Wednesday's Window: a little bit of drama

 

I love love love these. I'm not sure of my facts because they were taken a few months ago and I didn't label them but I think they were in the Siam Centre. (If anyone knows differently, please let me know and I will happily credit them.)

I love the drama and the sense of the macabre they've created by playing with illusion. (Do you see the half hat?) It's that dolls with scary faces thing (Magic, anyone?) They terrify me and make me laugh in equal measure. 

Friday Photo: Apology by 'phone

Wednesday's Window: Lacoste

Wednesday’s Window is one of my favourite posts. I have stopped and photographed shop windows for years without quite realising what they could be: a week after week blog post, of course! There are going to be some old and out of date ones coming up (so you’ll no longer be able to see them live) because even when I’m not blogging, I don’t stop taking pics of gorgeous, clever, interesting windows. I’m just drawn to them.

Back in June I had a date with some friends in the newly refurbished Siam Centre to eat cake and afterwards, I wandered about. This, as a window, wasn’t particularly impressive because I had to get up close to spot it; but as an installation inside the shop, I loved it. It’s from Lacoste and they very kindly – though I’m sure I wasn’t meant to – allowed me to take some pictures inside.

From the outside, these crocodiles were so beautifully crisp looking that I thought they were metallic but they are actually made of good quality card with a high gloss finish.

And I have to confess, I’m actually quite freaked out by the pile of crocs by the door. (My children will sigh and huff and roll their eyes, given that these are paper crocodiles in childish colours; but what is sculpture or art for if it isn’t to move us in some way? Yes, children, I am still too terrified to watch Jurassic Park; yes, I know that the dinosaurs can’t possibly be real but I go in prepared to believe.) It’s the way that these guys have clambered over each other to get to whatever it is they want that makes me unsettled, which is I think a reminiscence of  the behaviour I saw years ago at one of Bangkok’s crocodile farms.

Taxi tales

I think it's perfectly normal to issue a tiny prayer every time I get into a Bangkok taxi. And that's not even when the taxi has answered my wave by swerving towards me over two lanes. In that circumstance, I'll offer up a pretty big prayer.

There is no 'Knowledge' here. I think if you want to be a taxi driver, you probably just apply to the 'taxi permit' office, pay your baht, and off you go. Sometimes we have such awful, hideous journeys and we stagger out of the car, astonished we didn't die on the way." Did you give him a tip?" I ask my husband. "Yes," he says, "I told him to change his break pads." Still, it's amazing how quickly you adapt. I'm quite shocked when I discover a seat belt AND a plug! Usually there's a seat belt but no plug; the plug gets sucked through the join in the seat and the backrest, never to be retrieved and after a run in with a GIGANTIC cockroach, yomping towards me on the backseat recently, I'm NOT putting my hand in there. 

And we don't have a car. We don't really need a car because we live in the middle of Bangkok, near to the skytrain and underground trains which are strictly limited in the ground they cover in Bangkok… still, the taxis are plentiful...

From my notebook

The other option is a motorbike; a motorbike taxi. These congregate at specified points every few hundred yards: at busy junctions or at the ends of sky train routes and they are tempting because they can weave through the Bangkok traffic. (Oh dear, I sense a theme.) It's hot here; walking can be unpleasant and if you are Thai you can perch delicately sidesaddle on the back of a bike and get there much, much quicker. But if you're farang (Foreigner) and scared like me, you sit like a man, legs each side. Fares are fixed although there seems to be the inevitable Thai rate and farang rate. In our early years I took a few bikes down our soi... (Don't tell my Mum!) It was a small road, two way but only one lane on each side. I have to tell you, it was quite exciting. It contravened everything I'd been programmed to believe. I'd heard tales from my Dad of young men who clutter up the orthopedic wards having come off their motorbikes. He theorized that there was a direct correlation between the higher the engine size, the shorter their life expectancy. (He really, bless him, didn't like motorcyclists and used to propose the use of shoulder-height piano wire outside the house as they raced up and down the 30 mile limit.) One day I couldn't get a taxi and took a motorbike up a different soi on my way to the chiropractor. I underestimated how much faster that road was than my tiny soi (it was Ekkamai, for any Bangkokians reading this) and it had at least three lanes in each direction. Terrifying. We flew. And then screech to halt as the traffic would slow and we'd weave over to another lane. Sometimes we'd be unable to get up between the vehicles and we'd find a dropped kerb and mount the pavement. There's always this awful dilemma of whether to allow my long farang legs to be kneecapped or whether to grip this strange Thai man tightly between my thighs.

Anyway, I came to my senses after that trip up Ekkamai. I was a Mum; there are no leathers, no helmets even. Then one day I got a call saying someone I knew had come off a bike on her way home; would I visit her in hospital? And that was the end of my foray into motorbike taxis.

Parent teenager miscommunications

Poor old Son had a long appointment at the dentist yesterday in order to get some treatment done before Christmas. He texted me - in misery (and sarcasm) from the dental chair - to confirm that afterwards he was meeting friends to go to the cinema. 

I was just trying to cheer him up; to give him a laugh but in my failure to pay attention (and my own obsession about costumes) I think I let him down…

(In my defence, the wool beard appeared to adopt a very similar method to the lion's mane I did a week or so ago... And if anyone knows the boys, please tell them they looked awesome and I really wished I'd asked them for a photo.)

Son's conversation is in yellow: mine in blue.

TA- Daaa: the Christmas headwear

I knew back in the summer that I was going to attempt to make a holly sprig for the Christmas headpiece, an essential (if only to me) part of my Bangkok Christmas. These things often look awesome and professional in my brain and uhm, less so, in reality. Anyway, I’m relatively happy with how they turned out. Definitely room for improvement… but not bad.

I adapted a method I learned with Bridget Bailey in my tutorial back in the summer that involved layers (silk and velvet) and floristry wire. I estimated that I needed 9-11 per headpiece plus extras for disasters so I was cutting and assembling the layers for quite some time.

If I thought THAT was fiddly, it was nothing on the assembling of the sprig, which turned out to be more of a branch. (Note to self: Less is more.) And then the binding of the wire… suffice to say, they didn’t get easier and I’m glad I only had to make three!

Christmas tree for charity

Today’s the day where I come begging for your help. 

Central and Zen department stores are having a competition this Christmas season to highlight charitable giving. They have invited embassies in Bangkok to take part by decorating a Christmas tree. The British Women’s Group decorated a tree on behalf of the British Embassy. The tree with the most votes will win 100,000 Baht for their chosen charity.

We wanted our tree to be different. (I think we achieved that!)

There are ten lovely trees in the competition and I don’t doubt for a second that all the charities will be worthy causes but I would be grateful for ever if you would go and vote for the UK tree!

Our charity, the SET Foundation is very close to my heart. It’s a wonderful charity that sponsors Thai students through high school and university. It makes a huge difference to the young people who without funds would have to leave school and contribute to the family income, often in dead end jobs on building sites or in paddy fields. I don’t know about you but I took my education for granted. Have a look at the What It Costs page; to us in the west, making a difference doesn’t cost as much as you think.

Please click here to see the trees. Click on the UK tree for details on voting (Click LIKE then add your name to the list.) PLEASE. It’ll only take a minute and SET really does change lives. Bangkok folks can also vote in Zen in Centralworld.

Thank you.

UPDATED instructions on leaving your name:

Making phuang-malai

I have often stopped and admired the (mostly) women making the phuang-malai on Bangkok's streets. They make as they sell so I'd watched some of the process and I knew that they used a piece of metal (it turned out to be a GIGANTIC needle) and they thread the buds onto raffia but that was as far as my knowledge went.

Phuang-malai are purchased for as little as 20 baht (40 pence) for a basic one but more ornate ones can cost up to a 1000 baht (£20.) They are much more than something pretty or to freshen the air. (The jasmine buds smell DIVINE.) They are given as offerings inside temples, on spirit houses and hung inside taxis and at the bow of a boat to make merit to the journey goddess, Mae Yanang. (You can find out more about the garlands here and here.)

Last week, thanks to Attic Studios, I learned to make one.

Lots of buds, including jasmine and roses, a HUMONGOUS needle and considerable patience. The folded banana leaf
stops the buds from falling off the needle. The angle at which you rotate each bud is very important to the finished
effect.

Two lengths make one circle. I told you, LOTS of patience.

The piece of the left is the bit that hides the rafia joins.

I love the flowers above the roses. They couldn't tell me what they are called but they are like teeny weeny little
sculptures. And TA-DAAAA: the finished phuang-malai.

Not with a bang but a whimper..

One of the problems of having a blog break - or a period of blog bone idleness - is that when you come back, you do want it to be with a bang not a whimper.

There was something of a bang last week after a visit to a garlic farm on the Isle of Wight, a tasting session and a garlicky lunch, but I’m betting you don’t want those details. It was a fantastic place though and, assuming you treat the garlic loading with a bit of respect, you’ll probably be fine during the following twelve hours.

I didn’t have a great journey to the UK. My first blister appeared before I’d left Bangkok airport. It turns out that you can’t put feet that live for eleven months of the year in flip flops, into contained shoes and not expect injuries. My plasters were in my suitcase (of course) which I couldn’t get into because I’d sealed it with a plastic cable tie: one of those things that goes on but not off unless you cut it. As well as not being able to carry any cutting implements on a flight, I’ve discovered that no members of the airside personnel are allowed to have scissors either.

I’d stayed up to watch a film on the flight – totally against my better judgment - and didn’t have enough sleep but things began to improve a bit at Paddington station. I thought. I found someone that had scissors and finally broke into my own suitcase; I found Vodafone open at 7am where I got a sim card sorted and I found a Starbucks where I drank tea and ‘What’s Apped’ Husband.

I just didn’t have the energy for the underground so I treated myself to a taxi between Paddington and Charing Cross. I tried to lift my case into the taxi but, in spite the laws of physics, it was heavier by several kgs than when I’d left Bangkok. And, damn it, I’d been taking things out of it… alright, so they were only plasters, but it was eight of them. How could it get heavier?

I could have slept in the taxi if it hadn’t been for the alarming rise of the meter. Although the Olympic vehicle lanes hadn’t yet opened, several of the roads were shut around Buckingham Palace and Whitehall so the fare was higher than expected; still, it was much easier than the tube.

At Charing Cross I thought I’d better replenish my dwindling funds so I went to the cashpoint but hmmm: no card. I searched through the crap vital receipts and cards in my wallet in case I’d slipped it in somewhere for ease… Nope; definitely no bank card. Through my addled brain I knew there was only one place the card could be: Vodafone. But, for heaven’s sake, they’d just sold me a sim card, so why hadn’t they rung me to tell me I’d left it there? I pulled out my phone: four missed calls and two text messages… I must have turned the sound off when I put the phone in my pocket.

I called my parents to let them know what kind of an idiot I was, put my suitcase into left luggage – ker ching! - and went down to the underground to return to Paddington – more ker ching! I was shattered by this time but so grateful to see that there was one last seat on the underground train. As the doors shut, I set off over people and their luggage to the spare seat. As I lowered myself down onto the seat, the tube train gave a great lurch and I landed in the lap of the man next door to my chair.

Things continued to improve over the four weeks (they couldn’t have got worse, surely?) I haven’t seen any friends – sorry to all of them but I am back in October – but I have had a rather lovely trip. My folks have been pretty good, it was my parent's 60th wedding anniversary and I’ve been on a couple of courses, which I will come back and tell you about soon. 

Wednesday's Windows

Okay, so the high end shops I've been featuring have got lots of money (relatively speaking) to spend on their window displays. But here are a couple of unrelated shop fronts who demonstrate that it's not about money...

The first one is Thann, an upmarket spa shop with their own products line. This is their Gaysorn branch. Oh how I love the simplicity... It must have taken someone many hours of cutting corrugated card into these lovely leafy branches and you do need tons to be effective but effective it is. It's so lovely and simple. I LURVE...

The next one I spotted  this week. It's courtesy of Adidas in Siam Centre. I'm completely unmoved by sports and I never rarely get stopped in my tracks by a sports shop's window display but I love this. Simple and brilliant. And of course it's hits the spot with my favourite technique, playing with scale.

Wednesday's Windows

There's been a bit of a War Horse thing going on in some of the Bangkok window displays. There's a third, but my addled brain can't find it!

From CPS CHAPS Emporium
Website

Yakko Maricard Siam Paragon
Website

One of my adventures

My notebook is full of little sketches of maps that I’ve made after glimpsing something exciting from a taxi. I will have scribbled down shop names or soi numbers as landmarks and made cryptic notes like ‘basket shops’ or ‘red Chinese drum things’ to remind me what I’d seen from the taxi that I’d thought worth going back to explore. My Thai doesn’t stretch to ‘Ooh, can we stop for a second? I want to take a picture/see what’s in that shop but I'm not doing a runner and will be back a minute.’

The other day I was intent on going to Mega Bridge to take photos. Mega Bridge is, well, it’s mega; huge so there’s no mistaking it but it’s not a destination in itself. ‘I want to go to [destination]’ is part of my every day Thai but equipped with the new phrase ‘I want to take photographs’ I set off downstairs to find a taxi.

Taxis are plentiful but it’s a lottery what sort of experience you’re going to get. They’ll often refuse to take you (either because they don’t know where it is or because they don’t want to go that way (wtf?) or because your pitiful Thai hasn’t worked.) We have a family tactic to get into the taxi before telling him where we want to go: a sort of ‘bums on seats are nine tenths of the law’ attitude.

Astonishingly the first taxi didn’t tell me to get out. Our conversation (in Thai) went something like this:

Me: I want to go to Mega Bridge.

Him: *disbelief* Mega Bridge?

Me: Yes, Mega Bridge. I want to take photos.

Him: *Grunt*

Me: *squinting, placing imaginary camera in front of face and clicking*

Him *Grunt* Sort of assent.

We set off in silence and I began to doubt that it was a result. As soon as I spotted the bridge, I began to take pictures so he’d get the idea. Very slowly, he began to thaw. He asked me would I like him to go over the bridge; we did and then we came back over to the starting shore. We stopped at the side of roads, in the middle of the bridge (yikes) and under the bridge. When I thought I was being dropped at a destination and I tried to pay him. No, no, he said, not finished.

When I got back into the taxi, he was on the phone. He passed the handset to me to speak to a Thai man who spoke perfect English. “He wants to know where you’d like to go next.” We agreed a route, winding up alongside the river, taking in two more bridges and I passed the phone back to the taxi driver. We set off again, stopping at a park that was shut and he got out and asked the guard if I could go in and take pictures…

He was wonderful. I had the best adventure.

(I'm under no illusions that I'm a photographer. I take pictures for reference only.)

Friday photo

I love the telegraph poles here. You see the street vendors tapping into the street supply in some random, Heath Robinson manner.

I love the swooping lines, the hodgepodge of wires and the knots but I often wonder how it's possible that the electricity gets from one place to another or how many more miles it travels than it should.

Wednesday's Windows

Wednesday's Windows is my new regular blog slot. I've always taken photos of window displays and sometimes I've blogged them but mostly, I've haven't, wondering why anyone else would be interested.

Now that I'm moving my interests back towards the visual, I've decided to establish Wednesday's Windows. They might be window displays, or they might be interiors; we shall have to see. (I'm making this up as I go along.)

So here's the first one: I hate macaroons but I love playing with scale!

CPS Chaps Emporium

Cloud9 at Gaysorn

Cloud9 at Gaysorn

Hello? Is there anyone there?

A pretty but irrelevant lotus from Khao Yai

What shockingly bad manners I have. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

This time – not that it makes a blind bit of difference to you – it wasn’t because I hadn’t got anything to say but because I’ve been SOOO busy.

First it was migraines, then I fell over and gouged out a piece of ankle, followed by tonsillitis (really? I’m not ten anymore…) and then the exams! All the while I’ve been doing a course. So, no time to tell you about any of it.

The exams are going relatively smoothly. Not the actual exams, of course: we won’t know how smoothly they’ve gone until D-Day. Gulp (One child tells me in luxuriant detail how the paper was; what marks were dropped, and where. The other child responds to the ‘how was the exam?’ question with a declaration of: ‘good’ which invites no further response from the parent enquirer. If you know my children, it’ll be clear to you which is which!)

Having two teenagers doing exams at the same time could have been stressful and I won’t pretend there haven’t been tears (they were mine) but mostly there’s been an atmosphere of slight hysteria. It’s probably not terribly responsible or kind to laugh at anyone going stir crazy with revision but Daughter, in particular, has been first class entertainment.

Anyway, I plan to prioritise poor old Tea Stains because I miss her. I’ve a new theme planned for Wednesdays and to reinstate Friday Photo. If I’ve any readers left AT ALL, do please pop back again in the coming days.

Sunday Photo

I missed Friday Photo because of a heavy schedule and a three day migraine so here's a Sunday photo.

I spotted this in Siam Paragon. It's nothing unusual to see a car in Siam P; one of the floors has showrooms full of top end cars and sometimes there's an exhibition in one of the lobbies decorated with 'pretties' but this one was in the wrapping paper, cards and gifts section. Perhaps that's a bit odd.

But not as odd maybe as a car having eyelashes...

A single banana

It's costume week at school for Son. This can mean only one thing: his school life is nearly over. It's a Patana tradition that the Year 13's last week in school, before study leave, can be spent in costumes and doing pranks!

I was asked to be involved in three costumes. Yesterday's costume required a bit of making; Son went dressed in primary school uniform and sadly we weren't able to just purchase that in the school shop (though I'm told some of the Asian girls were still (at 17/18) able to fit into real junior uniform!) I cut up an old shirt and stuck the school badge on with transfer paper. I made the shorts, the piping down the leg is the only thing that marks them out as school shorts...

The next two costumes were more difficult, requiring pattern making skills rather than the sort of slap dash approach I normally employ. I tasked myself with making banana heads - as you do but I farmed out the technical stuff to a local dressmaker. Something went dreadfully and horribly wrong. We needed two pairs of pyjamas for Son and his friend. Son's trousers didn't fit at all and neither of the shirts had large enough collars to take the banana heads I was making even though I had instructed them to make a collar size of 100 cm!

I won't go into the gory details because my blood pressure will go sky high again but suffice to say my position as project manager changed rather rapidly to costume maker. I had to remake Son's trousers from scratch and perform major surgery on both the pyjama tops.

Still, the finished job is OK; I think he looks rather spectacular - even if he hasn't got any hands...

Friday Photo

Mmmm, yum; stuff.

(In Emporium food market.)

Bunches of bananas and confidence

Hmm, well that gem shopping expedition didn’t quite go as planned.

I couldn’t face the schlep down to Chinatown on Saturday so I went to Amarin mall where there were several stalls and shops peddling gem and stones. I found a lovely shop where I told the man that I was learning to set stones and wanted something cheap but pretty that I could practice with. We started with amethysts and we moved through a host of stones whose names I’ve forgotten. Each time he brought something out I got more and more panicked: so TINY, shiny and perfectly cut. In my head I saw myself trying to measure and set them with my bunches of bananas and I felt a bit sick.  I knew they could look gorgeous. But probably only if someone else made them. He showed me all sorts of stones but I’d completely lost my confidence that I could do anything with them.

I found another stall. In a basket there were pieces of agate. I bought this one: it’s 4 cm long. I think even my bananas can make a reasonable job of setting them.

(Here’s the finished crown setting from the last post. I don’t know what the disc thing is that we’ve set but it feels like resin or even just plastic. Because it’s nicer with light behind it, I cut out a mad pattern on the back to let the light in.)

Jewellery, gems and skulls

The next stage in my jewellery making career journey is learning to set stones. This doesn’t require much fire (phew) but it does demand strict precision skills. Oh gawd.

Khun Gim found me an oval piece of rhodonite, a pretty pink and black stone to begin with. You measure the circumference with wire and then cut the metal a little bit longer than your wire. I cut it too long so I had to saw some of the extra mm off. Yes, and then I cut too much off and had to send it through the mangle to lengthen it again. Sigh.

Anyway, this ring is the result. Next I’m moving on to this resin (?) disk. This is the crown setting for it. Inside the crown setting we’ll I’ll solder a piece of wire to hold the disc at the top. Last week I asked Khun Gim ‘how do we keep the wire in the right place while I solder?’ Apparently the wire will hold itself because I’ll have cut it with such precision that it will just, erm, fit.

So this is the plan: I have to buy some stones to practice my setting skills. Bangkok is a good place to buy stones. Even though I’ve never been in the market for them you can’t help but see the shops around (and hear of the scams.) I’ve often stopped and peered into windows to look at the rubies, graded, sized and sitting in little see through trays. It’s another world to buy them though. Do a Google of Bangkok tourist scams, and the gem ones are right at the top. It has always struck me that if you’re on holiday and stupid enough to spend hundreds of pounds or dollars on rubies without the help of an independent expert, you’re kind of asking to be ripped off. Okay, this isn’t the way things should be but, sadly, it is the way it is.

Now clearly I’m not after ‘gem’ gems. I’m after something pretty or strikingly coloured and well, cheap. Remember, I might butcher it. K, who does jewellery at the same time as I do it, is a gemologist and she’s confirmed that as a foreigner the prices will rise the second I walk into the shop but she’s given me some advice. She’s advised me to reverse my normal approach; instead of ‘how much is that one?’ I should ask ‘what can I get for a 500 baht?’ (£10ish)

I shall let you know how I get on.

PS: isn't this rhodonite skull just divine? I love how his stylised look makes him appear to be wearing glasses. I want... (Source)