Monochrome

Open House

The Open House bookstore is Bangkok’s newest buzzy retail concept. Atop the city’s most high-end retail space, the Central Embassy mall, it is a fittingly chic combination of bookstore, lounge and food court designed by the same architects who fitted Tokyo’s exquisite T-Site bookstore. At Open House, the concept is an interesting one. Beautiful art books (and an exhibition space) pull in the punters and the various food outlets scattered among the shelves ring the tills. It is beautifully executed, with comfy sofas and floor-to-ceiling windows giving dramatic views over the Ploenchit skyscrapers, almost like a tropical Fifth Avenue. The whole thing really speaks to Bangkok’s new confidence as a glamorous style destination.

I bought an interesting Japanese novella, The Transparent Labyrinth by Keiichiro Hirano, and had my eye on a cool inflatable bonsai for my new place only to be told it was for display only, not sale.

Concrete and chlorophyll

City wild

The ever-reliable Coconuts Bangkok site reports on attempts to put “Uncle Fatty,” a notoriously chubby suburban monkey, on a diet here.

Meanwhile, a restaurant has been busted serving endangered species to Chinese tourists. The Luang To To restaurant was found to be serving cobras, andangered soft shell turtles and pangolin meat to its guests. This follows on from the revelations of tiger meat being served in the city a few years ago.

Death by plastic

Of Bangkok’s environmental problems – a sinking water table, stinking canals, the clearing of the city’s trees – its choking addiction to plastic is one of the most visible. With its delicious culture of street food (where snacks are frequently served in styrofoam and/or double bagged) and in its plastic-happy 7-11s the city churns through a frightening amount of single-use plastics. Indeed, Thailand is one of the five South East Asian nations said to be responsible for 60% of all the plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

Bangkok-based Norwegian photographer Ben Zander is seeking to raise awareness of the issue (as well as money to supply 7-11s with paper bags.) His project is a photo series called “Death by plastic” featuring Thai celebs (like the host of the Face Thailand here) posing against plastic pollution.

The pictures will be auctioned for the cause.

Deer tears

Artist Sakarin Krue-On explores the sad true story of the Schomburgk’s deer in his new exhibition at the Tang Gallery, “A Talebearer’s Tale”. The species once ranged throughout central Thailand until it was declared extinct in 1938. Today only one specimen survives, stuffed and mounted in the museum of natural history in Paris.

#BKKY

Bangkok youth talks about love, sex and identity in new documentary #BKKY.

Greetings from Planet Bangkok

  

Bangkapi-bound

I have spent the last two days on the canal boats zipping up and down the Khlong Saen Seap, one of Bangkok’s most quintessential experiences. You hop into the boats as they briefly moor then speed on again, conductors perched precariously along the sides and commuters – women in headscarves, local shoppers, gaggles of kids and office workers – dodging deathly splashback by raising plastic sheets at the sides of the boats. Along the way, you pass traditional waterside communities, brightly painted toy-town mosques and concrete walkways brightened with graffiti and bouganvilleas. At the end of the route is the Mall in Bangkapi, a vast shopping centre which I liked for its very local flavour (and thus non-tourist prices), wide range of shops, lavish food hall and – when I was there – fun, if cheesy, Avatar exhibition.

 

Bread and heartache

Holey is a stylish-looking artisanal bakery on Sukhumvit Soi 33. I had passed it earlier in the week, and waking up craving crusty European bread, I decided to make my way back. While googling for directions though, I turned up more than I had expected. First of all I was surprised to read that the hipster haven was an import from Bangladesh. In fact, the business is a refugee of sorts – having originally started in Dhaka it opened in Bangkok following a harrowing terrorist attack in 2016. ISIS-inspired militants had burst in, killing 20 customers (after torturing those who could not recite a passage from the Koran, including seven Japanese aid workers). I read this munching on my baguette in the cafe’s stylish and friendly Bangkok space, pondering what would have happened had I been in Dhaka that day. Why had a bread shop been a target? Was it simply a place where foreigners congregated, or was it more an scathing comment on the life of leisure enjoyed by expats in a country where few could afford 100 baht (or the equivalent) for a just-baked bread loaf?  The Bangkok bakery that day was certainly full of the fair and the moneyed, Phrom Phong beautiful people, Australian and European expats. And was I then “the enemy” too? Lots to chew over as I enjoyed my bread and butter.

Bangkok Sculpture Center

The Bangkok Sculpture Center is one of the city’s (literally) hidden gems. Rarely visited due to its extraordinarily remote location in the Northeastern suburbs, far from even a bus route, it houses a collection of thousand-year-old Buddhas and then a spectacular hangar-like space of contemporary Thai sculpture in a striking modernist concrete building.

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Garuda

Lording over the collection at the Bangkok Scuplture Center is this powerful copy of the 1938 garuda bust adorning the city’s former Central post office. The original can now be seen up-close from the newly opened roof garden of the new Thailand Design and Culture Centre in the restored building on Charoen Krung.

 

Subashok the Art Centre

The sculpture of Kma Sirisamphan at the impressive new Subhasok The Art Centre space on Sukhmuvit Soi 39.

An escape

After a solid ten days in Bangkok, but still with more than a week until my boyfriend was due to arrive, I decided to head out of town for a change of scenery. The first plan, excitingly, was to fly to Assam. However, even though the flights were cheap it turned out that the Indian visa was a bureaucractic hurdle I hadn’t factored in so I put that aside for next time.

Instead, I decided (the night before) to hop on a 12-hour bus ride to Thailand’s South. I was up at 5am to the distant Southern Bus Terminus and then off on a slow, rolling journey through the lush green countryside to Krabi.

By the end of the afternoon, the South announced itself outside my window with shacks in gloomy rows of rubber trees, open-back trucks piled with durian and jackfruits,  jadded jungly limestone spires piercing the skyline and the copper domes of small town mosques shining in the dying light of the sun.

From Krabi –  pleasant, prosperous little city – I took a longtail boat across the bay to Railay Beach, a paradise under its dramatic crags. After a day here I moved on to Khao Sok national park, where the same imposing karsts rose not out of the ocean but out of a jade green lake and a thick ancient rainforest.

The glorious South

   

Bangkok snack