Mysterious Orientations

One of the most charming moments in my stay at Colin’s came from one of his Bangkok visitors, Khae, who was the UNO shark of the crowd. However, every time she slapped a “Draw Four” card on me (the worst card in the deck), and she did it a lot, she would make a face of abject apology and say “Sorry” so sweetly that I just had to believe her. Almost.

Small fishing fleet just down the beach from Colin's

Colin's studio, from the main house

The joke of the week was about rock star Bono, who has been known to pontificate on social matters from time to time. At a U2 concert in Scotland, the band finished a song to wild applause, and then the house lights faded to black. A single floodlight illuminated Bono on the stage, and he said to the audience “Please be totally silent.” A hush fell over the auditorium. Slowly he clapped his hands together loudly, then again and again, once per second or so, for fully half a minute. Then he said in somber tones “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” A voice rang out from the back of the auditorium “Then for God’s sake, stop clapping!”

Rasta dog, near village market

Beia, Psycho and GoGo, about to storm the castle gate

Although incomes are low in Thailand (minimum wage is about $7 per day), prices for consumer goods are very cheap by Western standards. As a tourist you need look no further than hotel and meal prices. I am staying in a perfectly pleasant room (a detached cottage, actually) with aircon, tv, fridge, double bed, en suite bath, right in the center of town, for $15 per night in the high season. I had a couple of weeks’ worth of laundry washed, dried and folded yesterday for $3. They seem to have misplaced a pair of short pants, but I trust they will find them before I leave.

Dahla Hotel, Ranong, Thailand

A meal in the local market runs a couple of dollars, for pad thai freshly prepared while you watch. The bicycle pictured below is about $40, and the washing machine, about $200, both prices well under half what one would pay in the US.

Colin at the train station, as I was leaving for Bangkok

The 11:47 to Bang Sue...

The days at Colin’s place definitely took place in Thai time, each flowing pretty imperceptibly into the next. The big meal of the day happened at lunchtime, on either side of which Colin worked assiduously on the ninth book in the Dr. Siri series, due in part to some panicky goading from his publisher. He writes his early drafts in longhand, and from time to time must cast about looking for the particular notebook that might provide some continuity among the notebooks he has been able to turn up thus far.

Evenings were loose, however, for chatting, snacking, and attending to the needs and whims of the dogs. For my last night there, we decided to build a campfire beneath the leaning palm tree, using for fuel assorted combustible crapola that had accumulated on the beach over the past week or so. There seems no end to the aforementioned combustibles, the saving grace being that the ocean will usually take them back sooner or later if they are not used in the meantime. Palm fronds, bamboo sticks, unidentifiable wooden items presumably dropped from boats (or perhaps pieces that once constituted boats), coconut husks, chunks of furniture—the list of campfire materials went on and on.

Shortly after dark we headed out to the beach, with all six dogs in tow, and a cooler full of beer, cheese and crackers. There was a nice breeze off the ocean, and it cooperated for the most part by blowing the smoke in a direction away from where we were sitting. The conversation was all over the board, as it had been all week, for that matter: girls; cars; Thailand; travels; jokes; plans for the near future; etc.

And then at one point, the discussion turned to music. I had listened to a CD of Mongolian throat singers early in my stay at Colin’s, and this led me to believe that he must have at least as eclectic tastes in music as I do. That was confirmed when I happened upon his “ukulele disco hits” CD, with lyrics all in Thai. No home should be without one. Except mine.

Colin and I are but a year apart in age, although we grew up on opposite sides of the Atlantic. I was curious to know what songs and artists might have made the transoceanic jump successfully (and by extrapolation, which hits had stayed firmly rooted in their home countries), and mentioned a couple of tunes I liked. This started a several-hour beer-fueled music dialogue that culminated in our crafting the Ultimate Awful Song List of All Time.

I had done this at least one time before, while traveling through the Sahara Desert with my ex-wife Cyndi, on what turned out to be a very extended honeymoon. For lack of something better to do, we took turns naming the worst songs we could think of, and, if we remembered the words, singing them badly. This was in the 1980s, so the choices were necessarily more limited, but there was no shortage of material, I guarantee that.

Fast forward to 2012, and I launched the first salvo with Morris Albert’s “Feelings”, a staple at karaoke bars worldwide, and guaranteed to engender the throwing of eggs (particularly in Asia, where it is rendered as “Feerings”). This was rapidly followed up with “You’re Having My Baby”, “Honey”, “Ebony and Ivory”, “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo”, “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”, “MacArthur Park”, “The Pina Colada Song”, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”, “Muskrat Love”, “Seasons in the Sun”, anything by Kenny Rogers, “You Light Up My Life”, “From a Distance”, “I Am  Woman”, “Achy Breaky Heart”—you get the idea. The culmination of this exercise was an impromptu duet rendition of “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”, which I am ashamed to say that both of us remembered word for word in its entirety (thus using valuable brain space which could easily be utilized more profitably; indeed, it is hard to imagine using brain cells less profitably), and which I am sure has never been sung so badly in Thailand (or anywhere), and may never be again. Some performances leave no room for an encore, and we shortly toddled off to our respective sleeping places, presumably to dream about the awful songs we’d forgotten, like that heinous ballad by Bread about the guy who finds his girlfriend’s diary underneath a tree…

After a long time of living on Gilligan’s Island (“no phone, no lights, no motorcars, not a single luxury”, seriously) about which I shall write more soon, I finally have internet access again, speedy access at that. So, here at last are some pics from the Cotterill Compound and its environs; note, click on the pics, then when the page reloads, click once more, and you can see larger, more detailed versions…

The man himself, dressed up for work...

The compound as seen from the beach side...

...and from the driveway side

Sticky Rice (left) and Psycho (right) herd neighbor's cattle

L to R, Noon, Pyo, Nok, Bruce, and Khae playing a local version of UNO

Getting toys together for Chinese New Year; Khae, Pyo, Noon, Daw, and Nok

Noon's makeshift hair-dryer

Some of the kids from the Burmese school

Pyo and one of the teachers, whose name, sadly, I did not get

Perhaps the Frida Kahlo of the 21st century

For first-time artists, this group had it going on!

We have a winner (the one in the red and white shirt, that is...)

A bite of lunch

Dessert was a big hit!

Pyo and Khae loading up for return to Bangkok

Phrot-Samh and her brother Jet-Samh

Colin and the Williams sisters (Colin is in the green shirt)

Gulf of Siam, just down the beach from Colin's place

Once I was ensconced in the Cotterill Compound, the first folks I met were Gogo, Beia, Psycho, and Sticky Rice. These were not, as you might otherwise surmise, members of a rogue biker club, but rather four largish and mostly affable canines, each with his or her own peccadilloes. They also appear as characters in his latest book, Killed at the Whim of a Hat, by the way. Later I would meet the two newest additions, a pair of athletic and ever-so-full-of-themselves puppies named Venus and Serena, who had not been accepted as full-fledged members of the pack, and thus were sequestered in protective custody until such time as they were accorded provisional constituency.

The next day promised some additional human companionship, in the form of Colin’s “daughter” Nok, and her friends Daw, Khae, Noon, and Pyo. The five motored down from Bangkok in Daw’s nifty new Chevrolet SUV (a model I haven’t seen before but liked a lot, quite an admission from a confirmed Japanese car geek), to help out with a Chinese New Year Celebration at the nearby Burmese school. A lot of Burmese refugees reside in Thailand, in varying degrees of legality, providing a cheap labor pool for fishing, construction, farming, and so on. (Does this all sound a bit too familiar?) There is really no provision for schooling their children, many or most of whom don’t speak Thai, so a handful of concerned teachers, parents and benefactors, with Colin deeply involved, have gotten together to provide a schoolroom, some supplies, and a lot of compassion. The situation is not the best, of course; kids of all ages share the same classroom, and like kids everywhere, the cooler older ones are not all that keen to share space with the dorkier younger ones. Also, the kids are routinely pulled out of school as their parents follow the work wherever it may lead. Thus, the teachers find themselves rehashing the same lessons again and again. That said, I have rarely if ever seen such a group of engaged kids in one place at one time. A couple of them had a few words of English, which they tried out on me again and again: “Hi, how you?” “What you name?” “My name ____” These phrases occasioned raucous laughter from their friends, but not as much as my replies, particularly when I had answered the same questions forty-three times.

There were games and activities galore, not unlike those you might see at a stateside school: musical chairs (but somehow, although the number of chairs got smaller each round, the number of players seemed to stay constant, perhaps even grow, and the kids very obligingly shared space on the chairs with one or two other kids so nobody would be left out); painting (no surprise here, but more of the paint got on the kids than on the paper, and they even managed to get a fair bit of blue paint on the my otherwise peaches and cream countenance, courtesy of a balloon that they “kissed” me with, failing to mention that the face painted thereon had been added scant seconds before); and a Pamplona-esque romp in which a balloon was tied to the right ankle of each child, and then the kids were set loose in a circle, each trying to stomp the balloon of every other child into oblivion. Colin was a master at this game; clearly he had been practicing. However, being one of only two Westerners on hand, he was a prime target, and he got he got his comeuppance, triple-teamed by a phalanx of future soccer players who took great delight in having stomped his balloon into oblivion.

I’ve never been one to approach travel from the planning perspective, preferring instead simply to set the basic process in motion, and then let it evolve as it will. Thus, when I arrived in Thailand, I had made no arrangements beyond the air ticket and the first night’s accommodation, figuring that as I was arriving late in the evening, the last thing I would want to do was cast about for a reasonably priced room in a foreign country, especially one in which I know only two words of the language, “hello” and “thank you”. (Technically, I suppose, that’s three words, but let’s not split hairs.)

I had been in touch with several friends who had had some experience of Thailand, and I was waiting to see who might write back to me with some suggestions that sounded too tempting to pass up. When I finally checked in at the airport-adjacent hotel, sometime around midnight, I checked my emails and found a note from author Timothy Hallinan (The Queen of Patpong, Breathing Water), suggesting that I get in touch with a  couple of his fellow writers, Christopher G. Moore (Spirit House; Asia Hand), who is based in Bangkok, and Colin Cotterill (The Curse of the  Pogo Stick, Killed at the Whim of a Hat), who lives on the Gulf of Siam a day’s drive south of the capital. As it happened, Christopher was leaving for Burma to do some research for his next Vincent Calvino novel, but Colin emailed me back and said if I was up for making the trip, he could offer me a bunk in his guesthouse for a couple of nights. There were a couple of caveats: his place, he said, was a long way from anywhere that could remotely be considered a tourist draw; and I would be sharing my digs with six large and rambunctious dogs (as it turned out, there were four large and two small dogs, although he was spot on about the rambunctious part). Still, he allowed, the beer was cold, and that is no small thing in the tropics. So, one long bus ride, and one mildly terrifying mini-bus ride later, I arrived in the small seaside town where he lives.

Colin had suggested that I give him a call shortly before my arrival (surely, with my charming
personality, not to mention my two words of Thai, I should be able to borrow a phone for a local call, right?), and he would pick me up wherever the mini-bus dropped me off. That proved unfeasible, as none of the hardy tourists on the mini-bus had a mobile phone that worked in Thailand. I was deposited rather unceremoniously on a small concrete island amidst the lanes of traffic, the
mini-bus accelerating smartly the moment I cleared the door, nearly taking my trailing foot along with it.

In a small kiosk at the edge of the road, about thirty feet from where I stood, sat a group of four men, all of whom were grinning and calling to me, and waving me over. What with the undisciplined and seemingly endless traffic, it took me about five minutes to cover that thirty feet. As it turned out, none of the group spoke English, although one of them was able to ask me “Where you go?” Another
of the four, clearly the leader as he was wearing a uniform, asked me something in Thai, which of course I didn’t understand. I guessed that he was a cop. Or a postman. Or a boy scout leader. Good uniform, though.

I pulled out my piece of paper with Colin’s number on it and said “Colin Cotterill, my friend”. The
fellow looked at me and said “ Colin…my friend” back to me. He didn’t even try “Cotterill”. I pointed helpfully to the paper, on which was printed Colin’s phone number. Gamely, he entered the numbers into his cell phone, and got some generic phone company recording. At least I assume that is what it was, as he handed me the phone to listen for myself. Meanwhile the other three guys got in on the act, passing the paper around amongst themselves, scratching their heads in consternation. One even scrutinized it upside down, but I opted not to mention that to him. Then a guy seated astride a scooter at the edge of the gathering seized the paper, held a finger in the air as though he had just had an “aha!” moment, and rode off on the highway shoulder (against traffic, I might add), taking with him the only means I had of getting in touch with Colin. No worries, though, he was back in about five minutes with the paper sticking out of his shirt pocket, this time with the number rewritten in his own hand, and without the leading three digits that comprise the Thailand country code. The uniformed fellow took the paper back and redialed the number; still no luck. I noticed however that he had missed entering one number that motorcycle dude had written very lightly. I made a motion which I hoped would convey that I would like to borrow his phone for a moment, and he handed it to me happily. I tried the number once again, this time adding the lightly pencilled final “1” and sure enough, an English voice answered.

“Bruce, where are you?”

“Um,” I said, looking around, “I’m on a main highway, I would guess the main highway, in a small kiosk across the road from what appears to be the bulk of the town.”

“What can you see close by?”

“Well, there is a pink building on the corner, and a green one with yellow trim, and a sign that looks like it might be for pizza…” Everything I could see had only Thai writing, naturally, of which I can read not one whit, also naturally.

Ultimately, it was decided that Colin should talk to one of my compatriots, so I handed the phone back to the man in uniform. There was a lot of nodding, a few sentences of Thai, and then the uniformed fellow hung up. “Fitty baht,” he said. I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a two twenty-baht notes and a ten-baht coin, about $1.50 in US money. “You give,” he said, motioning me to give that amount of money to the motorcycle guy. I was fine with this, I would like to note. Without the motorcycle guy I would likely still be sitting in the kiosk, soliciting alms from passing tourists. So I pulled fifty baht out of my wallet and proffered it to the fellow in question. “You come,” he said, motioning me to his bike. Okay, I thought dubiously, now what? He motioned me to get on the back of the bike, which I did with great reluctance, and he started to accelerate out into traffic before I had even gotten a good handhold. Thankfully, he immediately stalled the bike, whose tiny 125cc engine clearly was none too happy about its oversize farang passenger. His companions hooted and catcalled from the kiosk, a chorus of ridicule easily understood no matter the language. The second time was the charm, and we sailed off into the six lanes of traffic, somehow making it across all six without incident, although I would not have bet money on that at the outset. He dropped me off in front of a place I truly did not expect to find in the small town, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. I was seriously thirsty, so I ordered a large Pepsi from the smiling counter girl, and no sooner did I have it in hand, than Colin Cotterill walked through the entry door.

It seems that virtually every time I am somewhere far afield from my customary stomping grounds, I run into complete strangers with whom I have some strange hitherto-unknown connection. They a) live where I live, b) grew up where I grew up, c) know some of the same people I know, or d) all of the above; more importantly, the conversation inexplicably drifts in a direction that exposes those connections. This has already taken place twice in the four days I have spent in Thailand, and I have every expectation it will happen again.

The first one was on the tourist boat that plies its way up and down the Chao Phraya River, stopping at popular venues six or eight times along the way: Chinatown; Wat Phrao; Wat Arun; and a wealth (and I use that word literally) of high-zoot hotels. The boat was pretty full, and I had what would have been a window seat, had there been any windows. The seat beside me remained unoccupied until a pair of young women, obviously traveling together, meandered their way down the center aisle. For some reason I knew they were Japanese. I suppose it was the style of dress, because no conversation passed between them. One of them sat next to me, the other one found a seat across the aisle. When it came time to pay, I held out a bill which was not only larger than the amount needed for my ticket, but also larger than what was needed for two of us. I must have looked askance at my less-than-expected change, at which point the ticket-taker asked “Two, right?” Um, no actually. “Sumimasen,” the girl beside me said, and then realizing she had spoken in Japanese, hastily modified it to “Sorry!” She then paid for her ticket, and the ticket-taker refunded me the appropriate amount.

“Nihon-jin desu ka?” I asked (“You are Japanese?”). She did a double take, clearly not expecting to hear Japanese, especially from a non-native, after which I told her that I live in Saitama. “Really, where? I live in Saitama too!” I went on to tell her that I live in Niiza, a neighborhood of Saitama very close to the Tokyo border. If the wind is right, you can spit to Tokyo from my balcony. As it turned out, she lives two stations past mine, in Tokorozawa, and we routinely ride the same train back and forth to downtown. We have never met in Japan; it took a nine-hour flight and a desire for river travel at precisely the same moment to engineer this particular collision.

Later that same night, I was having supper at my new favorite Thai restaurant, May Kai-dee’s, which doubles as a cooking school for foreigners who would like to learn a bit about the foundations of Thai cuisine. The food is all organic, all vegetarian for that matter, and hands down the best Thai food I’ve ever eaten. The fact that a healthy (in both senses of the word) helping runs about $2 is a major bonus. The restaurant was understandably quite full, and as I was dining alone, the server asked if I would mind sharing my table. “Not at all,” I replied, and I was joined by an American woman named Jen, who had just finished the cooking class, and was now about to sample the dishes she had prepared. She insisted that I try her concoctions, which looked and smelled very fine indeed. Her massaman curry was so delicious I resolved to have that the next time I ate at May’s. Anyway, we got to talking in the middle of our munching, and it turned out that she was from Philadelphia, or rather the west Philly suburb of Manayunk. As it happened, the Manayunk local railway ran right behind my house when I was a kid, and countless times my brother and I flouted our mother’s authority and hiked along the tracks, heading for the old arched bridge that crossed the Schuylkill River. It was possible to lift manhole covers between the tracks and climb down into the structure of the bridge, and then dangle your feet over the river, from a height of perhaps a couple hundred feet. My poor mother would have fainted dead away if she had had any idea. Jen knew all the station names along the way, and could likely have picked my house out of a lineup. Once again, a weird confluence of circumstances conspired to engineer a collision half a planet away from where one might have reasonably expected one.

Small world, neh?

Pretty much everything I know about Bangkok comes from the mystery novels of three writers whose work I admire very much: Timothy Hallinan, John Burdett, and Christopher G. Moore. Because their books focus upon hard-line criminal activity, I have perhaps cultivated a stronger impression of the city’s seamy underbelly than I might have otherwise, and thus less of an impression of any other facet of The City of the Angel. And, I have to say, I was quite curious as to how reality would square up against my preconceptions.

I wound up here partly by design and partly by chance. Having spent a month in Indonesia around this time last year, I really wanted to get back to Southeast Asia in a big way. By midwinter I find myself craving the tropics, both for the weather and for the longer hours of sunlight that seem to elude me both in Japan and in Prince Edward Island. Bangkok, I am happy to say, is far enough south that it will not disappoint on either count. The chance part factors into the equation by virtue of the fact that a flight to Bangkok was about $100 cheaper than a flight to Singapore, and since I had never been to either place, Bangkok won out.

I arrived late in the evening, after a pair of flights, the first from Tokyo to Seoul, the second from Seoul to Bangkok. The first flight was close to empty, and I had a whole row of seats to myself (literally the whole row, window to window). As I had gotten up fairly early in the morning, I took the opportunity to pretty much snooze my way to Korea, awakening once to have a look for Mt. Fuji’s peak peeking up through the clouds (no luck there), and once to have a bite of lunch. The layover in Seoul was fairly short, a bit more than an hour. I realized upon arriving that I had neglected to bring any Korean money, and it seemed kind of silly to use my American Express card to buy just a bottle of water, so I contented myself with reading at the departure gate, and hoping that the flight attendants would bring the cart around with something to drink early on in the flight. This time the plane was close to full; my seatmate was a young Korean woman named Jeong-Lye (I hope I have spelled that right); she spoke quite good English and we spent most of the six-hour flight in conversation. We chatted endlessly about her job, my comparative lack thereof, our respective homes and families, and anything else we thought of; it made the flight go by very quickly, at least for me, and I hope for her as well.

Entry into Thailand could scarcely have been easier. I had had one tiny glitch when checking in for my first flight in Tokyo, in that my return flight was two months away, and a Thailand visa is good for only thirty days. I explained to the ticket agent that I intended to spend some of that time outside the country, and would not overstay my visa. A hasty call to somebody (presumably someone official) secured the necessary waiver, with the suggestion that if the Thai immigration folks balked at my far-off departure date, I should explain the situation to them in exactly the same manner. In the event, though, I was simply asked to fill out a short form, smile for a photo, and welcomed expansively into their country.

At the taxi stand, a lovely woman named Pen offered to intercede for me with the gathered taxi drivers, and was able to score for me a rate only about 50% higher than I would have paid if I had done it myself. At that, it was only about $4, so no major harm came of it. The taxi driver was driving a personal Volvo, an older model in fine condition (no markings and no meter, though, not a good sign); he took me to a pretty deserted area of town, and promptly got “lost”. I was beginning to get just a wee bit nervous, but Pen had been so sweet, I could not imagine that she would have me sold into slavery on my first night in Bangkok. Still, I was beginning to feel minor twinges in the areas of my vital removable organs (I really have been reading a lot of mysteries!). And then the hotel magically appeared between a couple of houses, not especially different from its neighbors, and not particularly well marked; I was quite pleased to see it nonetheless. It was clean, it was comfortable, and it was reasonably priced; I wasted no time in powering up the a/c, having a cool shower and plopping onto the small but surprisingly comfortable bed. All I had managed to glean about Bangkok was: a) it was steamin’ hot, even at 11pm; b) the people, to a one, were smiling, friendly and helpful; and c) hotels were not always where you would expect to find them. Further discoveries would have to wait until the following day.

Tomorrow I leave on my midwinter break, this time to Southeast Asia once again. Last year I spent a month in Bali, and loved every minute of it (except perhaps the case of Bali Belly that I contracted on my final day there, putting my presence on the return flight in peril). That trip also offered the side benefit of taking me away from Japan in time to miss the Tohoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami. In any event, that part of the world really appeals to me: great beaches; a welcome warm break from the chilly Tokyo weather; friendly people; bargain-basement prices. What’s not to like?

Last year, I had a beachfront hotel room in a small family-run place in Nusa Lembongan, a small island off the coast of Bali. It had an attached restaurant and an infinity pool just steps from the beach. This place ran about $15 a night. I was talking with Marie, a Danish girl I met poolside, and asked her how she liked the place. She considered my question for a moment, and then replied “It’s quite nice, but a bit pricey, don’t you think?” Intrigued, I asked her where she had found cheaper digs, certainly not in Denmark! She laughed and replied that places along the beach in Thailand and Cambodia were sometimes $8 or $10 a night for perfectly pleasant accommodations, albeit perhaps a bit off the beaten path. She really liked the food as well, and mentioned a couple of hotels where a fine tropical breakfast of fresh fruit and homemade breads could be had for less than $1.

Then over the Christmas holidays my friend Elias went to Thailand and Cambodia, and sent back atmospheric reports of sunrise at Angkor Wat, and tiny floating fishing villages along the Mekong. I was hooked, so to speak, and tomorrow begins the “reeling in” process. I will fly into Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport, and likely stay in the city for a few days to have a look around and decompress after the long flight. Then, depending on my mood, I will either head for Ko Phuket, a small island off the coast of Thailand, in the turquoise Andaman sea; or, I may choose the road less traveled, and take a short flight to Rangoon, Burma (aka Myanmar), and from there make my way by steamer and ferry up the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay and Pegan. Burma may be the last country in the world without a McDonald’s, and that can’t last long; I’d quite like to visit a place that has been that much unmarked by “progress”.

Also on the (very loose) itinerary are side trips to the aforementioned Angkor Wat, and probably into Laos as well. I have it on good authority that the Laotian capital, Vientiane, is one of the great secret finds of Southeast Asia, and I want to find out just why that is. I have gotten Lonely Planet guidebooks for the countries in question, and I will peruse them on my new Kindle (arigato, BookPage!), along with the books I have lined up for my next month’s Whodunit column in BookPage.

Sayonara for now!

As regular readers of Mysterious Orientations well know, one of my favorite things about being disoriented in the Orient is the wonderfully wacky mangling of the English language by the locals. Sometimes it is a hilarious misspelling (“No Smorking”); or it can be an oddly worded, but still understandable sign (“Be Careful of the Bee”). Sometimes it is understandable, sorta, but the details are a bit dubious, as on this great fire procedure sign in a Kyoto hotel: “In the event of fire, assume the low position and breathe through the bottom.” This is a technique I have not mastered, at least not the inhalation part.

Anyway, I have rounded up a bunch of pictures of over the past year, and it is now my intention to share them with you. If you have seen some of these before, please excuse the duplication; I am going through all my photos and adding them as I find them.

In Japan, embarrassment is worse than losing your foot, apparently.

Try bringing this in your carry-on luggage!

Profound or inscrutable? You be the judge.

How does one measure loveliness?

"I'm Gonna Happy, I Gave You Love Sick"

No doubt the path followed by the usual suspects...

Odd name for beauty salon...

Packaging for a toilet seat cover

What do you think this means?

Scary Pre-school; no English, but in this case it may not be necessary

T-Shirts are among the major Manglish culprits

Be sure to ask for DogTar wine by name!

Baked cookies? This changes everything!

It is fortuitous, the anhydrous entrance...

What can one possibly add to this?

I can't even guess what they were aiming for here!

Ya gotta love the balcony of no frippery!

I wonder how wide the seats are in travel class?

That's kinda charming

No hyphen shortage in China...

Wow! Bread AND Food!

Hopefully not as a menu item!

English is fine, product perhaps less so

Could this be, by any chance, "Frog Legs"?

Could be an MP3 Playar, I guess, but kinda looks like a SatNav...

What do you imagine "cracking nano foam" actually does?

Words to live by...

An oddly named Japanese health supplement

Or perhaps white?

This gem comes from my friend Eric van den Ing