Tokyo encounters (4)

with the present...............

Efficiency - Communication is everything

Speed & punctuality - The Shinkansen ("Bullet train")

Practicality - Tokyo love hotel

July, Aug 2009 Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo encounters (3)

.....with the past




The Memorial Park, Hiroshima. The park was built in commemoration of the
first nuclear bomb ever used, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 by the USA in the final days of World War II.

Hiroshima being rebuilt. The pictures show the city in various stages over the decades.

Nowadays, the city makes a pleasant, peaceful, modern and, most of all, friendly and welcoming impression.

This monument shrine features a flame (left of the centre) that burns since it was erected, and will only be extinguished when all nuclear arms will have disappeared from Earth.

I'm afraid this might take a while.....

Tokyo encounters (2)

.........with nature










Saturday, July 25th 2009 Rikugien Garden, Tokyo





This garden is a typical "kai-yu" ("walk-around") style garden. The thirty and sixty minute walking courses will take you round the pond, up Mount Fujishiro which is a miniature mountain, past Garyuseki Rock which represents a dragon, and past Horai-jima island which is shaped like a turtle. The garden dates back to 1695; it took 7 years to build and throughout history it has been described in many Japanese "waka" (31 syllable) poems.
















Jeans meet kimono....




"......believe me, I'm going to be a sumo wrestler....."

Tokyo encounters (1)

....with art

Ai Weiwei, contemporary, controversial artist and architectural designer exhibits at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills, on the 51st floor.

Self-portrait. Ai Weiwei drops an ancient and precious vase without any apparent emotion,
to demonstrate a different view on values.

Born in Beijing in 1957, his father was Chinese poet Ai Qing, who was denounced during the Cultural Revolution and sent off to a labor camp with his wife, Gao Ying.

Ai Weiwei is married to artist Lu Qing.
From 1981 to 1993, Ai Weiwei lived in the United States, before returning to China.

The exhibition runs till the end of August in Roppongi Hills.

Hotel rating - Thailand

Rating from 1 (ought to be demolished) to 10 (excellent)

The Methavalai, Cha-am

Location - logistics: 6
Location - environment: 9
Hotel lay out: 7
Rooms - layout: 6
Rooms - soundproof: 6
Service - staff attentiveness: 7
Service - extra's and amenities: 6
Restaurants: 6
Price: paid: € 50 per night (superior room)

The Novotel on Siam Square, Bangkok


Location - logistics: 8
Location - environment: 7
Hotel lay out: 8
Rooms - layout: 7
Rooms - soundproof: 7
Service - staff attentiveness: 7
Service - extra's and amenities: 8
Restaurants: not used

Price: paid € 74 per night, standard room, non-breakfast


The Montien, Bangkok

Location - logistics: 7
Location - environment: 5
Hotel lay out: 7
Rooms - layout: 7
Rooms - soundproof: 7
Service - staff attentiveness: 8
Service - extra's and amenities: 6
Restaurants: 8
Price paid: € 71 per night, breakfast included

The Sofitel, Hua Hin


Location - logistics: 8
Location - environment: 10
Hotel lay out: 9
Rooms - layout: 8
Rooms - soundproof: 5
Service - staff attentiveness: 8
Service - extra's and amenities: 8
Restaurants: 8


Free local newspapers in the morning complement your feeling of being spoilt.

Price: paid € 87 per night when three nights booked with a promotion, which includes breakfast, one free dinner and a chocolate treat from the Tea Room.

The Intercontinental, Bangkok

Location - logistics: 9
Location - attractiveness: 8
Hotel lay out: 7
Rooms - layout: 8
Rooms - soundproof: 8
Service - staff attentiveness: 9
Service - extra's and amenities: 8
Restaurants: not used

Price paid: € 105 per night (special deal, Executive floor) includes breakfast, happy hour at the Exec Club, 2 items in laundry, free use of internet in both room and Exec Club.

Sunset Beach Resort, Sattahip

Location - logistics: 2
Location - attractiveness: 8
Hotel lay out: 8
Rooms - layout: 7
Rooms - soundproof: 2
Service - staff attentiveness: 9
Service - extra's and amenities: 6
Restaurants: 6

Paid: 150 US$ per night (beach view bungalow), includes breakfast, which is too expensive.

Economies of scales

(Thailand)

In my relentless efforts to be not totally ignorant, although this would solve a lot of problems, I read the Bangkok Post every day. It provides an insight in Thai politics, politicians and how they are supposed to be perceived by Thais and farangs alike. It is truly revealing.

I read the business section too, but frankly one doesn't need this. It is easy to see how the Thai economy functions or rather why it doesn't. I worked it out the other day when I stayed in Hua Hin, a popular beach resort of about 70.000 inhabitants and another 100.000 guests if you include the hotels and guesthouses in the immediate surroundings.

When you are on the beach in nearby Cha-am, you get the first indication as to what, as the saying goes, "could be improved." Management-speak for what sucks.

A chair on the beach will set you back 30 Baht which equals 60 Euro cents, almost one Swiss Franc or, if you believe the Daily Mail, just over ninety-five quid since last week. They blame it on the Polish migrant workers.

Back to the beach. No sooner have I chosen a strategic position to expose my skin and the first of many vendors strolls by, stops right in front me and holds up a range of T-shirts with the most fascinating texts, such as "Kingdom of Thailand" (on the front) and "Singha beer" (on the back), or "Farang" on either side.

At first, in a momentary spur of politeness, I say "no thanks" but after salesman number twenty-four within a time span of 2 minutes (I'm not making this up) the text changes to "not interested", "on your bike", "why would I want such rubbish", "fuck off" and worse. Much worse.

The articles vary from silk scarfs (on a beach!) to wooden elephants (still on the same beach) and plastic frogs that make the sound of real ones when you wind them up. And, get this, nobody, that's right, nobody buys anything at all.

Now here's the message none of these people seem to get. Why would I spend money I have to work hard for on some thing I don't need with somebody who is deliberately blocking my view to sun, sea and half naked flesh? Why?

The Thai answer would be: because you "hep money", which in their view justifies any attempt to help you get rid of it. Does Thailand have a latent talent for communism?

No. The answer is less complicated than that, but still requires a bit of profoundness. Those of you who consider Tiny and Agony bore the Nation or Match of the Day the cultural highlights of the week, you have probably landed on the wrong blog to begin with, and are now kindly invited to switch to another one. Look for an "adult" content. That's a-d-u-l-t. Those with a brain stay here.

Apparently the cost of living is so low in Thailand that even if those would-be salesmen sell one T-shirt of, say two hundred Baht, they could feed their families for a day or three on that provided they don't have wine with dinner. Astonished to learn this, I furthered my investigations in Soy Something in Hua Hin, which is dotted with girlie bars, cabaret shows and other more or less educational forms of entertainment.

Here, too, the same phenomenon. Endless rows of bars who all look the same. Music blaring out loud and girls in the front greeting every passer-by with "hello-welcome" (pronounced as "well-kham"), "handsome man", "where you go" and other revealing truths of life. Only, no customers except for the occasional expat who does not pay anyway, as he bought the bar years ago and is still regretting it.

Why oh why don't people learn, I wonder. What made the Englishman, who somehow ended up in Thailand and decided to stay here because he made a mess of his life back home, think that running a bar in a street where there are seventy-one more like his, may get him the competitive edge? And why doesn't he close shop when nobody comes in?

And I certainly won't. I prefer the women in my life to look like women, that is, with a backside that is nicely shaped and a front that is well equipped and thus recognisable as clearly belonging to a member of the opposite sex.

Thai women fall into two categories. Half of them look like boys because they miss the features I just hinted at in my typical, subtle way. The other half are boys who haven't collected enough money for their operation yet.

Does that mean there are no exceptions? Of course there are and I'm proud to say I have met them both, years ago. One of them asked me to marry her, which gave me a real ego-boost until I found out I was her third prospect that week, the other one has left the country and now lives in Singapore with a wealthy Australian, or vice versa. But that's about it, really.

So it's economies of scales. Massive scales. You mobilise a lorry load of tremendously cheap labour in the hope that it generates some sales, as the yields are low but not as low as the costs. More importantly, you sell what is easy for you to produce, not what the customer needs. But how long can you stay in business when you only have farangs like me, who look and don't buy? Or worse, like this year, when there are fewer farangs than ever before? No matter how low your costs, you do need some customers at the end of the day.

Here's a suggestion. Remember the double-pricing system the former communist countries, such as Bulgaria, Romania and even nowadays Cuba used to have? Thailand still applies this. This could help, provided you'd turn it around.

That's right. Make the costs of living for Thai people three times higher than for tourists. I'm not being funny here. You wouldn't want to spend your days on the beach thinking "oh well, if I sell one set of plastic teeth it will see me through" if the tourists get their fried rice at the utmost reasonable prices you used to pay. No way. You would get off your backside and invent some way of either producing something useful or, alternatively, set up a bank to finance these enterprises.

Furthermore, it would entice the tourists to flock to Thailand in great numbers again, for once being positively discriminated when referred to as farang, since it will mean they pay less. See, it is beginning to work already!

It will create some problems in the beginning, I'll grant you, but nothing that can't be overcome. Some people's education may prove insufficient and they may have to learn to speak proper English, although an Aussie accent suffices for most of the farangs. Americans speak English worse than the Thai and, let's face it, the tourists with the most spending power in the next few years will be the Chinese. But that's a tonal language too.

As for the Europeans, they will come back as guest labourers. Impoverished by the Credit Crunch, they will have no choice but to work in a country where everyone smiles, prices will be much lower for them and shopping can be done on Sundays too. It's also slightly warmer. I'll start applying now, actually.

Still, I wonder what "Daily Mail" reads in Thai.

Ode to Jeremy

(Thailand)

It takes over 4 hours from Bangkok to reach Hua Hin, but fortunately I'm not alone. Jeremy is on the seat next to me, albeit face down.

Not that you would be bored. Every station along the line bring new vendors on board who pass though the aisle and offer some sweet, cookies, bananas and other more or less useful food for sale. I buy some water and a meal from the dining car, which is almost empty. There are windows, but they are all down. There are doors too, and they remain open during the ride. With over thirty degrees, nobody seems to bother.

I start to read the Bangkok Post and to my surprise there is some good news being squeezed in between the election of yet another prime minister, the demise of yet another hedge fund and a couple of murders. In an uncharted area in the North, near Chang Rai, no less than 20 new species of wildlife have been discovered. Among them are a grey rat with a tail like a squirrel, a hummingbird that can't fly in reverse and a giant beetle. The problem now is to find names for them. I think I might be able to help out there.

It used to be common practice to name the newly invented creatures after the person who discovered them. This is almost invariably a bloke, since women are more practical by nature and can't be bothered to travel into a jungle without any bathrooms under 20 square meters and three mirrors just to find new models of bizarre insects, when you could be having lunch in a department store reading the Cosmopolitan about the things in life that really matter, such as the costs of Victoria Beckham's divorce, or where your G-spot is.

Since the guys who discovered this lot all had names like Wannapee Komseemyporn or something to that effect, I would suggest a different approach. Why not name one of them after someone whose theory the discovery confirms. In this particular case, it would have to be Jeremy Clarkson.

Clarkson has been stating for most of his adult life, and that's almost as long as I've been watching BBC, that aeroplanes are not necessarily bad for the environment and cars do little damage to nature, but rather turn men into most agreeable partners in conversation once they're on the subject. Driving them is also cheaper than having sex, but this had already been scientifically proven by a sportsman named Boris Becker.

So now we know that Earth, rather than suffering under our carbon-dioxide emissions and constant attempts to dissolve the ozone layer can take good care of itself and replaces creatures that are extinct by new ones. That's a relief.

Which made me think of Jeremy, whose views on the environment are, in his own words, "not the same as everybody else's" but God, he's hilarious in the way he puts it and, I'm being serious now, a very talented writer and observer of mankind. He also observes foxes and then kills them reportedly, but I don't want to go there on this occasion.

There are two problems with Mr. Clarkson though. First, it is considered politically incorrect to buy any of his books (which I just did) and, to make matters worse, I'm halfway through it and Hua Hin is nowhere in sight, and secondly, he keeps making anti-German jokes.
I must admit that I'm slightly biased here, having a most lovable German girlfriend, but hardly as biased as Jeremy himself, as the war had long stopped before he was even born and frankly, not only are these sort of jokes out-of-touch, there more than out-of date. It is one thing to be conservative, it's quite another to be moulded. It's over seventy years ago, get a grip.

But that's small beer in comparison to what he does on the upside. I had to stop reading "For crying out loud" several times because other passengers stare at me when I burst out laughing. And believe me, it really is good. My favourite piece is the one about the meetings and conferences, and the one about the Americans must be the most recognisable for the majority of living creatures on this planet, including the newly discovered, though not necessarily the inhabitants of the States.

Clarkson appeals to the naughty one in all of us. The kind of person that sits inside and secretly admires looking at fast cars, playing with electronically advanced, but not strictly necessary gadgets and only in the company of non-trusted others speak up for the multi-ethnic society. That of course is part of his success. But I specifically want to dedicate this piece to him for turning a four hour train ride into a most enjoyable one.

As for the species then, I don't think the hummingbird. Too small and vulnerable. The rat looks like a squirrel and I seem to remember he puts squirrels in the same league with the foxes. And we all know what happens to them...

But the giant beetle somehow would seem to fit. How about: Coleoptera Jeremia. Would Herr Clarkson like that?