Week 86 · Bangkok & Singapore · September 2015
Bangkok
After working 40 hours between 5pm Friday and 10pm Monday, proposal done and I was off first thing Tuesday morning to Bangkok for an industry conference. Or a conference centre 30 miles from Bangkok — like going on a business trip to Washington DC and spending the entire time in Frederick.
Nothing special about the conference centre — it had about 20 restaurants in the food court and none served Thai food (I know — it is just food to them) and I only ate Thai food once. The supplier event was a nice boat ride — pretty much the same as Sharon, the girls, and I did a year ago except that I was discussing the logistics of distributed combined-cycle power generation using small-scale regasifiers on islands in Southeast Asia. The highlight was leaving afterwards — unrelated to the event, a Beatles tribute band was playing. They were great and invited people up on stage with them, and sounded just like them.
The Erawan Shrine bombing occurred on August 17, 2015 — just weeks before this visit — killing 20 people and injuring 125 at the four-faced Brahma shrine at the Ratchaprasong intersection in central Bangkok. It was the deadliest bombing in Thailand's history and targeted the shrine during peak tourist hours. The attack was carried out by Uyghur militants in retaliation for Thailand's deportation of over 100 Uyghur asylum seekers back to China earlier that year. The shrine was repaired and reopened within days, and remains one of the most visited religious sites in Bangkok. The photo in this post shows the site shortly after the bombing.
Went to Singapore for some more business meetings and then went out with my team and a recruiter who had been contacting me through LinkedIn. For having a reputation as a serious/business-only city, it was much more lively than I expected and Club Street compares to Itaewon. He introduced me to his fellow recruiter and they claimed we had met — but couldn't make the connection until they said "you're the guy wearing sunglasses on his LinkedIn picture." I might need to change that.
Toured during the day Saturday — really beautiful city and it is literally a city in a garden. Met Peter and Christina and some other expats for dinner at a hawker market, a low-key neighbourhood food market which was mayhem for the dinner hour but fun. Exchanged stories of the "IKEA visit" which is a rite of passage for expats anywhere trying to outfit small apartments with cheap furniture.
"Exchanged stories of the IKEA visit — a rite of passage for expats anywhere trying to outfit small apartments with cheap furniture."
Singapore's hawker centres are open-air cooked food complexes where hundreds of individual stalls serve cheap, freshly prepared food — a system created in the 1970s when the government relocated Singapore's street hawkers into purpose-built centres to improve hygiene and reduce traffic congestion. In 2020, Singapore's hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Several Singapore hawker stalls have been awarded Michelin stars or Bib Gourmand recognition — making them among the most decorated and affordable Michelin-recognised restaurants in the world. The hawker centre remains the primary communal dining space for Singaporeans of all backgrounds.
I was planning on heading from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, but had to come back to Korea for a work issue — but coming back will make this upcoming weekend in Los Angeles easier to handle. The flight from Jakarta to LA via Seoul was over 20 hours travel time. Now just a short 11-hour flight there.