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Bangkok 2008

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Last Saturday (your Friday) I flew to Bangkok…carrying on a nice conversation with a Malaysian man sitting next to me. He says Thaksin did help the rural farmers…but the system takes time to change. And he says Thaksin began to feel like he owned the country…like Suharto in Indonesia. Thaksin’s web site says he plans to return to Thailand in two days. Will be interesting to see if there is a reaction from the Bangkok educated elites who hate him for his corrupt business dealings.

The weather is warm here but not uncomfortably so…yet.

I stayed the first night at the new Hi Sukhumvit hostel on Sukhumvit soi 38 where I had stayed before. But this time the single rooms were full. The mixed dorm I was put in was miserable…in…out…in…out…zippers unzipped…zippers zipped…light on…lights out…in…out…door slams…guys snoring…guy listening to music…lights on…door slams…and plastic bags should be outlawed after 10pm! Finally I hear slurp slurp and realize that the one other girl had crawled into bed with one of the guys. That did it. I went to the roof lounge to sleep. But woke up with little red spots all over my legs and arms…accosted by what I don’t know.

The next morning a Canadian guy took me around the corner to the Rex Hotel…an old Bangkok landmark. I get Fox and BBC on satellite TV. Today I explored the neighborhood and found the American Women’s Club, an expat group of women, down a sub soy off Suk 38.

Tonight I am in the Bourbon St. Bar and Restaurant owned by an American near Sukhumvit 22 using their free WiFi and listening to the NY Philharmonic playing in North Korea on the TV. A couple of older overweight French guys are spell-bound.

Tomorrow I go to Bumrungrad Hospital to make some appointments and my first dental appointment is tuesday. My body is beginning to feel like it is residing in Thailand and not China.

Posted in Bangkok, Hotels,Hostels & Guesthouses, Thailand | No Comments »

“Taxation Without Representation”

Friday, November 4th, 2005

Taking a fast sleek train, we are visiting our country’s capitol city for a few days. “Taxation Without Representation” is written at the bottom of D.C. license plates here in the District of Columbia. Don’t know why DC’s fair citizens don’t have any representation in Congress, but we nevertheless enjoy their city.

The weather has been fantastic…sunny, clear and brisk. The trees have become a palette of fall colors. We are staying in a cute little Victorian bed and breakfast called Kalorama Guest House on Mintwood Place NW, (it’s on the web) around the corner from a slew of coffee shops (free internet at Tryst during the week) and ethnic restaurants full of thirty-somethings carrying computer bags and wearing official appearing ID tags. One overheard conversation: “…the working title of my book is The China Wars of 1871…” We think there are a lot of very highly educated people in this city but aren’t sure this is a good thing considering some of the policies coming out of this place.

But alas, our visit will be short. Tomorrow the Red Line of the clean plush subway train will take us from our neighborhood directly to Union Train Station…the most elegant we have seen anywhere in the world except maybe Victoria Station in Bombay..where we will catch our train back to Penn Station in Manhattan.

The gigantic government office buildings remind Bob and I of the utilitarian Nazi-built grey concrete buildings in the eastern sector of Berlin-what used to be East Germany. It occurs to me that at least our tax money hasn’t been spent on hegemonic architecture. But at least a few or more thousand people have jobs in this gigantic bureaucracy.

I spent two days at the National Archives digging up info on my great grandfather who spent 14 months in Confederate prisons, including Andersonville, while Bob roamed the city. We make fun of all the others walking around with cell phones glued to their ears but it’s a darn good thing we have them (cell phones and ears) or we’d still be looking for each other.

Revisionist history: Eisenhower was the first president to send “armed advisors” to Viet Nam. The last time I was in Washington I didn’t notice that the date engraved on the wall of the Vietnam War Memorial…1955… was the date indicating the first death. But the pentagon has revised this date twice in the eighties, explained the park service guide…upping it to sometime in the 60’s. But once a date is engraved you just can’t mark it out with a black marker, the guide wryly remarked…

The city, full of irony, was laid out by, of all people, the same Frenchman who designed modern Paris. The J. Edgar Hoover building is exactly across the street from the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building-the two men, of course, hating each other during their tenures. Washington was in the south at the time of the civil war and a bridge crosses the Potomac River, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, to connect the District of Columbia with Arlington Cemetery on land that was given the city by Robert E. Lee.

The Smithsonian Museums, set up by a foreign benefactor, are free and not to be missed. And the residence of the Vice-President was set up on U.S. Naval grounds in order to save taxpayer money by not having to build another palatial home.

But Bob and I looked at each other with not a little bewilderment when the hop-on- hop-off bus driver/tour guide told us that Washington D.C. had more species of trees than any other city in the world. We wondered how they figured this out.

Posted in Hotels,Hostels & Guesthouses, Trains, Transportation, USA, Washington D.C. | Comments Off on “Taxation Without Representation”

Panda Research Base

Wednesday, January 1st, 2003
YUqE3FCf1Hd9CjfG1qqmt0-2006171132705308.gif An early morning one-hour ride on Sam's Guesthouse bus took us south of Chengdu to the Panda Research Base where China is trying to keep the Giant Pandas from disappearing into extinction. It ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in China, Excursions, Hotels,Hostels & Guesthouses, Sichuan, Touching Experiences, Videos | No Comments »

New Years in Chengdu

Tuesday, December 31st, 2002
YUqE3FCf1Hd9CjfG1qqmt0-2006171132705308.gif The sleeper train from Kunming to Chengdu takes about 18 hours and passes through more than 200 tunnels. It took 10 years to build the railroad...mostly by political prisoners...and looking through the train ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in China, Hotels,Hostels & Guesthouses, Sichuan, Trains | Comments Off on New Years in Chengdu

Lovely Lao

Wednesday, November 20th, 2002
ySKKSpbtXBjgyhP6z8LuC0-2006217035001655.gif My favorite country so far...the people are sweet but very natural and direct. Flew from Siem Reap Cambodia to Vientiane, the Capital of Lao. The "s" was added by the French so ... [Continue reading this entry]

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