Madame Woo
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Madame Woo" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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12:12 pm
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the essential guide to thailand ... for (ugly old) men!
I picked this little gem of a guide to Thailand for sex tourists last night. It was FREE!
It looked pretty good at first, it had pictures of half-naked guys, but then when you read the stories
it's pretty clear who it's aimed at "i saw a boy, he looked so young, maybe he would say I was too old for him!" (don't freak, boy here means 20-30 basically)
You can see it's aimed at Thailand newbies, since you're NEVER too old or to uggo to get laid here in the land of smiles, as long as there's money in your wallet. I srsly saw a guy with a walker in the hooker district. Makin' us proud, grandpa!
There's great information in there too: "In Thailand, as in other countries, AIDS is primarily spread through heterosexual sex" O RELY?
Yep, it's us straights are slipping into gay meth cocktail orgies and back bathrooms glory holes and givin gays the HIV.
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10:57 pm
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all your base
yeah, i went there
Being in Asia, home of all bad and hilarious translations, guess who might be doing translations? While I'm trying to translate well, how much funner would it be to write horrible ASIAN TRANSLATIONS?
Frankly, the RIAA has no chance to stop piracy when piracy is so value-added. Never mind the flexibility offered by pirated formats over their stupid restrictions, but you haven't watched the Simpsons until you've watched them TRANSLATED BY SOME 13-year old CHINESE KID who "speaks" "english".
VALUE ADDED.
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11:02 pm
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cambodia
bleh, i have to wake up at 5 tomorrow to take a van to cambodia for a visa run. all of my companions will probably be sexpats. i will use this time to perfect my "waiting with godot" story, as that is surely what i will be doing.
in other notes, a. a man who has obsessive compulsive disorder, smells like a math major and picks his nose in public is MORE POPULAR THAN ME.
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04:25 pm
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hey geeks: recommendations for easy-for-end-user cms
okay, pretend you're an italian gentleman farmer who needs to change something on his website.
which cms would be the easiest for you to use?
dude wants to be able to updates pages himself, which makes total sense, but the only cms i really know is drupal, and that's barely developer-friendly, never mind user-friendly.
the website will have about 40 pages, (really, 8 pages, but each of them has to be in french, english, italian and german), it's a brochureware site, but he wants to be able to make changes to the content.
and i have to be able to get the css to look exactly the way that i want -- not just use some provides themes or whatever. in my ideal world, i wouldn't have to learn how to write a theme, but i'll survive if i do.
i thought of wordpress since it's a small site. any ideas?
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07:17 am
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sweater!
i would just like to point out that i got this sweater in the garbage, and even from an ocean away, i still LOVE IT! NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS!!!!
around the house, it was referred to as "the garbage sweater". simon hates it.
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02:04 pm
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quotes from fred
"everything is different here, I don't like it" -- Fred on Bangkok
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03:08 am
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who is this guy?
OMG, who is this guy? Can I have a job making out with him for the rest of eternity?
Can I become a boy and steal his haircut? Dear Jesus.
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09:25 am
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dinosaursattack
Jurassic Park meets home appliances.
Bangkok is like a video games with secret levels, you're always discovering all kinds of weird, unexpected gems.
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09:45 pm
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more cranes for pmcurdy!
The Bangkok night falls in full tropical lassitude, it is 30 degrees+ even at night, everything is weighed down by the heat and the dust -- the night, the streets, the people coming home from work, traipsing down the steps of the sky train, the dogs already sleeping.
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10:23 am
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chuey duey! (help!)
I was walking back from breakfast when I heard frantic meowing in the sky. "WTF?", I thought, "why do I hear a cat in the sky?". I look up and see this little guy, stuck in the door of a shophouse. He had managed to climb all way up behind the door, and get stuck at the top. He fell down a little bit into the front gate here.
He eventually got down, but then he ran under a parked car.
I hope he's ok.
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12:13 am
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construction in thong lo
This picture is especially for pmcurdy!
The sun was setting in Thong Lo, Bangkok's ritzy Japanese expat neighborhood, when I saw these cranes.
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07:55 pm
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You're the reason I'm leaving
Saigon is like a science fiction movie where no one ever goes outside because there has been a horrible disaster, and HK billionaires fight to the death for the 4 molecules of breathable air left in the universe.
Don't believe me? Here is a short movie, shot from my taxi this afternoon, of the traffic nightmare that is Saigon.
It's like a Hell's Angels rally full of short Vietnamese bikers, 24 hours a day, forever. Whereas the good citizen of Whereversville board up their windows and doors when the Hells' annual shindig rolls into town, *you* actually have to wade through this motherfucker to get anywhere: there are no pedestrian crossings in Saigon, few stoplights of any kind, and no elevated walkways.
Get me the fuck out of there. This chicken isn't crossing that road. I'm going back to BKK if I have to teach English to ladyboys or work in a ping-pong show to do it. The only way you'll get me to come back to Saigon is with an oxygen tank and a 24-hour chauffeur.
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04:35 am
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cross town traffic
Technology in the developing world is small, young, fast, and flexible: the mobile phone, the motorbike (know as a scooter at home.) A hacker's paradise? Necessity being your mom, and all.
Bangkok has recently gotten digital cash. I bought a refill for my Thai mobile. You don't buy credits anymore, you buy "money" -- which you can enter as credits into your phone, or use to pay bills, or something (it was all in Thai). I promise pictures on my return to Bangkok.
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01:22 am
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tectonic plates
"I wanted to stand on that exact place on the earth's crust where you feel the tectonic plates come crashing together." --John Burdett
Well, here I am: the wild east, the new frontier, the exact place where the tectonic platest come crashing together: Asia.
There is a palpable sense of optimism and hope in Saigon. People seem eager to get ahead, and get ahead in a good way: the schools are full of kids, teenagers, and university students, eager, with no where to go but up.
Thailand, on the other hand, feels like it is eating its seed corn (or rice :-), trying to get rich in a fast, unsustainable way.
Jeremy Seabrooke speaks of his grandmother's generation, who lived through the industrial revolution as the generation raised "to work and to want" -- that is where Thailand seems to be headed: so much advertizing, so many luxury goods, designer brands, looks, condos, the search for the new "lifestyle". We suffer from this problem too, but it seems worse there. So much of the wealth is ill-gotten wealth, because of corruption.
I swear the BKK Guru (a free paper) had an ad for a "condorarium" in Phuket -- a condo where you just ride up in your yatch, Venise-style. I'm not even joking! They even called it a condorarium! (Or condorina, or some other hideous composite word!)
What characterizes the third world is not the absence of wealth, now I understand, it's enormous disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor. I have never seen as many BMWs and Mercs as on the streets of BKK, and I went to university at Waterloo, one of the favored overseas dumping grounds for the offspring of rich HK Chinese.
I found this woman crouching on the ground in the 30+ degree sun, selling coconuts and bottles of water meters from Louis Vutton in Saigon.
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07:31 pm
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the Thai grilled cheese sandwich
Roadside noodles are the Thai equivalent of a grilled cheese sandwich: it's what you eat when you don't know what to eat., at any hour of the night and day.
These are noodles with red pork and gyoza (dumplings), in some kind of chicken broth. There's some steamed greens, fried garlic and pork skin in there, too. You add chili peppers and fish sauce.
The whole thing will set you back 35B (1$). Aroi!
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10:31 pm
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In a blanket
OMG I miss my kitty kat. Simon took this picture -- isn't he so cute?
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07:16 am
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"turn right at the bean curd shop", or "directions in the most advanced city on earth"
Japan is the most technologically advanced country on earth (Onion article: Earthquake sets Japan back to 2147, yet maps of anything in Tokyo contain roly-poly directions like "turn left at the tofu shop", and "it's right next to the guy with the big fish".
As an example, here is the map to where I'm staying. It includes landmarks such as Tokyo university, the police box, and the "bean curd shop".
Rock on, bean curd shop! Maybe I'll buy some bean curd today.
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08:10 pm
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weird shit you can and can't check in on flights
These are ACTUAL ITEMS listed on the carry-on/checked baggage list of what you can bring on a plane.
(from: the Canadian government's list of what's allowed and not allowed on flights)
Things that can be checked but not carried on:
axes
crossbows
fake ammunition
bowling balls
GUNS
meat thermometers
water in containers larger than 100ml, purchased before security check
No way Hosay!
catapults
molotov cocktails
nitroglycerin
pinatas
Welcome everywhere, including carry-on:
whips
parachutes
dry ice
cigar cutters
pudding
gel filled bras
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01:27 am
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"Debunking third world myths with the best statistics you've ever seen"
I was surprised in visiting Thailand and Laos, to see very few really poor people. Oh, sure, you can't drink the tap water, but I also didn't see lots of rail thin kids dying with flies in their eyes -- like in Christian Children Fund ads. This contradicted everything I'd ever heard about "The Thirld World" -- that everyone lives in crippling misery. Maybe only African has really poor people, I thought?
Turns out there was something to my impression. Many of our ideas about the developing world were last true in the 70s. The world has moved on.
In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses funky new stats visualizaton software to shows us the facts and debunk myths about the developing world.
You can try out the visualization tool from his talk here. I disliked stats as much as everyone, but this tool is great: countries are little bubbles that float across the screen, you can animate it and see the years advance, you can plot life expectancy, internet use, family size, etc, against each other.
I just tried it, and discovered something interesting in just a few minutes: while Vietnam has an income per capita of 2553$, and Cambodia just 324$ less (2227$) -- the life expectancy in Vietnam (70 years) is 13 years higher than Cambodia (57)!
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06:29 pm
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good travel/expatriate medical insurance?
Hey world travellers,
does anyone have any good recommendations for travel/expatriate (long trip) insurance?
I bought my travel insurance from travel cuts last time, and it was pretty shitty. I'd like to find something better.
thanks for any info!
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