Living the Bangkok Beat
Bangkok, Thailand -- At face value, Bangkok shouldn’t be a great place for an expat assignment. The threat of political instability is the highest in the region, next to Indonesia. The Thai economy continues to be outshined by neighbours: growth projections for this year have been revised downward due to anticipation of falling exports sales. And last August, a bomb at the Erawan shrine in central Bangkok killed 20 and injured more than 120.
During my recent trip to Bangkok, exiting my hotel at the end of Sukhumvit Soi 3, where Little Arabia hands the sidewalk back over to Thailand, it was a feat of wit and dexterity to out-maneuver the gauntlet of often freezing water being discharged from hoses, water pistols and occasionally chucked from buckets. Little children …
Continue reading Songkran: Thailand Water Festival Do’s and Don’t’s
For the past month, I had been fussing over an old story about SWING, a volunteer organization that offers a variety of counseling services and English lessons to sex workers of every gender in Bangkok. And after a bit of cleanup and some calls to Thailand, I churned out a story for CNNGo, CNN's Asia-travel …
Living in Bangkok during the coup of 2006 I wake up sweating. My air conditioner has given out in the middle of the night as it so often does, and my neck and stomach are now soaked in my own epidermal excrement. I brush my hand across the back of my neck and wipe away …
Some people spend their entire lives trying to understand Asia only to discover that the more they know, the more they realize how much they don’t know. We live in a fascinating and diverse world full of beauty and unspeakable evil. Over the past several months I have had the grand opportunity to witness the …
Continue reading Five Months in Bangkok and the World Turns Over
Justin Calderón 