Posts Tagged ‘Bangkok’
New place, new mind
It’s come to my attention that some of you came under the impression, based on my previous post, that I had moved to China. I did write that one intentionally vague, so I’ll make it clear. My new base is Bangkok, Thailand.
The thing I have enjoyed most since moving here has been attending book events, believe it or not.
I went to the Bangkok literary festival at Kunsthalle, over near Hua Lamphong where I happened to stumble upon a gorgeous plate of crispy fried belly pork, with the most unctuous white fat, atop a bed of ramen, before heading there. (The dish is pictured below.)
I went to a private book club, examining thirst, hosted by my friend, the lovely and sublimely talented Pim Wangtechawat, and two editions of a more public reading club that has surprised me with how enjoyable it is to read en masse and then discuss the books we’re reading. The literary scene in Bangkok is burgeoning and I predict it will grow handsomely given the grassroots happenings occurring.
The second-most enjoyable is being more active — going to yoga classes, walking around, sports clubs, exploring. Being more physically active, and out and about, is always a plus.
Sometimes, I’ll be riding the BTS, Bangkok’s metal sky train, looking around at everyone, being a weirdo, and I’ll think to myself, “my god, I live here now”. Truly, it is a kind of luxury to be mobile in this way: an international cosmopolite, a writer abroad.
It is not all paradise.
Both times I’ve joined a badminton group to play mixed doubles I’ve been drenched in sweat, sitting in front of the fan in between games, feeling like I might keel over and die during games, such is the heat and humidity.
The noise and traffic pollution of parts of Bangkok is bad. I look forward to the EV revolution sweeping these parts. Apparently, big cities in China, like Beijing and Shanghai, are noticeably calmer and cleaner now due to electric vehicles, with their softly whining electric motors.
It’s intriguing the way the mind changes once it inhabits a new city. For the curious, the adventurers, the philosophers, diplomats and artists, it is as sure a process as it was for those sailing around the Mediterranean ports and harbours millennia ago.
The age when Greek philosophy, as goods and ideas and poetry were being traded, arriving at increasingly prosperous port cities, was born. (A book I’m currently reading is How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, by Adam Nicholson, which has been fascinating.)
Bangkok is a stimulating place. Almost overwhelmingly so. There are layers here. Parts and puzzles I’m still figuring out. Week by week a little more is revealed. But it’s not only the city and its people you’re learning, it’s also yourself.
So I’m expanding, not contracting, not diminishing. The opposite, one hopes. Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed that God is dead and that man’s meaning is self-created. Perhaps discovery is my meaning, or one of them.
Bit by bit, you discover more about the world, and one of the biggest discoveries is that your own mind has capacities and extraordinarily deep wisdom buried in there. As one old Buddhist once said, Buddhahood exists within us all.
I’ve recently attuned to just how important mindset is, listening to a venerable researcher by the name of Ellen Langer. A professor of psychology at Harvard University, Langer has conducted some famous experiments.
One experiment involved old guys and making them talk and think like they were much younger, which apparently made them noticeably younger looking, with improved hearing and other markers, within the space of a week, compared to a control group, all by just changing their mindset.
On a podcast, Langer spoke about how fatigue is a mindset. She gave the example of someone who’d spent all day Word processing, so that he felt very tired at the end of the day, only to sit down to play the piano, and feel much better.
She gave the example of telling one set of participants to do 100 jumping jacks, who would feed back that they’d feel tired around the 60-mark. Another set of people, they told to perform 200 jumping jacks. And guess what? The number of jumping jacks when they’d feel tired was significantly higher. This is astonishing.
Consider it for a moment. Just by changing the goal, from 100 to 200, the rate at which fatigue set in was significantly different. No other condition changed. This is a mind-blowing result.
Langer herself is clearly an outstanding person, with an impressive mindset. She told a story about how her house burnt down. In an almost throwaway line, she said something like, “I’d already lost all my things, I thought, I may as well not throw away my sanity, too”.
That was just a small example of how Langer has a strong mind. Of someone who reflexively looks on the bright side, gets on with things, and doesn’t dwell on the small fry. Most things are inconveniences rather than tragedies is another one of her lines.
Listening to her talk, and the powerful, evidence-based learnings she’s discovered about mindset and mindfulness, has inspired me to carry out my own experiments with mindset. I won’t go into them, but it’ll be interesting to try.
The one about fatigue was especially pertinent. Because it’s true, no matter how tired you feel, the body usually does, always, have more gas in the tank. The benefits of mindfulness and awareness are powerful. It is never too late to harness those powers.
Until next time!
February: freelancing woes (and salvation); Bangkok & Taipei; and my hunger for some time off
cafe in bangkok
This year February is longer than usual. And the leap day falls on a Saturday. Will you do something special with this twenty-ninth day?
It’s been a while since I wrote you, reader. And last time we met I was in Chiang Mai chafing at the idyllic nature of it all. After Chiang Mai I went to Bangkok and I simultaneously missed Chiang Mai, its luscious nature, and felt glad to be away from it. Such are our contradictory natures.
I arrived in Chiang Mai on the 22nd January and I left Thailand, via Bangkok, on the 21st February. I spent 30 days in Thailand, unexpectedly extending my stay by several days.
I write you from a hostel in Taipei, Taiwan. It is the same hostel I stayed in for over a month last year. Next Monday I leave and travel back to the Philippines. I won’t explain all my comings and goings to you, but just know that traveling is sometimes based on whims and it is perilous to ignore those whims.
A week ago or so I had a bit of a crisis. Basically I was having a meltdown because I had spent too much money in Thailand and I had no work booked in. The pitches I had managed to send off in the past month had all been rejected and I even had had one commission cut off. The money going out was not being replaced by money coming in. This is not sustainable.
I even thought about quitting journalism and just finding some stable and safe job. Then I hustled. I pitched. I worked. I have mostly stayed in or around my hostel, venturing out only to buy food, to go running and swimming. Salvation came via a commission that wasn’t even my pitch. It was from an editor who I contacted via Twitter last August while I was in Singapore, and with whom I arranged a coffee-meet. Since then I have kept in touch with this editor, pitching her on occasion, and finally I have received paid work. I have received more work, copywriting, via my network too. In Chinese this is known as guanxi — a term that goes beyond the western-equivalent word: networking. To develop good guanxi is key to a good life.
So I will have money coming in again, which is good. Money is always good.
a park in taipei
I also feel like I need to settle down somewhere for a while and work on literary writing. That is really important to me. To find some space and move away from the commercial writing (journalism) and to seek the solace and joy of working on my own stuff. I am still not sure where this place will be. I’ll let you know…
I’ve been a journalist for over seven years and a full-time freelancer for five. Maybe it is natural that my thoughts turn to some kind of career break. It would be great to hear from another journalist, or anyone, who has taken a break of this kind, and what they learned from the experience, or even maybe transitioned to doing something completely else. I always enjoy hearing other people’s stories.
Chiang Mai, productivity, and the need for fixity
I have been in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for two weeks. We have entered February and I have begun to feel the need, urgent and rising, to start getting my nose to the grindstone.
January was taken by time spent in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Thailand. And it was a wonderful month.
The time I’ve spent in Chiang Mai, so far, has been good. I have succumbed to all the sensations this country, and city, is so well-equipped to provide. But I remember now why I didn’t quite gel with this place in the first place (I first visited Chiang Mai in 2016). It’s to do with the blissfully chilled-out vibe; the sultry heat; the jungle air. This place pulses with a certain energy, like a powerful narcotic, that makes it extremely difficult — for me at least — to be productive.
It really does feel like straining against a strong drug, or a seductive spell, that has slipped over me, and I need to fight and make enormous effort in order to break free of this enchantment. As a freelancer, and a traveling one, I need to work and to slip back into productive schedules otherwise I can kiss this lifestyle goodbye.
Different people gravitate towards different energies. Some people fall in love with Chiang Mai: attracted to its wonderful combination of nature, cafes, traveller, hippie/Thai qualities. Although many people have remarked that my own personality would be a good fit for this place (I generally seem laidback, easy-going, and even, perhaps, lazy) it is a misjudgement. I find myself leaning more towards grittier, dirtier places with dynamism to spare. There are limits. Manila, capital of the Philippines, probably has too much grit than I can take.
But Beijing, where I was based for six years, was gritty and dirty, until it was cleaned up in the past few years. Most travellers are not very fond of Bangkok, preferring natural Chiang Mai or the lazy paradise islands of the south, but I like Bangkok and its superior energy, the pace, the grittiness of its daily life.
Chiang Mai has wreaked havoc on my productivity and I find myself wanting to leave this place.
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Last year, when I travelled to five different places over four months, my most productive time was spent in Taipei, Taiwan. There’s a good reason for this. I was living in a hostel, which I ended up staying in for over a month. The hostel allowed residents to be quite self-sufficient and I quickly found local landmarks. I fell into a routine. Oolong tea to wake up with, brewed in the common area at my hostel. Go out for a sweet potato bought from the nearby convenience store for breakfast. Walk around for a bit. Return to the hostel to work, or else head to a nearby café to work. Lunch at a local cafeteria which was cheap as chips. Have a bubble tea in the afternoon. Nap. Or swim at the local gym. Evening, head to the night market for dinner. Night-time: work in the kitchen of my hostel, which was quiet and low-ceilinged, and which was conducive to long bouts of writing.
The month I spent in Singapore was also fairly productive; ditto for the half-month I spent in Seoul. But Taipei was king of a productive me.
I find myself in want of this kind of schedule now. I will continue to travel, but I am aware that I may need to make some kind of big change. To find a spot to settle in, in order so I can work and achieve the goals that are important to me. I cannot stay in Chiang Mai. This place destroys my sense of achieving goals. But today, I am faring better, as I write this blog post. But having a fixity — a fixed place; a stable routine — is something I will need to find again. But where shall I go? What city shall I call my temporary home? This is the other question that haunts me. Recommendations welcome.
My writing life
Bangkok & Chiang Mai
Last month I went to Thailand, for the second time this year.
I was in Bangkok for about a week in total, and several days in Chiang Mai.
Chiang Mai is Thailand’s second city and about an hour away, by plane, north of Bangkok.
Jungle and hills surround it and it doesn’t feel like a city at all, more like an overgrown village with a temporary leasehold over the jungle.
Quite a few of my friends told me about their love for Chiang Mai. It’s a very chill, laid-back place with lots of cafes and guesthouses. But for me it was too chill. I prefer the raw energy of Bangkok which feels alive and visceral — intense — like life has been crammed into every inch.
In Chiang Mai I happened to meet up with Brent Crane, a fellow freelancer, who was on a journey traveling overland from Cambodia, where he’d spent a year at the Phnom Penh Post, to Nepal. Brent’s a prolific freelancer (and a guest contributor to the site) and by the time I’d met him in Chiang Mai he’d already sold features to The New Republic and Men’s Journal, making more than enough to cover his travel expenses.
I was taking it easy; reading and writing more of my novel. In Chiang Mai I didn’t do much of the things you’re supposed to do (elephant riding, trekking, jungle zip-lining, etc). I didn’t really have the appetite to do them so I didn’t.
If you’re there though try Counting Sheeps (sic) hostel. It’s comfortable, centrally located, and very good. Say hi to Goieurh too, who taught me how to play checkers. And you really should check out the Sunday evening market in the old town.
In Bangkok, I made a new friend who I came across playing Pokemon Go. It was on the steps next to Paragon, a shopping mall in downtown.
I also spent a couple of nights in Sofitel Bangkok, a five-star hotel. Having written for travel publications such as Wanderlust, CNN Travel, and NineMSN, I got a deal.
The suite they gave me was grand and lovely. It was the biggest hotel room I have ever stayed in. I was chauffeured to and from the airport in a Mercedes, which had WiFi and hot towels. I had my own personal butler and access to the VIP lounge, where there was served wine, canapes, fruit, cakes, cheese, prawn cocktails, and other beverages. There was a cool swimming pool, and breakfast buffet with a rack of honeycomb. The bathroom had Hermes toiletries.
It was the best I’ve ever been treated — a truly luxurious and memorable experience at the Sofitel Bangkok. Did I mention dinner on their rooftop restaurant L’Appart? It was elegant French fare — delicious scallops — and I had great company.
Having twice stayed in five-star hotels this year, the experience is rather agreeable I have to say and checking online the expense for these hotels in Asia isn’t as extravagant as you may think so it’s worth spoiling yourself sometimes. The experience really does linger long in the memory.
