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Apr 12, 2013 • Turn back time for a look at Thailand’s famous Songkran Festival in years past. Today, Songkran – the Thai New Year – is a water war. Wild and crazy Thai teenagers, grown-up “teenagers”, excited tourists, children and people of all ages roam the street with water canons, giant buckets full of ice, icy-hot paste and...
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Jun 20, 2012 • Delicious design. I snapped this sign at the back of a rural Northern Thai market. It’s a restaurant hawking Southern Thai food. I didn’t have a chance to try the culinary artistry but I fell in love with the bold colours and the kaleidoscope of fonts, including some retro styled lettering. The pot-bellied fellow in...
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Jun 7, 2012 • Forgotten photographs of Hindu pilgrims. When I was twenty years old, I visited the holy city of Rameshwaram. The southeastern most point of India, it stretches out into the sea, just a stone’s throw from Sri Lanka. Though at that time the civil war in Sri Lanka was raging and the only people who regularly...
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Jan 18, 2012 • Haunting Time Warp. Palmy, Thailand’s spiral-locked Pop goddess, twirls through Bangkok’s beautifully antiquated Nightingale-Olympic Department Store in this 2011 music video. I’ve been meaning for a long time to drop by the store to do an impromptu photo shoot of its dusty glory. The 1960s Thai Chinatown grandeur frozen in time… well, not frozen so...
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Jan 10, 2012 • Star Wars characters cavort, inexplicably, in this 1978 tuna fish ad from Japan. The somewhat English-sounding phrase sung over and over is in fact English… “Sea Chicken, Sea Chicken.” I love the inscrutability of foreign advertising to outsiders. It’s like trying to translate a joke between languages and cultures. Somehow the joke often gets lost...
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Dec 30, 2011 • Another beautiful hammered brass bowl, or ‘kan nam’. Of course, their primary use was for good ole plain pure water, but who’s to say there was never some ‘lao kao’ (rice whiskey) or ‘ya dong’ (herb-infused liquor masquerading as medicine) swirling around its intricate designs? While the outside of this antique drinking bowl is quite...
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Nov 22, 2011 • Thai advertising gem. Comedians impersonate Western pop stars to promote an apartment building, Flat Pla Tong (Goldfish Flats), on Rangsit Road at the northern outskirts of Bangkok. Watch as Thai Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Madonna and others croon about public bus access and the low down payment. Thailand’s well-developed advertising industry rakes in a disproportionate...
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Nov 7, 2011 • Local flavour. My last post dipped into India’s soda wars. Read about it in this entry with a vintage Indian ad for Gold Spot. Another favourite ‘cool drink’ and for many years the domestic market leader was Limca. It’s a lemon-lime drink. Bottled like a soda but much less carbonated than your typical fizzy. Watch...
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Nov 7, 2011 • Cool drinks. A friend in India once asked me, ‘Why do foreigners drink so many cool drinks?’ (‘Cool drinks’ being Indian English for what goes by the name ‘soda’ or ‘pop’ in much of the rest of the English-speaking world). I had never really thought about the question, but I guessed that it was a...
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Oct 31, 2011 • It’s a wobbly subject. This 1958 Jell-O commercial from America gives us a peek into vintage representations of Asia. Of course it’s not intentionally racist – it was just a product of its time. But racism doesn’t have to be intentional. Some of the most insidious racism can be unintended and arising from ingrained beliefs...
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Oct 25, 2011 • American celebrities have been flying over to Japanese shores for years to record commercials – for handsome wads of cash. To outsiders these ads can appear just… well… wacky. Though, to be fair, advertising often appears odd in another language. It seems as though we don’t realize how bizarre our own advertising is, but when...
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Oct 19, 2011 • Handmade hammered brass bowl from Thailand. Drinking bowls are a symbol of Thai hospitality. Until just a few decades ago it was still very common to find these in front of houses along the roads and paths of rural Thailand. The cups would sit atop an urn of water, welcome to all passersby and strangers...
