One thing I didn’t expect to do while living in Thailand, was to learn more about what it means to be a woman in a man’s world. In this respect, the past year has been a rather fascinating journey for me. It was around ten years ago that a female school friend stated, in a… Read More Being a woman in a man’s world (in Thailand)
I had a strange realisation today that most of my workmates have lost a grandparent in the last few months. It’s uncanny. Two in the past week, one less than two months ago, and one at the end of last year. One of my workmates rushed down to Bangkok last week because her grandfather was… Read More Four funerals and a wedding
We were hanging out with some good friends at their place on the weekend, discussing how it seems that once you decide to leave a place, it will inevitably find ways to draw you back. It makes it much harder to have a clean break — if there really is such a thing. This morning… Read More Breaking up [with a city] is hard to do
I had my last Thai lesson this week and it really felt like the end of an era. I’ve been taking lessons since the end of March last year, a week after I arrived, and during this time I became very good friends with my Thai teacher. Aside from all of my workmates, she’s the… Read More My Paris plan
I’ve woken up to two very exciting developments: I’ve just started contributing to a blog called Language on the Move and my first post has been published. I’ve written about the fact that many foreigners here don’t learn how to read Thai and what that means. I have lots of other ideas relating to my… Read More Some exciting developments
Even after living in Chiang Mai for almost a year, I’m still no closer to cracking this particular chestnut. The handful of Thai women I regularly spend time with seem to have pretty high calorie diets full of saturated fats; eat relatively few vegetables; drink very sweet drinks and reasonably large amounts of alcohol; walk… Read More How do Thai women stay so skinny?
That’s what they call them in Thailand, anyway. When I ordered them off the menu last night, I completely glossed over the name. All I knew was that it said ‘egg something horse’. As it turns out, something was the word for urine — but at the time, I didn’t have that word in my… Read More Horse urine eggs
The Travels of Elephant Woman 