Conflicting rights - Bangkok, Thailand

Seated on the tables barring the passage

Sometimes we have a lot to learn from the simplicity, the humanity and the flexibility of South East Asians (for an example you can take a look at the last picture below). Or better, to re-learn, as fifty or sixty years ago we were pretty much like them.
For some other aspects though it is better for us to go and take our lessons somewhere else. I realized that when I was having a bite and a beer at at table near the edge of a street in Bangkok. The restaurant management had placed their tables on the section of the sidewalk in front of the entrance. Normally people prefer to walk on the road - especially in this area and in the evening - turning it into a sort of pedestrian area. The road was jammed though, as it often happens here: a taxi, a tuk-tuk, a street stall and a few people ordering their food. The passersby were forced to move to the sidewalk. Notice that this is exactly the opposite of what should normally happen. This is a very common thing in Asia though, and it is not what I intend to point out here.

The discrete time dimension security - Moscow, Russia

The Moscow metro

Last week I was watching a video at a contemporary art exhibition at the Moscow Manege. According to what the author claims as soon as the users of the huge city subway system set foot on the long escalators they suddenly enter a different dimension, where time ceases to be a continuum entity and becomes a sequence of discrete quantities: those of the intervals between two consecutive stops and those of the long waits at the exit gates. The only thing we can do to regain possession of our personal time experience - we read on the exhibit caption - is leaving the flock, walk in the opposite direction, do something unusual, different, original. 
Maybe. It seems to me though that the plastic masses of people that clog the bottlenecks of the escalators mouths - not discrete at all, actually rather continuous, uniform, almost liquid - can be a useful source of security, confidence, physical and human warmth, especially when you are wedged between the soft paunch of a boozer and the prominent ass of a beautiful Moscow girl. 
Then you recall that a few years back a group of fanatics launched a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, causing a massacre, and you realize that in cases like this the larger the mass the higher the number of victims, so you tend to agree with the artist, not really to reset the hands of your personal clock but rather to save your precious ass. 
Still, dropping the nipple of that huge, sensual and wobbling - albeit time-upsetting - breast is not easy at all. 

Funny signs/9

156783 people like this, only Mark Zuckerberg is not so sure about it...(Boracay, Philippines)

Cupid was here (Florence, Italy)

You! (Bangkok, Thailand)

Yet another cynical post: the Thai prostitution myth

Penis rock and vagina rick at sunset, how romantic! (Koh Samui, Thailand)

This is the cynical post that I promised here.

Next time I see one of those cheese TV reports on prostitution in Thailand I swear I am going to puke. Of course the majority of western journalists are good professionals and I wouldn't dare say anything about them or their work. There are some, though, who should have their pens, laptops and tablets confiscated. A bunch of low level word-workers who rely on trite myths and stereotypes to justify the salaries their editors give them.
Those that for years have told us the story of the poor Thai girls taken advantage of or even enslaved by old and slimy sexual tourists are among the most sly.
It's hard for me to believe that they have really been in Thailand, collected evidence, looked around, tried to understand and finally got it all wrong that way. It must somehow be intentional. They must have based what they wrote on hearsay, relying on some urban legend or isolated tear-jerking case in order to achieve some sensationalist effect and exploit the overwhelming Western hypocrisy. Reading Michel Houllebecq could provide some inspiring ideas on the subject. On the other hand it is quite unlikely that over the years I've only come across exceptional cases. I got to an apparently arrogant yet unequivocal conclusion: I just know more than them about this subject.

How to fuck up a nice place - Koh Samui, Thailand

Beach party

My fingertips are itching. I need to write a couple of cynical posts, and the first one is going to be about the Thai island of Koh Samui: the perfect example of a heavenly place that have been fucked up in just a few years. 
I've been coming to Chaweng beach for about ten years. I remember well the impression I got the first time I got here: a beautiful bay with white sand, clear water and tropical vegetation. Lively at night: a few pubs with live music and screens for sport events, a couple of discos where you could spot a certain number of hookers but also a lot of "normal" customers, including Thais, and a few bars. The general atmosphere was still very simple, in line with the rural origins of the country: a lot of street food stalls, mototaxis that could take you anywhere for a small fee, songthaews - something in between a taxi and a bus - authentic local markets, nice people, some funny odd ones, smiles, coziness. I liked it a lot. I'm neither the no-electricity-faraway-island type of tourist nor the luxury resort one. Koh Samui was just the right mix. 

Wrong signs, with photos - Suzhou, China

Signs in China are often translated in English. I am not entirely sure about it but I suspect that there might be some law or government guideline behind this. Normally road signs and information boards in public places are correctly translated. When it comes to the private sector though any sign can suddenly become some sort of comic strip, cheering you up when you are in a bad mood or simply a bit bored. Sometimes the mistakes are so funny that one might think they came out of a lousy Google translation or that out of a long list of dictionary entries somebody carelessly picked the first one, regardless of whether it made sense or not.
In order to give you an idea of the quantity of mistakes over the total number of signs I'm only publishing the ones I've spotted in the Suzhou residential compound where I've been staying for a few weeks.

Hundreds of copies put up all over the compound, all of them with the same typo

This is my favorite, it beats them all 

Possibly the best war museum I've seen - Nanjing, China

300000 victims in just one city 

We get off the train at Nanjing central station, take a quick look at Google Maps and get on the subway to Yunjinlu station. After misinterpreting the station area map we end up at the Silk and brocade museum. We understand straight away that we've made a mistake, nonetheless we take a jolly little walk among silkworms, looms and robes. At the end of it we get out again under the Central-Eastern China scorching sun and enter the right museum, the Nanking massacre one. The structure spreads over a number of air-conditioned halls and an outdoor area (more suffering, it would've been much better to come here in spring). The visitors can walk among commemorative sculptures and installations, reconstructions, bunkers, authentic (and rather grim) mass graves unearthed many years after the events took place and an amazing photo exhibition that I recommend you leave as the last part of your visit. 
Obviously, in order to focus on the real value of the exhibition, one has to scratch the inevitable bombast glaze that coats the whole thing and overlook for a few hours the Chinese government exploitation of the historical events (and the subsequent hatred against the Japanese) for slimy regional supremacy purposes. Beautiful sentences of the "forgivable, but not forgettable" type can sound rather shallow in this context. 
This is no doubt one of the best war museums I've seen though. Those in Hanoi and Saigon can also sport first class exhibits but the buildings that house them and the general care for details are definitely of a much lower level. At the Nanjing museum quality encompasses a number of different aspects: architectural, artistic, historical and documentary. And if that were not enough the admission is totally free, for everyone. If you happen to be anywhere in Eastern China (especially in Shanghai or the surrounding region) I strongly recommend you pay a visit to it

A few more photos: