Globe Corner Blogs

Lonely Planet Healthy Travel Asia & India

“Mai pen drai. Mai pen drai,” the nurses kept saying gently to me, smiling, as I lay on my back in a hospital bed. They were trying to reassure me: no big deal, don’t you worry. “Pen drai…pen drai…” I weakly whimpered back, knowing very well that this was not a legitimate phrase for “all this puke is too a problem!” The nurses ignored the pleas of the foolish farang (foreigner). They gave me an “anti-womitting” pill that I quickly purged myself of and then tried to insert an IV into my shaky arm.

One hour previously I had announced to a vanful of fellow students (heading home from Bangkok) that I wasn’t feeling well and then promptly yarfed into a tiny plastic bag. The driver quickly detoured the van of disgusted, irritated students to the nearest hospital. After the IV was in me, they wheeled me into a large room full of beds with other people, all in apparent agony, where I surveyed the surroundings in dismay.

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Lonely Planet Thailand

The food does not take me back. Pad thai here is not pad thai there. And only rarely, if the chef is generous, can you get khao neao gap som tom (sticky rice with papaya salad). In DC I had a chef so excited that someone wanted it he brought the generous portion out himself. But it’s just not the same in a sit-down American restaurant. Sometimes the orchids in vases on a restaurant’s clean white tablecloth take me back to the early mornings in Thailand. Walking to my meeting room, raincoat hood dripping over my nose, I stared at the gracefully curving stems and regal flowers growing in hanging gardens in people’s backyards. One basket hung on each limb of a wooden stand, like impatiens or geraniums, but orchids. And misted to some kind of dewy perfection.

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More Chinglish--by Oliver Lutz Radtke

Stop everything. This is important. Very important. In fact, you may want to be sitting down. I don’t want to exaggerate, but the word “life-changing” may very well apply. Deep breaths. Okay, ready?

A new edition of Chinglish – appropriately titled More Chinglish – has just arrived. I know. Now, you may be thinking, “Does this mean that the old one is not available anymore?” Good question. I can hear the panic in your voice, but, dear Reader, you don’t need to worry. Chinglish was the number one best-selling book of 2008 for our store; it’s not going anywhere. Oliver Lutz Radtke’s new book More Chinglish has a place on our display table next to the original, some might say classic, Chinglish. More Chinglish was in the store for mere minutes before it started eliciting giggles and guffaws from browsers. And the staff have already made a dent in our inventory numbers. Continue Reading »

Let's Go Thailand

This is my first contribution to the Globe Corner blog — unfortunately grad school usually leaves little time for reflections on travel (I should really find a dissertation topic that will allow me to collect data in some exciting locale…), but today I’m finally done with work for the summer, and in about seven hours, I hope to be completely packed and on a plane from JFK to Tokyo. Tokyo will be my first stop on a three week trip, which also includes Hong Kong and a beach in Thailand (TBD: I have a flight into Krabi and some vague desires of white sand and warm water.)

This whirlwind tour of half the continent will be the exact opposite of my last (and first) trip to Asia, as a researcher-writer for Let’s Go Thailand. I spent two months in the north of the country, combing the region for guesthouses, bus schedules, and cooking classes. I was traveling alone, moving every other day, and visiting every last wat (monastery) in each town on my route. I got to know the region extremely well, and in fact, the north is synonymous with all of Thailand for me, since I had to return to the States almost immediately at the end of my route, and never got to see the rest of the country.

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