One Night In Bangkok

I was in Bangkok on Wednesday of this past week.  Well, I flew in Tuesday evening, was a ATECH for a shop visit all day Wednesday and then I flew back to Singapore Wednesday evening.
It was all pretty much the same as the other 6 or 8 times I have gone to Bangkok in the past couple of months. However, this time when P (the driver from the vendor) picked me up to drive me to the hotel we took a slightly different route as traffic was pretty bad. We left the airport and for the first 45 minutes or so the trip was the same as usual along the freeway.  About 45 minutes into the 1 hour trip, the traffic got pretty thick, so P took an exit and we started to drive through the city on surface streets (and I will have to have a whole separate blog about the city of Bangkok itself).
At one point we turned down a side street or alley and I noticed what, at first, looked like a couple of grandparents and another older couple (though younger than the "grandparents") sitting at a table on the side of the road next to an abandoned building. I also noticed a couple of young ladies in very short shorts and low cut tops. Then I noticed a few more standing next to some run down (or abandoned) cars. I then realized that the whole alley was a hooker alley.
P, the driver, commented that they were all prostitutes. I said "Yes, I figured that. Are they all women or are some of them guys?"
He looked at me in the rear view mirror and asked "You are familiar with this?" in a sort of disbelieving tone. I explained that I had lived in New York City and that I now live in Los Angeles and that I had seen amny prostitutes and many transvestite or transsexual ones. He looked at me, again in the rear view mirror, and asked "You have prostitutes in America?" I explained that all of the major cities, and many smaller towns, had them. And that indeed most major cities and many small towns in every country in the world have them.
At this point we had pulled up to a very long stop light and while we were waiting for it to change he turned around and asked me: "Do you have beggars too?" and cupped his hands in the sort of universal motion of begging for money or food. I explained that, yes we do indeed have beggars in America, and many of them in the larger cities.
He made the comment "But you live in a civilized country?!?" as if asking a question and making a statement at the same time. He then shook his head and said, almost under his breath and sort of chuckling in dis-belief at the same time, "Beggars in America!". It was almost like the subtext of that thought or the continuation of it was "Hmmmmm, who knew?"
I think that I may have caused him to seriously re-think his ideas of our country or maybe even his world view.

Not What I Expected

Singapore really is the land of the unexpected. No matter how familiar I think something will be, it always turns out to be "...not what I expected...". Whether it is a toy museum or a chicken sandwich or Japanese ramen or a black & tan or "Hawaiian Pizza", it always seems to be 3 degrees to the left of what I thought it would be.
This seems to be the case with food, more than anything really, but it is also the case with other things.  I've had cab drivers refuse tips, wait staff that stands behind you, patiently & politely but not about to leave, until you pay the bill and "American Breakfast" that is, again, 3 degrees left of what we'd really eat back in the States.
It's all similar, but just different enough to make you really miss or crave some basic things from your life back home. It all ends up being more surreal due to the similarities, rather then the differences.
Anyway, just some thoughts for the evening.

Toy Museum in Singapore

Okay, so today I went with a number of co-workers to the Mint Toy Museum over by Raffles Hotel (the home of the Singapore Sling) in Singapore.

It's a very cool place. I have a number of friends who would be in heaven there (Zane & Dave Cobb to mention two).

The museum has some great, some wierd, some creepy and some down right racist toys from the past 80 years or so.

The place is divided into 5 floors:

Ground floor: cafe, shop & ticket sales

2nd floor: Collectables (Beatles, Monkees, Matchbox)

3rd floor: Childhood Favorites (Disney, Warner Bros., Etc)

4th floor: Superheroes & Characters

5th floor: Outer Space

We started at the top floor and worked our way down.

The place is pretty small. It's maybe 20 feet wide by 60 feet deep, so, each floor is really just a stairwell, a sort of hallway with shelves along one side, and then it opens up a bit to another type of display area.

It wasn't until we were down on the 3rd floor that I realized what the architects had done (see the video below):
Overall, the Mint Toy Museum was very interesting. I think that what was most notable was the repetition of toys within the variety displayed there. I know that sounds odd, but the best example is the tin toys. There must have been a thousand tin toys on one level, maybe several hundred per case, and within that case of several hundred there were, say, 15 or 20 tin elephants that were all from different countries, with different paint jobs, yet all from the same mold and having the exact same form. really, really interesting stuff.

I'll put together a Picassa album of this little adventure:
http://picasaweb.google.com/KevinCardani/MintToyMuseumSingapore#


Enjoy.

Dinner with Chuck

So, just got back from a great dinner with Chuck Spina at an Italian joint in Holland Village.

Holland Village is a little foodie neighborhood in Singapore about a 15 minute cab ride from the hotel. It's probably fairly touristy, but in a different way than the Clarke Quay area here where the Gallery Hotel is located. There are some pretty cool looking little restaurants, bars and shops there.

See the video above for a typical sign and the sort of typical flavor of the area. It's really a pretty neat little place here in Singapore.

I always enjoy having dinner with Chuck. He's a very interesting guy and works with some pretty fun people, so his stories about work and his job and his co-workers are fun to hear. And he is very excited that his wife and kids will be coming out to Singapore to visit for 2 weeks. They get here next weekend I believe. I'm sure they'll have a great time.

http://www.browhaus.com/

Work & Travel Abroad

I was thinking of titling this post "One Night In Bangkok", but I'll save that for another post.

Not a whole lot to report right now.

Let's see:

Sunday afternoon I flew to Bangkok on business (I'll have a whole post about that later, with pics & video and what not)

Monday I was at the fabrication vendor in Bangkok all day and I flew back late Monday night. I didn't truly get to sleep until about 1:30 am.

Tuesday I got up pretty darn early and had a VERY long day. I feel like I am way behind on things and I dropped the ball on one particluar thing I really needed to get done (and I am STILL not done with it yet. I hope to finish it this evening). The upside to the whole day was a fantastic dinner at Bella Pizza at Robertson Quay (again - I'll do a whole post on that later).

Today - got up late, but I had a pretty good day problem solving and (I hope) averting a couple of crises (and STILL not getting my project from the day before completed). I had a love futo-maki (spelling?) roll at a Japanese restaurant near the hotel with my colleague Adela. Talked to my folks on Skype. Now I am finishing this blog, working on some drawings and waiting for Seth to call me before I go to bed.

I think that's it for this one folks. See ya soon!

Mr. Curry Restaurnt in The Central @ Clarke Quay

This is a very typical food display for a restaurant in a mall.

In this case the restaurant is Mr. Curry Japanese Curry & Sweet House at The Central, a mall at the end of Clarke Quay.

Dysentery & Swollen Bug Bites

So, I have been in Asia for the past 6 weeks or so, based in Singapore with weekly trips to Bangkok, Thailand.
I must say that both Singapore and Thailand are truly amazing places. I must also say that they have things we just don't have in Los Angeles, both good and not so good.
Examples in Singapore: good: Mangostines, bad: small bugs that bite me and leave a puffy red swelling the diameter of a soda can
Examples in Thailand: good: beautiful temples, bad: dysentery
So: the backstory:
I am here in Singapore working as an Art Director for Jeremy Railton on 4 attractions at the new casino that is being built at Resorts World on Sentosa Island in Singapore. Our main fabrication vendor is based in Bangkok, Thailand.
I flew out to Singapore from Los Angeles at the beginning of August. I landed on a Tuesday, was at the site office on Wednesday and then flew to Bangkok on Thursday and then back to Singapore on Friday. I (unknowingly) drank the water and got dysentery. Luckily, it was  amild case and the doctor near our hotel (and the hotel is a whole 'nother blog in and of itself) immediately diagnosed me with dysentery and gave me antibiotics. So, I suffered through about 3 days of it, got the antibiotics and was all better about 5 days later. Jeremy was not so lucky. He also got dysentery and then flew back to the US, where it took his doctor about 2 weeks to get him all sorted and back to health.
So, that's the dysentery from Thailand story. Now for the puffy red bug bite story:
Part of my daily (well every other day-ly) routine is to go out to several of the attraction sites to review the current progress. Now, remember that we are essentially in a rain forest about 4 feet from the equator. This is hard to visualize as Singapore is now a large city that pretty much does a Disney Spray to keep the bugs to a minimum. However, the construction site that we work on has literally been carved out of the jungle.  Where the raw concrete and dirt end, the jungle begins (I'll dig up and upload some pics soon). So, between the jungle being very close, the fast that it rains regularly, is more huimd than Florida and there is a fair amount of standing water, bugs are pretty common. Now, I haven't really ahd any issues with the bugs other than a couple of mosquito bites. However, on my Thursday evening site walk with young Rob Palmer, I got bit about 3 times by a small bug that looked like a small black fly. I had a couple of mosquito bite looking bumps on my left arm and didn't think much of them until...I woke up Friday morning to several large red puffy areas on my hand, wrist and near my elbow. Over the course of the day they got redder, itchier and hotter. I didn't get off work in time to go to the local clinic by the hotel, so I waited until this morning.
In explaining to the doctor the whole bug bite and swelling thing, he looked at them and said that he knew what caused it (though he couldn't recall the name of the insect) and that I was lucky as sometimes the bites blister within minutes of the person being bitten. Well, I now have some anitbacterial cream and the swelling and itching and redness are going away.
So, for all the fun I am having working on this project and with my co-workers (again, another blog on them at a later date) I am running into some things that I would most likely never see back home.
On the up side, the food both in Singapore and Bangkok is AH-MAY-ZING!

Ciao

Blog #1 2009-09-12

Welcome to my blog.



This is the first of what I hope will become a weekly or even daily update. (I am the one on the right in red, Seth, my partner, is the one in blue on the left, and the kid is our nephew.)



I figure that, as I am doing some travelling for work right now, and since I have a lot of family and such who are NOT on Facebook, that this might be a goodway to keep people up on what's happening while I am travelling.



Once I am done travelling, we'll see what this turns into, but for now, it's going to sort of be a travel blog.