If you’re like us, you weren’t prepared to find that the Indonesia’s island of Bali hosted a number of extraordinary expat painters. Balinese museums and private collections are full of their work, and the viewer is left wanting to know more about these extraordinary artists. Noted expat Asian author Harold Stephens provides many important details […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Culture & History' Category
Bangkok’s grisly museum of death: WoWasis revisits the Siriraj Medical Museum
What may very well be the world’s grisliest museum isn’t all that hard to get to, as long as you know where it is and what you’re in store for. But if you’re not a medical professional, you might need a strong stomach to get through it. We here at WoWasis first visited here in […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis Bangkok jazz review: the Sunday jam session at CheckInn99 off Sukhumvit
Quite a few jazz musicians live in Bangkok, both Thai and expat. Without a doubt, Bangkok’s best jazz bargain is when many of them jam together every Sunday afternoon from 2-6 at Bangkok’s notable speakeasy, CheckInn99. You need three things to have a great jazz venue: good musicians, earthy ambiance, and inexpensive drinks. CheckInn99 has […]
Read the rest of this entry »Touring Bangkok’s Klong Toey slums: an experience you can’t afford to miss
Book the Explore! Klong Toey Slums of Bangkok tour here. Bangkok is a city of 13 million people, and a significant part of her labor pool lives in the slum neighborhood of Klong Toey. In the West, we tend to see the word “slum” in pejorative terms, but here, its encoded into the Thai language […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis tours Unknown Bangkok and the Thonburi Klongs
If you’re like us, you just get those days where you want to see a half day of great stuff, get on the water a bit, then spend the rest of the afternoon having a beer and beating the heat. We just finished taking a tour in Bangkok that gave us just that. The Unknown […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘I-Boat Captain,’ by Zenji Orita with Joseph Harrington
We first became aware of Japanese submariner Zenji Orita in author Joseph D. Harrington’s book Yankee Samurai: the Secret Role of Nisei in America’s Pacific Victory (1979), which sent us scurrying to find Orita’s book I-Boat Captain: How Japanese Submarines Almost Defeated the U.S. Navy in the Pacific (1976). The book is alternately chilling and […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Stephen Leather’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ from Hong Kong
Stephen Leather never ceases to tantalize us. It’s not just the vicious murderers or the fetching murderesses, either. Hungry Ghost (ISBN 978-0-340-96072-1), originally published in 1992 and re-released in 2008, is replete with all the cerebral stuff we’ve grown to expect from the author. His “no stones unturned” approach is something we figure he picked […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Kenzaburo Oé’s Japanese novel ‘A Silent Cry’
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oé’s novel A Silent Cry (1994) is a psychological thriller relating to the familial travails surrounding two brothers. As in much of the author’s writing, there are no heroes here, as all protagonists are enveloped by a deep-seated malaise that continues to descend as the book progresses. Oé is a master […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Yankee Samurai,’ Nisei working for the US in WWII, by Joseph Harrington
Author Joseph D. Harrington has written an informative and insightful history of the Nisei (Americans of Japanese Ancestry, or AJAs, the first generation to be born outside of Japan, and children of Issei, their Japanese-born parents living in the United States), working for the U.S. armed forces in the Pacific during World War II. Yankee […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis Banned Book review: ‘Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason, and Lèse-Majesté’ by David Streckfuss
In our previous review of Paul Handley’s book The King Never Smiles, we quoted from the book’s back cover: “Any journalist or academic who takes an interest in Thailand soon learns that one topic is off limits: the modern monarchy… it is dangerous, and one risks expulsion or jail for lèse-majesté” for reporting on sensitive […]
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