Looking back at Thailand, and upcoming PhotoBlogs

I've been to Thailand a total of 4 times so far in my life, and each time I go its harder to leave. Its one of my favorite places in the world for its culture, cuisine, art, natural beauty, and more than anything, its population of incredibly warm, spiritual, and gentle people. All around its a completely incredible and intoxicating (and by that I don't mean its a great place to get intoxicated . . . necessarily) place to be.

I visited Thailand more recently just this past January with my good bud Merwan, and before that for most of July of 2008. I figured it was about time to catch up with a photoblog of sorts of those two trips.

I'm thinking I'm going to try to make this a regular thing for the next couple weeks. That is, try to catch up on a lot of my travels of the past 2+ years with these photoblogs.

What do I mean by a photoblog? Well, basically I just mean a slideshow with a lot of accompanying words to tell stories of my travels. So without further ado, here it is: highlights from my last two trips to Thailand (July '08 and Jan '09) with emphasis in explorations of the art and street fashion world of Bangkok.


***To view the photoblog as I intend it pretty please do two things:

1. Enlarge the slideshow to get the full screen effect: it makes the experience so much better. Just click the little square in the lower right hand corner of the slideshow with the four little white arrows that looks like this:
Then, when the screen expands to fill your screeen,

2. Click on "Show Info" to bring up the text for the pictures: You'll have to first actually click the screen to get the top toolbar to show up, where you'll find this in the upper right-hand corner:
Click it, and . . .

3. Enjoy the show.

Oh, and special thanks to Tara Lal for the impetus behind finally putting this up. :)



Oh, and sorry I didn't quite finish this blog perfectly, but I gotta run to Merle Fest!

Shit is crazy.

I'm just saying.

(Photo by Clark Little.)

Fellow Ex-Pat Dispath

How's this: I live in Hawaii for 7 years, one of my best friends is an Ozzy web-designer/insane body-boarding pipe-charger named Joe (witness to the right), the guy even ends up taking over my house in Hawaii when I leave, I keep in touch with him regularly, I visit him and hang out with him on my way back through Hawaii on my way to India back in July, we talk online all the time, then, he comes to India for over a month on his own accord, something about wanting to see India, work at an orphanage, check out the IT scene, we plan to meet up in Mumbai or Ahmednagar so I can show him Meher Baba's place, and so when he gets here . . . . . .

we NEVER meet!

How's that for crap! Nevertheless, he has an agenda and I'm busy with my own work, finishing up my internship at Chemould Prescott Road Art Gallery, and working on finding more wonderful goods to bring back to America for my company. So its understandable, but highly strange to actually be chatting to him online at this very moment as we sit in the same foreign (or in my case adopted) country and realizing that we won't be meeting after all.

However, there is a silver lining to this cloud. He has just informed me that he's grown a 'stache, and at this very moment he is shooting a pic of it for me. And in India, growing a 'stache is not mod, its not ironic, its not something you wear to the club.

Its something you raise your kids with,

its something that pays the bills,

its the big stick you carry when you speak softly,

its a well trimmed piece of no-joke.


Joe just sent me a little chat that was all time classic India white guy experience that I must share:


Me, after hearing that Joe had grown a 'stache and had taken to wearing a polyester shirt tucked into tight fitting bell-bottom jeans (the ubiquitous Indian male uniform): so, do you have a pen in your pocket at all times?

Joe: actually, yes, but just by chance
people still stop you all over the place
trip out cause they're meeting a white guy

i met these gangsters in goa
they called themselves the 'Mexico Boys'
invited me to drink with them in a park
showed me their leader
and their candidate for governemnt

'he will look after all the poor people"

and legalize marijuana and jiggy jiggy

Me: oh my god, that is amazing

they called it jiggy jig, thats funny

Joe: then they took me to a backyard cricket match

200-300 kids
playing cricket with a tennis ball
and back yard rules
they said I was a baseball star
and made me give a speach on the loudspeaker
and toss a coin to start the match
the politician was the chief guest
and i was the head guest

joe engel, baseball star from america (Joe is Australian)
haha
all the kids wanted to shake my hand

Me: !!!!!!!! LOL!!!!!

send me a pic of you with mustache now

Joe: classic india huh

Me: i'm putting your story on my blog

So in honor of my buddy Joe, and with his help, I post the following here-for-to unreleased pictures: brothers in this land of the ever-present 'stache. *WOAH! Just received Joe's 'stache pic live. Tell me this is not the nordic Don Juan. I've never seen the man's hair this long or 'stache period. Kudos to you my friend.




May we meet in the future in this holy land my dear brother, 'stache's a-blazing. Amen.

Colaba Baba

Here stands the "Green Thandai," which translated in Hindi literally means "Green Chilled."
And here I sit quite satisfied.

I'm at Woodside Cafe, one of my favorite haunts of Colaba for an after work drink when I'm feeling frivilous. Woodside Cafe is a beautiful place, an old colonial building refurbished to perfection. It has a wonderful atmosphere, plays a pretty endearing regular mix of 90's pop-grunge and or soul-grunge like Counting Crows, etc, which isn't too bad. Its got very warm real wood decor offset with refreshingly freezing A/C which needs only a short dip outside into the boiling mud-flat wonderland of stank humidity that is Mumbai to be apprecaited anew should it get to cold for ones taste.
I enjoy coming here from time to time to get an overpriced cocktail or Corona (at 245 rupees (about $5) not bad actually for a high class bar).
Tonight was a thrilling sucess of mouthy delights however as I began by deciding to give the Cocktail of the Day a try, again, the "Green Thanda."

Let me just try to do this thing justice. Its kind of like a mix between a grasshopper

. . . (by the way, if you've never . . . had a grasshopper at the Golden Nugget or Binions Casino late at night on Freemont Street in old Downtown Vegas surrounded by your closest mates and authentic memorbilia like cow horns hung by Mr. Binion himself, at a 2-deck blackjack table gambling at 17 years old on a fake ID lovingly made by your brother, wearing a stunning dark chocolate brown $500 leather jacket made of leather you didn't know could be so soft, sold to you in downtown Sydney Australia, by a gorgeous older woman in a white form-fitting power suite, charcoal black hair in a clipped bob, and a thick russian accent, and your on a serious hot streak with a stack of cash sitting in front of you like you've never seen, getting dealt by some veteran guy that's seen it all but is rooting you on as the pit boss feeds you coupons to the all-day pancake house where you'll soon relish your winnings over steak and eggs with your mates as you laugh and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, and they'll make up stories about how your known strictly as "boss," to the curious onlookers . . . well, you haven't lived) . . .

and a mojito and a mint julip tea in all the best possible ways. F-ing incredible.
I don't claim to be some kind of cocktail conosiour, not that I don't appreciate the complexities of fine beverage,

Anyway, in other news things are going well in Mumbai.
Yesterday was the anniversary of Shivaji Maharaj's birthday. As I was taking a cab home late at night the night before his birthday I came across this, just another beautiful and ridiculously ornate temporary celebratory construction in Mumbai. How I love them. Isn't it amazing?
By the way, for those of you who don't know, Shivaji was the 16th century guerilla genius King of the Marathis who essentially single-handedly won vast portions of India back from the Moguls and made India what it is today, instead of an Islamic nation with a huge population of repressed Hindus. Those of you interested in Meher Baba out there, should really check this out by the way.
Well, more coming soon. Batteries dead. Much love from India.