niece.
Well, the “show” was them dancing and singing (kind of) to music from the movie Mamma Mia, the new “it” album of the moment in their house. Their parents’ bedroom has a sitting area that is set off from the main bedroom in a way that makes the wide arch between the two look a little like a proscenium.
Sadly, they didn’t know all the words so it was mostly a matter of dancing and bouncing around. But I though you might enjoy the first minute or so of it…
Lots more to share in the coming days and weeks, including exclusive footage from the Kitchen of Zakiah!
A fifth wheel is a type of coupling device used for towing campers, trailers and various types of recreational vehicles. More broadly, the term “fifth wheeler” refers to recreational vehicles. In the category of “bringing another vehicle with you”, I saw one of the stranger entries while walking down Soi Thong Lor 13 on my way home from the market last Friday:
What in the world is this guy doing and why? I have one particular answer in mind, but I want to see what you think the answer might be.
christao408 