I’ve been increasingly using Path recently to document my daily life in Hong Kong. It’s an amazingly well designed app that lets you share stuff with your closest friends (private Facebook if you will). Similar to Instagram, you can apply filters to photos with some nice results. Instead of these photos being lost in the stream forever I thought I’d start sharing some of them here in a new series I’m calling “Hong Kong Path”.
To the untrained eye or ear, Asian languages can appear completely incomprehensible and indistinguishable from each other. The written characters may as well be hieroglyphs and unlike some other languages, listening in on a conversation isn’t going to give you much to go on. The guide below it intended to provide a simple quick start for telling apart Chinese, Japanese and Korean. You’ll soon find it’s really rather simple! Read more
After being forced to rub shoulders with much of Bangkok’s tourist population the previous day I decided to change tracks and headed to the multicultural district of Yaowarat and Phahurat (เยาวราชและพาหุรัด) which is home to sizeable Chinese and Indian communities. Filled with narrow alleyways and street markets, what the neighbourhoods lack in grandiose attractions, is made up for with local character aplenty. Read more
Nice (if somewhat predictable) video created by ANA for their IS JAPAN COOL? promotion encouraging people to return after last years earthquake/tsunami which drove tourist numbers to a record lows.
If you’re looking for a quiet, relaxing holiday then Bangkok probably wouldn’t be your first choice. What with year-round heat and frenetic streets which require your full attention just to navigate, the city assaults your every sense each time you step out the door. It barely lets up unless you manage to escape to one of its quieter quarters, of which the historic center of Rattanakosin (รัตนโกสินทร์) is not one. Read more
One of my ambitions in life is to design and build my own house. I am not strictly a designer or builder but I do have a very clear vision in mind of what I would like to create eventually. I think the first step towards this would be to start with something a little more manageable in scale and while researching the possibilities, a number of projects which make very clever use of small spaces caught my attention… Read more
A stunning time-lapse video by Spot On Idea (a production company in Hong Kong). Sometimes I have to pinch myself that I actually live here.
Everyone who knows I live in China is always surprised to learn that I’d never visited Southeast Asia – up until now I had always been more preoccupied with exploring the mainland and Korea / Japan. I decided to put this straight and during the Chinese New Year holidays and managed to get some cheap tickets to Bangkok in Thailand. Read more