The Noodle Curtain

Breaking 17 months of blog silence

There’s no one sorrier than me about abandoning this blog in the summer of 2011 and a new, though short-lived, one I started while living in Vietnam  in 2012. That last one really hurt when I shut it down after only two months.

 But enough about that regretful silence. I will get around to explaining that in bits and pieces as the days and weeks roll along here on The Noodle Curtain. 

 Back to the present! I am living in Bangkok now, coming full circle since my arrival in the Big Smoke in the fall of 2010 -- a new member of the retiree rolls. In that three-year stretch, I lived in BKK, then Phnom Penh, Cambodia and then on to the  Mekong Delta for a few months with my then girlfriend who was from Vietnam’s Rice Basket.

 After the breakup of our business and relationship, I fled to Thailand. My apologies but I landed in Pattaya, otherwise known as Sin City. It was just easy there. Lots of good food, cheap accommodation, lots of bars and an escape from the previous stressful Vietnam campaign.

 I lost count of the number of times I considered resurrecting this blog.  But I just didn’t have the inspiration but more especially the energy to rebuild this blog. Well, soon enough the real reason I didn’t have the energy was that I fell into the hands of a very nice Thai girl. She was my first ever Thai GF -- this despite nine plus years of travelling and living in Southeast Asia. Yeah, I was that picky. Seven days a week I was running errands for my GF’s restaurant, doing this and that and generally being a Good Boy. But that ended too after about 10 months. 

 Exit. Stage Bangkok! 

 This is my third attempt to live here. It has failed. My best friends in the world live here but I can’t abide by the intense living conditions and lifestyle here. Oh, yeah, it’s bloody expensive. And just last week the Thai government increased the alcohol tax again. Cry with me . . .

 Since moving here last May, I was quite happy for a while, having needed to escape (abominable) Pattaya and the breakup of another business and personal relationship. Note to self: Never combine a new relationship with starting a new business! Wait a couple of years! It was no one’s fault really, but that’s for another time.

 Now I have no attachments except my new-this-year iMac and my old faithful 5-year-old MacBook laptop. Oh, and my 42-inch LG LCD flatscreen TV. Oops, forgot my (recently discovered) fantastic Reebok shoes. Best ever walking shoes -- I love to walk. LOL. 

 Alas, I will leave Bangkok. There are two likely candidate locations: Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City.  Or maybe I should just say, Cambodia and Vietnam. That gives me an out if I decide on neither city!  It won’t be Thailand. Thailand is getting tired of foreign residents. Well, the feeling is mutual. That’s another topic for another day.

 During these almost four months, I think I’ve been away more than I’ve been in my Bangkok apartment, spending a lot of time in Phnom Penh and, uh, Pattaya. Strange that. The farther away I went, the closer I felt to Sin City. OK, maybe it’s just that I couldn’t enjoy or relax in Bangkok. True.

 This decision has got me thinking about all the lovely possibilities of my two favoured locations, Phnom Penh or Saigon (HCMC). I’ve been getting more and more enthused week by week, which seems to have tickled awake my brain’s blogging department. I’m feeling a growing inspiration to write, whereas Thailand leaves me cold. It’s been overdone anyway. 

 I remember when I wrote Nine Dragons Village (inactive now), the creative spirit was overflowing. I also started another blog for our bar/restaurant in the Delta. Two blogs at once and I felt I could write them forever. While The Noodle Curtain lasted three years, I knew it would end because my interest in the Thailand experience had faded away, evidenced by the two-week (and rising) intervals between posts in summer, 2011. 

 Nutshell: I’m alive and well. I’m back. I’m moving. I’m fired up. 

 PS: I will continue this blog here at The Noodle Curtain for a couple of months (since I’m still in Thailand and this was a mostly Thailand blog) until I move. That’s when I hope to start a new blog over at Wordpress. 

My 7 Links at Behind the Noodle Curtain

It must be my journalism background but once a post is in the public domain, the only thing I focus on is the next one. I do not dwell on what’s past and find it hard to think of some posts that would meet the criteria of My 7 Links, a challenge to bloggers originated by travel blog Tripbase.

The goal is to “unite bloggers  (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.”

Well, maybe I can construct something that meets the challenge thrown down to me by my very good friend Talen at Thailand, Land of Smiles. What may help me to do this is to recall my underlying theme to this blog:  remove the veils of my ignorance about Asian culture,  Southeast Asian in particular, and more particularly, Thai culture.

For me, my time here on the blog is about educating myself. If someone else finds something useful when reading a post, that’s great too. You see, you can live in this culture and yet let a lot of things escape your notice. But if you write about something, you’d better look closer at your day to day life, which will lead you to a better understanding of your next topic.  That’s exactly what this blog has helped me do, pay attention to my surroundings, whether cultural or historical or social.

It’s a great exercise in learning to really live here.

Coincidentally, this month, July 2011, is the third anniversary of Behind the Noodle Curtain. I will have more to say about my three years of self-education in a later post.

My most controversial post on Behind the Noodle Curtain

I was in a rant mood after an extended stay in Southeast Asia in the spring of 2009. But it was some months later that I wrote Female temptations in west bring predictable endings. While I tempered my remarks -- in fact, re-edited and re-published it after removing some incendiary stuff -- I still hold to every word I wrote about male-female relations in my home city of Toronto. In short, I’ve never seen so many unattached, unhappy 30-something people, both sexes. And if there are liaisons, they appear more like business relationships: he is a graphic artist, she an interior designer and both go into business together. Oh, that sounds like fun.

Most popular post

That’s easy, all you have to do is write about bar girls, eh? However, I did not write this one but wish I had. My Bangkok friend and film director Paul Spurrier wrote all the important bits in Wise advice on relationships with Thai bar girls l, a sensitive and balanced post that may have some surprises in it. That is my current No. 1 post by far.

Most beautiful post

I decided to go to farthest Isaan, Nakhon Phanom on the Mekong River after Stickman and Talen wrote positively of the place over a couple of years. And I took to it immediately and wrote Beauty comes in many forms in Nakhon Phanom. I think it has as much to do with the view into Laos across the river (see photo at top) than any one thing about the town on the Thai said. But the town has its attractions, too, being a cross-culture of Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese and Chinese.  And maybe being as far away as possible in the northeast from Bangkok also played a role. 

Most helpful post

When you’re over 50, as I am, it’s a good idea to get the “usual” blood tests such as PSA, blood sugar, cholesterol and vitamin B12. After a six-month stay in Thailand, I returned to Canada and followed my own advice. I was deficient in vitamin B12, which comes mostly from red meat, little of which I ate in Thailand. It happened again after a recent extended stay. The first post, Keep eye on your vitamin B levels if on Thai food diet, got linked on a Russian language web site and has been popular ever since. The second one, Vitamin B12 deficiency recurs after long Thailand stay, has been picked up by many.

Successful post that surprised me

My post on a cheap haircut -- The 100 baht haircut that will last a lifetime  -- managed to draw out long-time friends and admired bloggers who have never commented on my blog. LOL. Must be something about the universality of getting old and hiding that fact as best as one can.

Post that didn’t get the attention it deserved

I got a lot of comments on my lengthy post, Canadian boys need to toughen up, but none from Canadian readers or (presumptuously on my part) authorities or other interested parties. Maybe no one outside of Thailand read it.   I am surprised that this post didn’t get linked to here and there. Did not even get any objections to my slandering of Canadian men.

Post I’m most proud of

I suppose I’m most proud of this post, Make changes and the world changes with you, because I was changing for the better. I wrote it from my home city Toronto (although Bangkok is my home now). On my fourth trip to Thailand, I resolved to look under the hood of Thai culture and see what I could see and hope to take the best of it into my soul. On that 2007 trip, I think a made a few small breakthroughs that I’ve continued to feed off of. I was chilling out.


Conclusion
When I looked at the requirement for 7 example posts, I thought it would be  real challenge and frankly, not very fruitful for readers. I looked through the headings of the 290 plus posts and realized, hey, this is an interesting list. Maybe I could find 7 if I stretched. Well, I had trouble narrowing the list down to 7.

 

I'm also supposed to nominate five bloggers for this Tripbase challenge. Some of my faves have already been nominated but I am very very happy to recommend the following:

Boonies Thailand Photos  When I want to relax, be amused and just take a break from the seriousness of world, I love visiting Boonsong Somboon and his village where he and his wife tell stories through photography with often very amusing results. This Thai writer has sure hand for a  English and Thai word play that will have you chuckling and laughing out loud. There's much to be learned about Thai culture here, too.

My Thai Village Life  The Village Farang's blog, set in Chiang Rai province, is written by an American who moved to Thailand more than 30 years ago and has made a life here and achieved wedded bliss. But don't expect a view of the world through rose coloured glasses. He doesn't write often but this posts are very thoughtful about farang and Thai cultures, and sometimes provocative.  Although recently he admits he has mellowed a bit. Always worth reading, especially if you're a motorcyclist!

LTO Cambodia There are not many blogs on Cambodia that I have found but LTO Cambodia author Casey Nelson collects news bits, photo stories, opinion pieces and amusing anecdotes on life in Phnom Penh and Cambodia.

Life in Rural Thailand - Ubon Ratchathani  Author MeMock has a home in Ubon and Australia and business in Laos, as well as a young family.  His blog mixes delightful and serious family stories with local issues, history and just life in general. You will also find much amusement as his two daughters and new son grow up.

The Thai Pirate Ben Shingleton writes a wry amusing and sometimes serious blog about Thai life in Suphanburi province, often using pictures and video

 

 

 

Volunteer visas to Hello Kitty: Colourful Thailand blogs

Despite suffering from passenger jet butt, I managed to exercise my blog reading muscles the last few days while newly stationed in Bangkok. I read a number of delightful stories and posts with good practical info  that I just had to tell someone about.

So on with show, which features near drownings in condos, snakes with feet, playing with colourful sticks, the case for older foreigners marrying younger women, successful blogging and misleading information on vounteer visas.

Thailand-Blogs.com deals with a very important topic, namely visas for foreign volunteers to Thailand. Author Mike surveys the top volunteer help groups, which charge a fee, by the way, and all but one gives out the wrong information. Read the fresh post, but in short: you can NOT provide unpaid or volunteer work in Thailand without a visa. There is no wiggle room here. You can be arrested, fined/jailed, probably deported, and maybe even blacklisted. (Side note: Mike has provided very detailed reports recently on visas and are worth reading.)

When I write “snakes” and “chickens,” you’re going to think Boonie’s blog post is about everyday life and death on the farm. Sorry to disappoint all you Discovery Channel fans. It’s  another delightful story about Thai language and culture, more specifically about a saying that reflects the activities of village  gossips. Don’t say I told you so!

I’m always amazed by people who go to a new country and decide right away they’re going to learn the language, as did Lonely Planet writer Joe Cummings.  In many cases, they put in four, five, six hours a day for months and months, then took formal lessons and work and developed their Thai language skills for years afterward. He talks about The Silent Way, where students “physically manipulate colored wooden rods (Cuisenaire rods) of various lengths, using them to represent people and things, and also as syntax markers for sentence  structure.” Fascinating. That’s not the only worthy thing to read at Catherine’s Women Learning Thai . . . and Some Men, too ;-), but start at the interview with Joe Cummings who appears to have mastered the Thai language. Somehow I just don’t see myself going that deep. Or it could be fear of work.

Talen, author of Thailand, Land of Smiles, has just moved to Thailand from America. He’s been regaling readers with his misadventures since early September, beginning with the move into a new condo apartment that was frequently trying to drown him and his partner. Repairmen came and went, each utterly inept. His long-time partner was bounced in what might be called typical Thai-farang fashion and in short order. Now he spends his days exploring Central Thailand, picking up a Hello Kitty fetish and the girl who came with it. Yes, he drives a pink Honda Accord brazenly adorned with the Japanese character’s graphics. But let Talen tell the tale.


Over at Thailand Musings, this post does a little  more than muse about the extent of and precedence for older foreign men marrying younger women, particularly focusing on the Thailand experience.  The unflinching post is extensive and makes the point that while Thai women are frequently used as a generic example for the phenomenon, the truth is that happens everywhere, even in economically advanced countries. It appears as though the post was written anonymously, but I’m not sure. Maybe blog author Steve can elucidate.

And finally but no less vitally, new and even old bloggers will find a vault of good information on the numbers behind the blog at Beyond the Mango Juice. Author Martyn rounds up his first two years during which he penned some wonderful, and often funny (at his expense, he might add) stories mostly focusing on  Udon Thani province. He talks about advertising support from the likes of Google AdSense, affiliate programs and direct advertising. Other successful bloggers on Thailand and beyond pitch in with wise counsel in the comments section.

Okay, so I was lazy in the first four days of my move to Bangkok. I am actually suffering from, oh, too much partying. Serious exploration escapades will ensue.

Are Thailand tourism numbers on the mend?

My blog site has been  noticeably busier since mid-June. What got my attention more recently is that my visitor numbers keep climbing even when I haven’t posted anything new in 13 days.

This hasn’t happened before in two years of blogging on Behind the Noodle Curtain -- in fact, this month is my second anniversary.

I just posted on my higher numbers on June 14. I passed the 3,000-hits-a-month plateau. Now the numbers are accelerating and the blog is quickly heading for 3,500-pageview monthly average and it’s only July 11, 2010AD/2553BE.

This evidence and more makes me believe there are more people searching for information on Thailand. Which must mean Thailand is becoming a destination in mind, if not in fact. Yet.

Stickman, a well known commentator on Bangkok night life, last month wrote his weekly column on the  issue of foreign visitors to The City of Angels. He said claims that fewer people are going to the fabled Thai paradise is pure BS.  His faraway friends are querying him more about vacationing in Thailand,  he’s getting more emails about whether visitors will be safe going to the Land of Smiles, and more and more foreigners are expressing a desire to retire there.

His eyes see a different story too. His own neighbourhood is filling with more and more western faces. “I would emphatically say that [the expat population]  is increasing.  For every resident foreigner who leaves, I would say that 5 – 10 arrive!”

A fellow Thailand blogger, HooDon at The Big Mango Juice, just set a site record for visitors and page views.

I’d give you a better view of my visitor origins and other information from my site numbers if I hadn’t unwittingly removed my StatsCounter coding from the lead page. I found out just as I was researching this that BtNC hadn’t been tracking visitors since early on July 4. Argh!!!

My Google Analytics report doesn’t quite give me the same thing I’m used to with StatsCounter so I can’t tell you where each visitor came from and therefore say whether more and more Icelanders are visiting versus last year. But I can say that, according to Google Analystics, my top 10 visitors originate, in order, from U.S., Thailand, Canada, U.K., Singapore, Malaysia, Germany India and The Philippines. Almost 80 per cent of those in the last 30 days are new visitors.

Should Thailand expect a resurgence of visitors this year? Well if the superficial evidence of rising blog hits and queries received by one of the top Bangkok websites are anything to go by, there could just be a mini-boom, or maybe just a recovery to near normal visits. It will be something the Kingdom sorely needs. But then what if the protests return? I know I’ll be there again this autumn.

As a last note, I’m looking forward to next weekend’s Taste of Thailand in Toronto and see whether there’s a pick-up in the number of festival goers and to talk with the Thailand Tourism reps who will undoubtedly be there. I will post lots of pictures of the event.

Mobile journalism or 'mojo' takes Asian media by storm

I wonder when top of the market  DSLR full-size sensor cameras will have built-in 3G mobile phone technology. I suppose it would make the camera body bigger and you have the problem of the phone using the same battery resource as the camera electronics.

Still, I can imagine it happening once mobile networks up the bandwidth so that large format pictures can fly to their destinations, whether traditional media or blogs or websites.  Some searching  didn’t scare up any concepts for  such camera/smartphone hybrids. Could be I just missed finding them.

For now,  you’ll have to (happily) make do with some pretty powerful cameras  in smartphones running up to 14 megapixels (although most of the upconversion is digital rather optical) and the coming iPhone 4 with its (some might say meagre) 5 megapixel lens. (That isn’t stopping early adopters, though, with Apple counting more than 600,000 U.S. pre-orders for iPhone 4, which decimated previous iPhone order records!)

All these thoughts came to me after scouring some recent news stories and blogs on the subject of instant journalism, which has been  handily put under the title of Mobile Journalism or mojo, which seems to be a fairly new term, according to a recent story in The Irrawaddy. Sounds suspiciously like blogging, to me.

Then I read a Jon Russell blog on the fact that some big media analysis firm is bullish on online and social media advertising spending in Asia, particularly in Thailand. If you’ll remember, many amazing reports and photos came out of the smartphones of people on the spot during the Thailand protests, which sparked huge bulges in pageviews and commentary among the watchers from afar -- count me in.

And in this Thailand post-crisis period, several active social media  posters (Twitter, Facebook) wrote on what their equipment bags held while working from the protest front lines.

So without further comment, here are the links to these timely blogs and stories:

LINKS:

• Mobile journalism is a way to post faster and more surreptitiously in trouble spots, particularly in Asia, reports  The Irrawaddy online news site.
• Online advertising and mobile advertising spending expected to soar, particularly in Thailand, reports Jon Russell.
• Blogger and news hound Vaitor writes about his complete blogging kit bag.
• All things iPhone by Richard Barrow in Thailand.
• Richard Barrow Thailand blog produced strictly via iPhone files.

Stats milestones don’t tell whole blog story

Hit two milestones on my blog last week, 25,000 page views since beginning this odyssey of words back in July 2008, about 23 months ago.

Back then, I had no concept of  pageviews, unique visitors, returning visitors and what else. I remember being amazed in the first few weeks that someone else found my nanospec space in the Blogverse. Otherwise, I still can’t claim to have anything more than the most superficial understanding of those subject titles. If I delve below the surface via Google Analytics, to see about search engines, referrer sites and direct traffic, my brain runs out of oil and seizes.

Blogging though is a two-way street. I started finding other bloggers on Thailand, my prime subject, even though my blog deliberately casts a wider net over Southeast Asia. I plan to cover more geographic space than just Thailand as the months go by this year.

With their help, I reached a wider readership, thanks to links from their wonderful and entertaining sites. Some bloggers even wrote about some of my posts. Puts into question their tastes!  Or maybe they’re just generous to a fault. I’ve done the same because I appreciate their contributions to my enjoyment of the blogging life and appreciate their points of view and helpful information.

Some online forums found my blog and linked to specific articles. My post on vitamin B12 deficiency got a lot of traction with a Russian site focusing on Thailand. Who knew?!?! I can’t read Russian but seeing B12 in the middle of all that Russian script and receiving stats analysis by my Typepad account, proved the subject was popular.

I’m not much of a Twitter user -- until the recent political unpleasantness in Bangkok. Richard Barrow -- must-check blogs on Thailand, Samut Prakhan and many other Thai topics -- provided dozens of hits when during his on-the-ground reporting from the Red Shirt barricades asked for Thailand blog links he could put up on his Thailand Voice blog. I pitched my blog. Got a “massive for me” boost, with 65 Twitter-sourced hits that day. In fact, the 242 pageviews on May 18 (GMT) was my all-time single day high.

Bit of a digression: I started “following” far more Tweeters because of the riots.  The amount and quality of information coming from the front lines were amazing, from both foreigner and Thai (in English). I have kept most of those “follows” because these folks are really tuned into Thailand -- and they have the good taste to not waste bandwidth with idle BS. Some of them are: Richard Barrow, of course, Terry Frederickson, Catherine Wentworth, kaewmala, vaitor, Mark MacKinnon, Tulip, veena T., Juarawaee, Talen, MrMeMock, Mike Rose at My Thai Friend, HooDon at Beyond the Mango Juice, The Irrawaddy. 

Reading other writers’ blogs sometimes, I just had to comment. Well, that frequently led to new visitors from those blogs. While I recognize that every little bit helps, I only visit and read other blogs if I like to read them. And sometimes I’ll leave a comment if I like a particular post or thought. I think only a tiny fraction of visitors ever leave a comment or a “thanks,” but I don’t like to “read and run.”  I like to let a writer know I enjoy his or her writing or points. Stats can be a cold reflection of blog activity and ultimately not terribly satisfying for the writer; on the other hand, comments are like a handshake or pat on the back.

My current Google Analytics stats show 40 per cent of my visitors come from other blogs, forums, Twitter, other Typepad clients, image seekers, another site crawler called Linked Within,  and blog reader feeds. These are piled up into a segment called Referring Sites.

Direct traffic, which is people arriving via their bookmarks or typing the URL into their browsers, accounts for 14%. This is how returning visitors are registered. Have to admit I have a very small coterie of returnees, although those are hard for browsers to determine if cookies are not activated. Hey, there’s the sum total of all my knowledge of returning visitors.

Last but certainly not least, the giant Google search engine plus Yahoo and tiny Search and Bing, plus Ask and AOL point another 40% of my readers to Behind the Noodle Curtain. I’m certain they had a big electronic hand in helping me reach my second milestone, namely hitting 3,000 pageviews in the 30 days ending June 9. A lot of first-time visitors arrive on the Google train. Not many stay for long but what can I do.

Overall, Behind the Noodle Curtain is growing. And while it’s satisfying to see the numbers trailing upward, that’s not why I do this. Call the stats score a side light. Kind of like checking your lottery numbers, knowing the odds of winning anything are exponentially out of reach.  But it’s far more about the act of writing, communicating with readers and connecting with other bloggers who I count as my virtual friends. I love the subject too, exploring the new-to-me cultures of Southeast Asia. The time spent doing this has genuinely helped me see more of my own culture, its good and bad. Self-education.

Last, visitor origins are an interesting source of amusement. I’ve had hits from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and China.  My blog has also caught the attention of the Foreign Affairs departments of Canada and more recently Thailand. Maybe I should rethink this blogging thing!

Behind the Noodle Curtain: By the numbers and more

I’m writing this to really convince myself that I ought to continue this Thailand blog. I touched on the subject  two posts back, April 3. That was the short version of a much longer piece. But I've since reread the long version and decided to throw it all on the table -- reasons and stats.

Come July, 2010, it will be two years since I started Behind the Noodle Curtain. My readership has been going up.  I’ve enjoyed many days writing, editing, taking pictures and redesigning the blog. It was very satisfying during those periods.

During the latter part of  last year, my page views started exceeding 1500 a month. I thought that was okay -- although nothing matches those early days of excitement when I actually discovered one day that someone else read my blog.  I went back to Thailand and Laos in mid-December for six wonderful weeks. I imagine I can credit that with the fact page views went blasting by 2,000.  The blog hit over 2,500 in January, a month in which I spent three weeks in Thailand and Laos.  Writing from the field is a much more exciting and interesting  occupation and I think it shows in the more inspired writing, which, in turn, draws more readers. Put another way, the writer is living it.

February page views were so so. Martyn, at the very popular blog, Beyond the Mango Juice, attributed the January jump partly to the fact that folks were paying for their Christmas-New Year’s expenditures that came home to roost in January. So they stayed home and surfed. Good call, I think.  In February, travellers left the virtual road and hit the real road.  March has been superb, heading toward 3,000. Some days page views were well over 100. Doesn’t seem like much when compared to some of my work colleagues here in Canada (occasionally hitting 20,000 in one day!) and fellow bloggers in Thailand.

 
At the same time, the source of my traffic has been changing significantly. The end of last year, people came to Behind the Noodle Curtain from four directions: about 30 per cent or less by search engine (Google), about 30+ per cent by referring links (people arriving via links to my blog at other blogs, forums and online services), about 15 per cent direct arrivals (bookmarks and typing in the URL) and a bit less traffic from news feeds.  

Now Google and Yahoo search engines (the latter has really come on) bring me 50 per cent of my page views and many new visitors.  Referrer and direct traffic  are up a few points, but news feeds  down quite a bit. With the big jump in visitors via search engines, my bounce rate has risen -- it means people stop by, but more likely they hit the road quickly.

Looking at the most popular search terms, I can speculate as to why the bounce rate has risen. The most popular key words that bring readers to my site are: Washington Square (top photo of girls eating), Wild Country bar (inset), Huay Kwang (inset, above left, traffic scene) and a few  other night life  brand names and locations, such as the Soi Cowboy (bottom photo) Bangkok Motor show (inset, lower right). Of course, these Bangkok spots are full of regular restaurants and businesses but are notable for their night life activities. So I expect male readers were looking for specific information that I simply do not publish. So, off the travellers go.

Still it’s nice that the search engines bring them here. Among the top 10  key words are Asian films and iPhone apps for learning Thai, the latter I hand off to expert Catherine over at Women Learning Thai. It’s amazing how many hits my site gets when I publish film news and reviews. The reaction is almost instantaneous, unlike many other search terms. I recently did something on Tai Orathai (inset, below left), the luktung superstar that many farangs know, thanks to their upcountry wives and girlfriends. Barely a statistical murmur. I’ll probably get some regular site visits over time, if the search engines co-operate.

Newness, however, doesn’t seem to spur visitors. Old stuff seems to be just as attractive. I’m always surprised at how often I get visitors for old posts. I can thank search engines but the fairly recent addition of LinkWithin widget has really made an impact. Their crawler indexes your site and when a reader clicks on something in order to read it, three or four (somewhat) related posts are popped up at the bottom of the article. Most bloggers use this service now and it’s really paid off, I think.

So that’s the numbers summary. But why am I unhappy with the blog? Or is it blogging? I think my first challenge is that I spend so much time away from Southeast Asia, I can’t get new material. New material is the life blood of a blog. New material comes harder when you’re so far away. It takes a lot of research time to produce one piece, but if you’re on the ground in SEA, the material is all around you. You just have to observe, analyze a bit and write. In the meantime, while sitting here in the west,  I’ve been neglecting other things, such as, oh,  studying my Thai language materials and  reading good books to sharpen my sadly declining vocabulary and knowledge base.  

Second, personal stories are a life blood, too. Maybe even moreso.  You can get all kinds of basic info on Southeast Asia on various websites, albeit some of them are rather too commercial and mercenary. What’s in short supply is the personal story that’s entertaining and also informative. In many stories, I tended to distance myself from the subject of a post, being the type of person who always likes to stay in the background. I think that if I reformulate my blog, I’ll make it more personal and hopefully interesting. Oh, and maybe informative, if I believe what I write above! 

Third, I haven’t settled on a consistent style.  I admire so many Thailand blogs and most of the reason is the writer’s personal style. The writer is always  “in-style.”  See Beyond the Mango Juice or Thailand, Land of Smiles or Retired in Thailand and Loving It, or Women Learning Thai. There are times when I think I’ve nailed the exact style for me. Then I post another during a tired or lazy period  and that sucks the life right out of a post.

Speaking of writing, I’ve spent most of my working life editing copy. So this blog has been a great practice sheet for getting back into the writer’s head space (200 plus posts, the most I’ve written since, um, the late ’90s). Believe me, in order to write well, you have to write. If you don’t do it for years, you really do lose your writing muscles. I typically write six  to 10 words, which are all that’s required for news headlines.   This is not a good thing unless you want to write for wiener packages.

Blogging is fun and I’ve “met” so many great folks, especially my fellow Thailand writers. But I’m feeling the itch for a “different”  personal enrichment. I think I may have to  put blogging aside for a while or at least restrict my posting. I really should spend more time in the language books  and get back to reading some good fiction and just good writing.

I know the coming year will see vast change, particularly since I’ll be officially retiring from the daily grind.   The extreme might be quitting blogging altogether, or I might just find inspiration when I move to Southeast Asia in September.  I somehow think the latter will rule.   After all, a blog is an exploration of self as well as subject. The two might work well together. And I do have ideas for another blog or two. As well as longer forms. How it all thrashes out could make for interesting reading. And maybe I'll end up at a different destination. Or not!

Below, is yet another photo from the Bangkok motor show at the Impact Centre. Below that is infamous Soi Cowboy go-go bar strip.

 

Taking a break from blog till SEA return

The past year and a half  I’ve spend a lot of time researching and writing posts for Behind the Noodle Curtain. I’ve found it very pleasurable  task, made even more fun and exciting when I’m on the scene in Southeast Asia. One is surrounded by stories and it becomes challenging to just pick one.

Reading the  reactions of my regular commenters, including friends,  has been a wonderful experience and their observations and suggestions make one think a bit deeper, too. That’s great, actually. A real education.

But I’ve been home in Canada for two and a half months. Scaring up stories probably takes twice as long, since I have to read many more sources. Online sources are not the most dependable. So you have to double- and triple-check some information. It also means spending entire evenings in front of the laptop here at home.

The result is I’ve developed an aversion to my computer and the internet from this seven-day-a-week habit. I’ve not been able to read books or study my Thai language course material in any fruitful way in the 20 months or so since I began my blog (July 2008). So I resolved at the end of March to get some balance. It means closing the laptop, getting away from the computer desk, cracking open a book or catching up on some movies or doing daily work on my Thai language skills, such as they are. And going for long walks. After all, a  really promising spring has arrived here in southern Canada. 

I think there will be a price to pay. I won’t be posting near as often for the next five months. But I expect to feel renewed and re-energized when I return to  Southeast Asia in September. On a semi-permanent basis. Then watch out. The floodgates may open and you will be up to your ears in words and pictures from the tropics.

In the last two months, work has  also taken its toll, it being very, very busy, what with business developing well and a new computer system being trotted out to crush our spirits. Consequently, I am tired of staring at a computer screen. Possibly this aversion will only be temporary. But for now, I'm tired.

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to everyone for visiting.  I see many more of you are coming via Google and Yahoo search, accounting for just shy of 50 per cent of my visitors, way up from about 30 per cent just two months ago.  I may post further on this -- I’d written something up just a week ago and never published it. But I need another break from the laptop.

You can always email me via the link above.

Blogging hotties live the high life

Sometimes you just need a dose of crazy-assed antics, you know,  some amusement and distraction from the everyday world. You want to forget about the Red Shirts vs Yellow Shirts, the shrinking U.S. dollar and mutual funds, the Thaksin roadshow antics, the plight of Burmese refugees, and the farang-Thai stories. That usually means the subject matter is about everyday stuff,  like checking out a new bar or restaurant, or going to a chi-chi party or making risotto with Asian twist or make a perfect hair bun in 1 minute  or  visiting Disney World in Hong Kong.

I find quite a bit of this material on blogs from young people in Singapore and Malaysia. There may be more. Lots more. A recent post by the extremely popular Xiaxue, a Singapore hottie, led me to many more English-language blogs by Southeast Asian young people.  It also gave me a colourful tour of Disney’s Hong Kong establishment. I’ll tell you right now that I don’t give a rat’s ass about things Disney. But Xiaxue’s report and pictures of fellow bloggers getting the five-star treatment was a hoot. (Image above, from xiaxue.blogspot.com, of Princess Aud, Redmummy, Xiaxue (Wendy) and Cheesie)

Need I tell you the report is full of pictures of  pretty blogging girls? Asian hotties? I do like ethnic Chinese girls’ looks and there’s much to like in this report as well as the reports by the other blogging hotties. And there’s food. Do Asian girls like food? Do humans breathe?  If the posts aren’t full of young Asian women having fun, they’re full of amazing, mouth-watering, beautifully prepared and presented food. I’d recommend these blogs if your only interest is Asian cuisine.

Then again, how does a girl survive if she doesn't know how to make a hair bun. You'll get that too in these blogs. Visit cheeserland.com and you'll see Cheesie (you won't mind her screen name too much  after you get a look at the hottie herself) shows how to do it [Update: dropped 1-min version for longer one. More is better, isn't it? ]. Watch a new, longer YouTube video:

Xiaxue, a.k.a. Wendy,  is a multi-award winning Asian blogger. It's interesting that her rants and antics are rather atypically Asian. Which is maybe why she's so popular. She doesn’t hold back when something bothers her such as a whinging reader or poor restaurant service or something done in bad taste. I like that. And so do her readers, it appears. Her site registers some 20,000 pageviews a day! I’ve seen as many as 200 comments on a post.

Note that Xiaxue’s blog takes quite a while to load, because of the heavy image load. It took maybe 2 minutes on my 10 megabit service to fully acquire the page.  I will also warn you that her language is colourful. This is not for office computers not because of the pictures, although your buddies might not leave your work station if they get a eyeful of the Asian pretties, but of the oversized displays of the f-word. Many of these Asian girl bloggers  use the f-word. Liberally. Speaking of language . . . the blogs are a mix of English and Singlish, as well as being peppered with (what I think is) Malaysian and Chinese expressions, but  transliterated into English. One blog in particular, Redmummy.com, is full of multi-language expressions. Couldn’t fathom too much of it, I have to admit. But then, it’s not aimed at a Canadian dude the other side of the planet.

LINKS

• Xiaxue (Wendy)
• Cheesie at Cheeserland
• Princess Aud at fourfeetnine
• Red at Redmummy
• eStee at Geek Goddess (or 9eek 9goddess)

Noodle Curtain blog redesign like a more comfortable chair

 

Goodbye to my original blog design above . . .  unless  readers object

The previous blog format for Behind the Noodle Curtain was bothering me for a few reasons. I attempted to look for ways to change it but standard templates have their severe limitations. Not surprising. As a newbie blogger over a year ago, I welcomed the ease with which I could get the Typepad blog going, the writing notwithstanding, as all you had to do was give it a name, write something and press Publish. Almost sounds too easy.

I particularly wanted to make my own photo banner. Apparently it can be done, but you need a degree in quantificational logic. Or rough equivalent to Master's in Pick-Up Sticks. In the next step up from basic template usage is the Typepad Theme Builder. I just couldn't figure out how to get started. Yes, I fell to my knees at the start line.

Then the other night, I resumed the pursuit of my goal because I really wanted to put up that photo banner, because all the other kids had one and I wanted one too! Somehow I picked up the sticks in the right order,  and actually built the design you hold in your eye's hands. It eventually was pretty easy to do. You can  re-arrange, re-divide, re-line up, re-colour and reformat just about everything, plus keep previewing at every stage. It's all through staged prompts on a single web page. Main problem I had was figuring out what Typepad means by Apply. Turns out that when I pressed this "button" on a test format, it applied the test style to my live format or Current Design. I won't bore you with any more knee-scrapers. Needless to say, some of you out there saw my "work in progress".

Some of you may still like the old blog style, and I do like "blogs in black", so to speak, but it all started to look the same to me. The theme has a certain class to it, like long, chrome-trimmed black limos. But it was the details that were not working for me, such as the greenish labels for the sidebar titles and chunky white font within. Two lines in a title label looked awkward but I let them go anyway. The spacing within the labels wasn't always "true". And that particular green really doesn't go with much else, especially, well, any other colour.

I give equal weight to another reason for ditching the black blog. Authors of blogs and websites on the naughty night life seem to favour  black themes  and, frankly, I didn't like the association. Now, maybe some of you don't know what I'm talking about but you only need to Google keywords such as Bangkok, Pattaya, nightlife, bars, Thai girls and massage. You'll get your answer quickly. I am definitely not putting down night life activities or  blogs that focus on same (I am a regular reader of Stickman), it's just that Behind the Noodle Curtain is not  about that feature of Southeast Asia.

So what colour? That was the single most challenging decision. I let 48 hours pass before I finally settled on the colour you see before you here. And I'm still not sure. Here is a screen cap of my alternative:

I quite like this blue one too. But I chose yellow because I like bright shiny things! The blue, while it's attractive, imbues a bit too much seriousness to my blog business. The yellow is fun, possibly reflecting the sanuk of Thailand. Then again, what do I know? Anyone got any preferences?

I could go on and on about the style of the redesign but you can see it right in front of you. I like its subtle fonts and scales, the nice white spacing between sidebar items, the text font and headline font of the first stack. I just like a lot about it.

Maybe some day I'll actually learn about HTML language and start from scratch, sort of. But today's blog platforms are a great start to getting into the blogging game!