“Hot, Flat, and Crowded” talks about how Americans need to become more sustain and regain their old American spirit of hard working and freedom in order to win back their global super power position. It talks about how the Subprime crisis happened back in 2008-2009 from bad habits and financial recklessness. While sustainability is mentioned as “value” that will lead America out of it.

What struck me the most about all this was how similar the situation was to what’s happening in Thailand. I know I don’t know much about financial system and what I’m about to write might be completely wrong, but I think, in a way, Thai people can should learn from this crisis to prevent this to happen to our country. I said Thailand is going in the same route America went because our policies these days are looking at the short term benefits: free healthcare, free education, lower mortgage for housing, lower tax for buying first cars, etc., these policies might benefit a lot of people whose just emerged as new middle class people and want to improve their quality of lives. Not only this, Thailand hasn’t been preparing for aging society (with 20% of population with age of 60 year old or more), ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), energy crisis, and environmental problems. These problems cannot be recognized as new problems, since we always knew this day would come sooner or later. But the government didn’t prepare its people for these. So we are about to face problematic social structure where healthcare system is not effective, reduced workforce due to age, lack of competitiveness in workforce due to free labor transfer from AEC , and high energy price with natural disasters from the global warming – ALL at the same time.

Ironically, all of these were mentioned by the King before, not just years before, but centuries! Thai people say they revere the King so much but when it comes to real practices, we laid back and let time flew. The King has been saying about sustainability through his “New Agricultural Theory”, “Sufficiency economics”, and “renewable energy initiative” for so many years. It’s almost too embarrassing to admit that despite all these examples, Thailand and its people failed to become the leader in sustainability.

I want to raise an example on our short-sightedness. I just went to Sam Roi Yod national park in Prachuab Kirikhan last Wednesday. This park is known for its lush resources – caves, beaches, mountains, flora and fauna. But the first thing I saw when I entered the park was this:

Those were shrimp farms, right in the national park where natural habitats should be conserved! Here’s another picture of them:

They were everywhere! I know Thailand probably exports billions of dollars worth of shrimp each year. But should we keep doing this? People who know a thing or two about shrimp farming can tell you that it’ll take years before you can grow plants on those land again due to high salinity and toxicity from antibiotics and chemical used during farming. Talk about sustainability. I wonder what these people’s children are going to do when they can’t raise shrimp here anymore. They will have to buy all their food despite how abundant this place once was.

Thai people might not affected much from the financial crisis in 2008/2009, but if we will continue to use our resources recklessly like this. We will have to fight the crisis ourselves. Maybe it’s time Thai government should raise sustainability awareness among people and lead Thailand toward a better, more sustainable future.

But as a Thai who’s been to this place a few times, I got nothing to be excited about (don’t get me wrong, it’s still awesome). So the highlight for me was the new exhibition hall where we went to see in the afternoon.

The “Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall” is close by the Democracy Monument. It’s packed with Thai history from Rattanakosin period in multimedia fashion and topped with some cool interactive presentations.

The hall is HUGE! It has 7 exhibition rooms that focus on different aspects of Bangkok and its cultures, people, society, traditions, etc. There seemed to be very few Thais visiting the museum though, but I wasn’t that surprise – I didn’t even know this place existed either I don’t remember exactly what was there, but something really stood out: 4D-multimedia room/elevator was one thing (you get in to watch the video while it transports you to another level), and the puppets booth where you can control the puppets – something I think is pretty smart to have interactive feature in such a huge exhibit. The library was pretty nice too. But I don’t really understand why we can’t take pictures in it.

Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The exhibition covers almost every aspects about the Rattanakosin Period. Except for the modern political conflicts which seemed intentionally left out. For me, this place is a very good example how Thai people always choose to not accept the problems rooted in the society. I mean I understand how the Thai government wants tourists to get the good picture of Bangkok and Thailand, but political conflicts were parts of Bangkok and Thailand history. Taking out a few pages of history book is not going to change the past, plus, if you were a tourist, wouldn’t you wanna learn the whole story?

I am a huge fan of sit-com TV series “Friends”. I have watched the entire series for countless of times (seriously) and I can proudly say that I learn English from it.

I recommend every Thai friends of mine who wants to get better at English to watch this show. Not just because it’s fun, the language used in the show is also very practical for daily use. Plus Friends is a long series (10 reasons) and it includes almost every situations you can think of in city lives: birthdays, weddings, funerals, relationship problems, work problems, etc. I can’t tell how many times I borrowed lines from Friends to express myself.

One of my favorite moments on FRIENDS

All I can say is, after repeatedly watching Friends for almost 10 years, I learned many slangs, expressions, body languages, and American cultures from it. It’s a great show, and I applaud the creators and the casts for creating this magical show for us all.

In my opinion, South Korea is one of the biggest cultural exporters and I think S.Korea’s creative economy is very unique and effective. Let’s see some examples:

2PM & SNSD on Water park campaign

SNSD’s first debut single which resurrected skinny jeans

Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace) – a popular Korean drama that put Korean cuisine on the map (at least in Thailand) [Credit: http://english.people.com.cn/90002/96021/6547165.html]

There are so much more of Korean advert that use famous bands, or actors/actresses to sell stuffs: from cosmetics to air conditioners, from microprocessor to mobile phone. And don’t also forget that S.Korea has one of the biggest games industries in the world. Consider the fact that S.Korea is a small country that share a borderline with North Korea – which often have dispute with each other – I’ll say this is very impressive.

Look back to Thailand, even though the PM gave the green light on this matter, the reality doesn’t look good for creative economy in Thailand. Thai cultures are not any poorer than Korean, but the vulnerable politics, suppressive laws, and pretentious morality can make this harder to happen.

Thai movie industry is the best example for this. There are so many films that weren’t allow to show to public. Because they contained some ‘inappropriate’ – but true – scenes:

A true story about problems in our society and it’s banned even though we have such perfect movies rating system *sarcasm*

Just because doctors have sex during the day, this was also banned.

But this movie got “E” rate (Everyone)

Yeah, a movie with bone-crushing, blood-spewing scene is suitable for everyone.

What the f**k!? Just because the movie presents the nationalism doesn’t mean it could get through the censorship. I wanted to see this movie actually, but when I saw the rate of this movie with the news about ‘Insects in the backyard’ got banned (ironically these happened at the same timeframe), I changed my mind. I don’t want to support Thai movies industry if we have such unethical, shameless policy.

Creative economy is a great idea and I think it’s the right way for Thailand to move forward to. But we have to except the truth. Stop being pretentious. Enough with the censorship or at least have better and acceptable standard for it.

Global warming is a global issue and everybody knows it. However, people might think that since it’s such a big issue, only governments or big corporations should do their jobs to solve this and your action is too small to make anything different. Well, think again. If you do care about the Earth (think globally), then you should change your habits accordingly (act locally).

For example, if you normally buy imported food, maybe you should switch to domestic produce instead (I changed my brand of cereal to the one that produced in Thailand.) I remember this quote from one of my textbooks: “Buying green isn’t as important as buying local”. Sure, some European or Japanese products might have low carbon footprints on their labels, but they have to be shipped all the way to Thailand so you can buy those “green products”. However, emissions from transportation phase will make them not “so green anymore. If you buy local product, on the other hand, you don’t pay for this transportation emissions and you also help local economy growth.

Or if you care more about poor education in Thailand, instead of complaining about it, you can just teach your children to be more creative, more innovative, more analytical…any quality you want to see in your kids. And by doing this, your kids will stand out at school, and make their friends intimidating and want to improve themselves. There you go, better education!

Basically I want Thai people to care more about everything around us. Environment, society, politics, whatever. We’re going through some difficult times but if we start open our minds and make changes on things that you think helpful, even the smallest thing like buying different brand of cereal, a better future we’re all looking for will come true faster.

The story set piece during the Cold War, thus Kiada’s idea is almost impossible in the time when many countries accumulate atomic bombs to threaten the oppositions. Yamato faces waves after waves of attack from the US and USSR and, with Japan’s support, finally convince the world to accept the idea of independent nuclear submarines to act as nuclear regulator of the world.

This manga has much more detail to write it down here. But the thing is, I was so inspired when I read it. I think Japan delivers tons of messages to its people through manga. And the writers also have high responsibility to do so. They consult the experts or do the researches on what they will write about. Moreover, since manga is fictional, they can deliver “imaginations”. They deliver many out-there imaginations and complicated messages though graphical, easy-to-understand media and I kudo them on that. I think it’s even appropriate to say that Japan built its nation from manga. Many gadgets or technologies we have today were once appeared on Doraemon; this is a proof of the above statement.

I look back to Thailand. What do we have? Stupid, brainless, bad-acted soap operas? This is what we want for our children? This needs to be changed quickly. Because, seriously, what Thai media we feel comfortable enough to let children watch, read, or listen to?

I think I need time to find the answer.

In contrast, when you write a blog entry, you think – and think hard because blogging is more like writing a book (at least to me, but maybe I take it too seriously). Your blog entries will be there every time you access your blog. So you want to give it some thinking about what to put on your blog, which word to use, spacing, format, blah blah blah, while you hardly think about that when you tweet (ok, maybe you do think about words because of amount of letters limit).

But then again, not all people are like that. Some people I know take their tweets (or microblogs) quite seriously as well. They tell stories, jokes, or other things worth being in blogs. But to my experiences, there’re not quite a lot of those people.

I just want to say that microblogging sometimes can be really disruptive. And maybe we all should take a little break from it and do some ‘real’ stuff like write a stupid blog entry like this one (oh yes, I do think this entry is kinda silly!)

Cheers.

So that’s just some superficial info about myself. And to you visitors, feel free to leave comments, questions, or suggestions as you like

Loy kratong festival is one of the most beautiful festivals in Thailand. On every full moon in November, Thais celebrate this day by making little boats (the Kratong) out of banana trunks, banana leaves, flowers, candles, and incents. Although some might use plastics, foams, or even bread to make their Kratongs. Then we go to the river, pond, lake, or sea; and float these Kratong (Loy means ‘to float’ in Thai) in the water as the way to pay respect to the goddess of river. We apologize to her that we make the water dirty. It is also the way to float away bad lucks in Thai belief.

While this festival is beautiful, it creates TONS of waste in the water bodies. We are talking about decomposable biomass and some plastic/foam floating along the rivers. Of course, we collect them after the Loy Kratong night but definitely some of them might not be picked up, especially those in the rivers or the seas. So my opinions on this festival are:

1. Use natural components for your Kratong: For obvious reason – we don’t want any plastic or foam in our rivers, do we? I know biomass can get rotten and smell, but it’s still less harmful than those synthetic materials.
2. One Kratong is enough: If you’re going to this festival with your friends, maybe you should just float only one Kratong together. Less waste going in the water, right? (I’m not talking about couples or lovers, they usually float their Kratong together because Loy Kratong is a romantic night for Thai people – cool breeze, moon light, candles. What more do you want, eh? )
3. Choose to Loy your Kratong in enclosed water bodies: make it easier to clean up.

I don’t want to ruin the fun of the festival though, just keep in mind that we technically dump the soon-to-be waste, pretty, flowery boat in the water. So consider my tricks, and have fun!