A Family Wedding

Saturday was Cecile and Aaron’s (Emilie's sister and brother-in-law) wedding. We unfortunately don’t have any photos of the ceremony itself, under the olive trees, because Emilie was too busy alternately trying to crush Brian’s hand and using it as a Kleenex. But it was very lovely and moving. Also, the lack of comprehension was shared very egalitarian-ly, as the ceremony was approximately 60% in English, 35% French, and 5% German or Other. And that’s not even counting the more abstract poetry as a separate language.

But we did manage to get plenty of photos of getting ready...

(The bride and her mother, Chantal)

(the star, and cousin Gay)

and the guests milling about…


(Cecile's friends, obviously enjoying the swimming-pool)

And even the food, because oh it was a good spread...


And then of the party. Here’s us, on the dance floor with the bride and groom…


Emilie’s parents groovin’ together


and Julien (brother), really groovin’…

(All in all, Brian thought the Mazza' familiy was quite groovin'.)

And of course, there’s nothing like a wedding for rubbing off romance on those attending…


The party lasted all night long. We went back to our guesthouse around 4:30, and saw dawn’s morning light before crashing. But at least a dozen wedding guests, including the bride and groom and the father and grandmother (!) of the groom, were boogieing away at 6 am! These French, they know how to party.

A Bit of a Change of Scenery

And now for something completely different… on Thursday (Jun 22) we flew to France. From Bangkok to Abu Dhabi (45 degrees Celsius on the tarmac (112 F) made Bangkok seem temperate), to Paris and thence to Nice.

We were headed to Emilie’s sister’s wedding at the Mazzacurati family house in Rouret, a small village near Grasse, near Cannes, in Provence.


We visited the village of Valbonne on a market day…


And had lunch in the square…


Perhaps too big a lunch…

(Emilie's brother, Julien)

(Her father, Richard)

We visited the medieval hill town of Grasse, famous for its perfumeries…


Wandered the narrow lanes…


And had pastis (a.k.a. Pernod, the fennel-flavored South-of-France long-evening drink) in the square…


And finally, we also visited Cannes, glamorous playground of movie stars and really big yachts. Here’s Emilie and her cousin Iris on the waterfront…


We were really only there to hop on a ferry to take us to the smaller of the two small islands (Ile Saint Honorat) right off the shore. There we could enjoy the clear blue waters, abundant sun, and fragrant breezes with a little less of the crowd.
And although a few boats do come out there…


We had a lovely afternoon tasting the pleasures of the Cote D'Azure

(In the background is the old tower of the monastery to which the island belongs)

My Tailor is Rich

You might be wondering how we’ve been keeping ourselves busy for all those evenings. I do, after all, get out of work fairly early by European standards (5 pm!), and Bangkok is known as the city that never sleeps… Yet we haven’t done anything fancy, no. We have actually spent all, by which I mean ALL our evenings at tailor shops.

Brian needs a whole set of suits for work, I need an evening gown for my sister’s wedding, Brian needs shirts, I need shoes… Bangkok is known as one of (or THE) best value-for-good-tailoring destinations in the world. Like Hong Kong twenty years ago. But the rub is, financial cost is not everything. The cost in time and energy is quite a bit higher,especially for neophytes like ourselves. Our life has been an endless string of searching, trying, bargaining, shopping, fittings, and searching again.


The whole Bangkok tailor thing is not as easy as you might think: first, there are trillions of tailors in Bangkok, and our preferred guidebooks wisely warned us about all kind of scams, tricks and other entourloupes (sorry, I don’t know the English equivalent). So we looked at length for online recommendations, asked my colleagues at work, and sauntered into random shops. In the end, with the plethora of recommendations canceling each other out (or being outside the price range), Brian settled on a random shop that looked good.

Also, they didn't have someone outside hustling us, and their door says welcome in, like, six languages.

Then the real hard part begin: what kind of fabric? What color? What pattern?

C’mon, all these fancy shades of grey to choose from! Choosing a suit is a lot of fun… You’d never imagine you can spend so much time discussing something that will end up, anyway, looking grey and conservative – I mean, a suit.


But the result was definitely worth it: Brian’s ready to rock!


Then it was my turn. We toured a good four or five places before we found a small but fancy shop at the other end of town, just to make sure our life was really complicated. Good thing was, I had a little more freedom than for a suit: all the colors, the fabrics, the shapes... . So after much hesitation, flipping through haute-couture magazines, trying to picture myself looking natural in a copy of Ungaro or Christian Lacroix dress, I settled for something a little more local in hand-woven Thai silk.


You have to imagine that each of these (and I spared you the shirts, in a third tailor shop, at yet another end of the city) takes two to three fittings, so that we ended up spending hooouuurs in public transportations - skytrain, boats, buses, etc. - and got lost a couple of times too.


To wrap up our shopping craze, we did something a little more fun on Saturday and went to Chatuchak weekend market: thousands of stalls, selling everything from bronze Buddha to fighting cocks and birds, house utensils and jewelry.

Necklaces from not-so-precious stones made-to-order

and some colorful lights to cheer up our little shoebox of an apartment.

Tropical Island Paradise (or more adventures in the search for exotic places to swim)

This past weekend we took a trip to the Gulf of Thailand island of Koh Chang. Thailand's second largest island, after the resort-encrusted and tsunami-swamped Phuket, Koh Chang is fairly undeveloped/disturbed. In fact, it and its surrounding archipelago are a national park, and the island is considered to have one of the largest chunks of untouched tropical forest in Thailand, or the whole region.

Of course, that doesn't mean we weren't still there primarily to enjoy cold fruit shakes (read: beer) and fried, steamed, barbecued, and curried fish on white sand beaches in between swims in turquoise waters.

Here we had to "kick it in the cabana" when that noonday gets just too darned hot.

We did actually get off our bums once or twice...

We rented a motorbike for a tour of the island and a little interior hike.


And met these guys.

And when for a little hike up into the forest, and along a series of increasingly cool waterfalls...

...in which we swam of course.



The next day we went snorkeling. This is us setting out in the morning - when the low morning sun felt cool and refreshing. That skin looked red as a rare steak before the day was through, with Brian getting his worst sunburn in years. Ooops.



...But it's all going to turn into sleek suntan, right?


Luckily, this was the low season, so there were only about two hundred people on the half-dozen boats all touring the same four or five sites. I imagine that in the high season the bobbing tourists must cake the water like an oil slick. But then again I hear that in the dry season you can go to much more amazing (and uncrowded) open water sites, but the sea is too rough for snorkeling there now. So we crowded on a boat with scores of others for an all-day tour of the many islands around Koh Chang and for some 'pretty-good' snorkeling. (I guess it doesn't compare to the Caribbean (snif-snif)). I wanted to take some pictures of the fantastic, brilliant, neon multihued, multitudinous fishes, anemones, jellyfish, corals, and other stuff I still haven't identified, but the darned camera just fizzled and popped when I took it underwater! Huh.

So, you'll just have to use your imagination...

To cap everything off, that night we were just getting ready to put our sore selves to bed when we were treated to a bit of a show on the beach...

of fire-dancers doing their thing, which basically entails spinning around flaming batons, chains, or balls along with some basic dancing in time to modern ambient electronica kinda music. On a warm and humid night on the beach in Thailand with the waves crashing behind, it was a lovely spectacle. We just tried not to think about the hydrocarbons dripping away to the aforementioned corals, anemones, and fishes...

Blending in

It's really easy to blend in in Thailand:





Sure, I'm still a bit taller and whiter than most people... But that yellow "I love the King" fashion has made my life so much easier!

Life in Bangkok

Food. Life in Bangkok (in Thailand really) is substantially about food. Food stalls litter the sidewalks and storefronts, with platters of fresh-cooked dishes, racks of barbecued meats and fishs, and smoking cauldrons of soups and fryers. I (Brian) am having a bit of challenge adjusting, not only because of the flavors (some wonderful, some not so much) and meats (I'm a relapsing vegetarian) but also because eating in a Thai streetside cafe is a hectic, chaotic, and rickety business, not really conducive to the peaceful mealtimes Westerners typically cultivate.

Though she looks content enough, eh?



Traffic. I tried all kinds of ways to capture the dirt, noise, and barely controlled chaos of Bangkok traffic, and couldn't really do a decent job, though I ended up with dozens of really boring pictures of streets and cars. Here's a short video of one tranquil walk. I've taken to wearing a mask on walks like this.



Street markets and street life. Where the action is.




King Pride. It (and the yellow shirts, the flags, and the giant portraits) are everywhere.

This weekend (June 9-12) is the 60th anniversary of His Majesty's coronation. So it's a HUGE deal. Lots of celebrations are planned, and they're rehearsing many different performances every night. Which is good, because we'll be away, so we get a preview. Though it's sad to know we'll miss performances like this:

(sorry for my nascent video skills)

However, we'll also miss things like this:

Yesterday we stumbled across the "barge procession" on the Chao Praya, with these beautiful longboats, including golden ones for royalty and long black ones with ornamental soldiers, rowing along with a blaring chanting song. Really beautiful.