TOO SWEET FOR ME - Bangkok, Thailand

Everything here is
sick-making pink,
the walls are wainscoted
with pink teddy bears.
Just fluffy toys,
all of them pink,
it's like eating honey
with sugar on top.
This is too cute,
sweet kind of cute,
I'm feeling noxious,
I'm about to puke.

Cakes and birch trees - Suzhou, China

The stack of papers...

In order to sooth L's recurring sugar abstinence crises instead of buying him an ice cream today I've opted for a slice of mille-feuille. I go to a fancy little bakery nested in the basement of a posh shopping mall and I order the cake. Instead of serving me right away a guy wearing a chef hat scribbles something on a receipt sheet. Actually this is not a very accurate term as the sheet works as a receipt only at the end of a long procedure that might make sense if you were purchasing a hundred kg of cement, a case of car sparks or, as we are already at it, a 20kg vanilla bag for your own bakery. Not for a single mignon cake though. The procedure prescribes in fact to take this three-multi-colored-copy form, go to a centralized cash register station serving all the shops of this section of the mall, pay for your order, receive two of the sheets correctly filled by a printer connected to the till and yet another receipt, go back to the bakery where an employee will keep one of the two sheets and give you the remaining one, the extra receipt and your cake. That, in order to make sure that he beats every relevant world record, he has wrapped in a plastic sheet and stored in a paper bag. I reckon that about fifteen birch trees have had to be felled in order to supply the procedure with the necessary raw material. Paper that everyone will obviously throw in the first trash bin at hand right after leaving the shop. The aggravating aspect of the situation is that this is not just a fancy of the managers of this particular mall. It works like that pretty much everywhere: shopping centers, department stores, food courts. You want to buy a lipstick? You'd like to eat a quick noodle soup? You need a bottle of honey? Well, then you have to take the stack of papers through all the steps of the route, until you finally throw it on a heap of garbage.
Hopefully they will recycle it. Well, actually, considering that…alright...hopefully they will…

More photos below:

Do you really eat rice??? - Suzhou, China

Some stacks of small Chinese rice bags

I'm at a convenience store to buy a couple of ice creams. If L doesn't take his daily sweet poison dose he's gonna be in a bad mood until the following night. And I'm the one who has to give him that shot.
When I'm walking by the rice corner I suddenly remember that we run out of it last time we cooked some leek and sausage risotto(*). I can't see the prices though. I ask the cashier how much the small(**) packs are, I get one of those and I drag it to the counter. It takes the girl a while to come to, she looks at me with a stunned expression and when she finally decides to scan the bar code she says: 
"Do you REALLY...eat rice?"
"Of course I do, why?"
"I thought..." she places her hand down on an imaginary table and then brings it up to her mouth to mime the action she's referring to "...that YOU only ate bread!"
That's funny: if you talk to a Chinese in Chinese like a Chinese he doesn't turn a hair, taking it for granted, but if he finds out that you eat rice he looks at you as if you were Yuri Gagarin who just disembarked from the Sputnik. 
I mean, of all foreigners, to me! I was born in the Po Plain, a land of rice fields, rice weeders and risotto. Chinese people are really great at surprising you by getting surprised at you. 

The chicken choir - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Look at those nice dresses

Just a few seconds after I've entered a clothing shop someone yells something that I don't understand, some other guy repeats the same thing, then it's a lady's turn and after that many other voices overlap. It seems that they are all shouting the same sentence: "Welcome to Uniqlo!". Yeah, sure, that's exactly what they are saying, and as I am the only one who's just entered the place they must necessarily be talking to me. Gosh, what a silly prank. In order to clear any doubt I turn towards the entrance and watch what happens next. Another customer gets in, an employee spots him and shouts: "Welcome to Uniqloooooo!" He's done it with a pseudo-nice tone which actually turns out to be irritating. It's as if he were focusing more on his performance than on the greeting itself, thus making the gesture not only insincere but ridiculous as well. His colleagues, who are all busy hanging shirts or folding t-shirts, hear him and repeat the sentence, parrot-like, without taking their eyes off what they are doing, using random techniques such as falsetto, trilling, rising and falling. They are using the old dazing-sales-technique, but it feels like being back at kindergarten again, or rather to have entered an tropical aviary.

First they say "Welcome Sir"...and then they search you! - Manila, Philippines

An unlikely "iPost" at a shopping mall

There is an enormous mess of shopping malls around the Makati and Ayala Avenue crossroads, apparently evergrowing, like some kind of urban benign tumor. The inevitable SM and Parkson malls can be found there, while Glorietta and Green belt have five branches each. They are laid out one next to the other, forming an uninterrupted commercial island a few square kilometers big. Shops, restaurants, department stores, cinemas, alfresco cafes, discos: hundreds of business venues and thousands of customers every day. A gold mine for the rich investors and the usual salary-eating trap for the middle classes of Asia, that when it comes to advertising and the call of the ephemeral don't have any form of self-defense and fall for it like little kids.
This avidity of the storekeepers runs counter to the general paranoia induced by the increasing criminality rate and the permanent sensation of political instability. This conflict takes place mostly at the mall entrances, where the clientele is channeled through narrow passages patrolled by security guards equipped with metal detectors.

Customer care-less - Thailand

This is another accusatory post. I'm publishing it for the benefit of those who are facing the same problem I had. And to try to affect as much as I can the reputation of the company involved, so that they can learn a lesson and act fairly in the future. For those who are not interested in the matter it might actually be a bit boring: just skip it and move on to the next post of this blog.

This time my target is the IT City group, a Thai store chain, specializing in computers and electronic products.
Before I start I actually have to admit that these probably are the best-stocked and fairest priced stores in Thailand. Unfortunately though, when I had a chance to test their attitude towards customers who have some problems (the so called customer or post sales service), the flunking was inevitable, immediate and absolute. And it definitely wasn't an isolated incident: the sequence of unacceptable situations was too long and serious to make any sort of extenuating circumstances applicable.
Here are the facts. My iFox USB internet card is out of order. It's my fault, it has been subjected to an unbearable sequence of blows and torsions, something inside was damaged and my PC doesn't recognize it anymore. It's a shame, I used to use it with a cheap AIS 3G plan and it never gave me any problem. I also tried to repair it: if possible I even made it worse. I'm a bit ashamed of that, but I was only trying to do what I had to do. My engineering qualification required me to try, success was hoped for but not to be taken for granted. 

Merry shopping! Christmas wishes from Citibank - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Citibank Malaysia sincere christmas wishes

Merry Shopping, that's the christmas wishes that Citibank decided to extend to its customers in Kuala Lumpur this year.
How sad! Irreverent! Offensive! So materialist!
These are some of the first things that people might think upon reading that ad, especially those who have, or pretend they have, an entirely different idea of christmas. And yet, come to think of it, this is exactly what it is all about. Christmas, for big firms and retailers, is just an instrument to boost their sales. And the majority of their customers share the same opinion. Everybody knows it, and everybody acts accordingly. Why hiding behind a bunch of hypocritical expressions, thoughts, images and tunes then? This year Citibank decided to steer clear of all that, getting straight to the point. Maybe it was an unintentional excess of candor. We'll never find out. But if we only take notice of the actual effect, without questioning of anybody's motives, as far as I am concerned this is perfectly fine. 
Merry shopping to you all then!

Re-read last year's Christmas poem here.

An ancient Venetian saying applied to a luxurious shopping mall - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Look at that fine round toilet bowl...

An old Venetian saying goes: "The weather, your ass and the rich will always do as they please." (Original version: "El tempo, el cul e i siori li fa sempre quel che vol lori".)
And in fact, no longer than ten minutes ago I was surrounded by a crowd of arrogant little assholes on the hunt for christmas presents in the luxury shops of this fancy shopping mall, while a monsoon storm was raging outside. There you have it, you proverb-loving readers: as expected, the weather and the rich are doing their part. Only my ass is missing, I was thinking, but I was underestimating the jet of plutonian atmosphere that was hitting my guts while I was absentmindedly watching those fanatics coming and going. I kept thinking about it while that cold air was working away at my ribs and, most important, at my belly.
And that's probably why I'm conceiving this silly post in a restroom while, seated on a toilet bowl, I'm trying to relax my stiffened bowels. Finally my ass (never before so proverbial) has started to do as he pleases too. Fortunately in these shopping malls even the bathrooms are spotless and luxurious. Moreover, though it might seem paradoxical to someone, the pieces of shit that float in here are less sniffy than the ones that trot out there.

Confiscation - Bangkok, Thailand

I pay the quick lunch that I just had at a small roadside restaurant, I turn around and I spot a waitress who is handing a gas cylinder to a man in uniform. He grabs it and gives it to his colleagues, who are standing on the back of a pick-up truck. What's going on? Since when are the cops collecting cylinders to be refilled? The vehicle is advancing slowly and another agent passes a stack of Lonely planets (photocopied ones) to his mates. I take a close look at the truckload, there is a bit of everything: bags full of t-shirts and pants, swimming trunks, folding chairs, a metal table, the travel guides and the cylinder. The truck is going past a massage parlor now. A few deck chairs used for foot reflexology have been placed on the road side, across from the shop. The cops choose one of them, get rid of all the cushions and towels, fold it and put it in the truck.

Self propelled - Bangkok, Thailand

You're walking next to some funny structure, and you throw a quick glance: it looks like the usual Thai street stall. This one is selling labels, banners and pennants. Football teams, countries, musicians, heroes, monarchs, naked girls, monks and gurus. Normally at night this kind of handmade structures equipped with wheels are "packed", closed and towed away with a motorbike, or manually pushed into a garage nearby. Sometimes they are even left in a corner outdoor, protected by a tangle of chains and padlocks. 

You are about to leave when the stall, suddenly...moves, apparently by itself. You look more carefully and you spot the presence of a motorbike inside. The whole little shop is built around it. The shopkeeper-driver is immersed in the darkness of a narrow corridor, without any side visibility, with only a few square centimeter-wide slot in front of him, at least two meters away. He stops after the next junction, sells something to a couple of customers, then starts the bike again and speeds off towards new business horizons. When asked "can you see the road well while you're driving?" he answers "Very well indeed!"

Let's hope that he knows what he's talking about.

The stall from behind

Customers

The beehive - Cairo, Egypt

Ramadan in Cairo is a curious time.
When the sun is set, because of the Iftar, on the streets and the squares there's not a soul around. The familiar uproar and the rock concert-like air vanish as if the city were the setting of a dream.
If you are crossing a road you can relax: that creepy feeling of being a scared cat that springs from lane to lane dodging speeding cars, at this time of the day is like a nightmare half-dreamt.

A few hours later though, let’s say at 1 a.m., when you go down for a snack and walk out of the hotel, a whirl of sensations just swallows you up. You freeze on the sidewalk and stares at the sight, stunned by the noise, the lights and the smells.
Deep into the night the shops are all open and huge crowds gather in front of the windows. They hunt for shoes, clothing and sweets, the same kind of stuff that you'd buy in the afternoon. You’re looking at people of any kind: not only adult men but old gentlemen too, and mothers with children who pull at their skirts.

Like a web of human threads it invades every space. Focused on the goods displayed in shops and stalls, people glide on the asphalt in multiple files. Hitting, blocking, crossing and twisting they look like water snakes into one of those basins that can be found in an Asian market.
Who is in a hurry and keeps kicking the heels of the innocent pedestrian who walks in front, decides to swerve and to share the road with the endless chains of battered cars.
At the main intersections the flows intersect and as in the screen of an old video-game they cross the road with intermittent starts.

When you're done with your shawarma you go back to your room and the activity of that beehive has yet to stop. Half an hour later you're awake in the dark, listening to the honks, the screams and the roar, that mixed with vapours of spices and grease, keep filtering in through the chinks in the window.

This is Cairo during Ramadan: that’s the way they sing lullabies here.