What's Cooking? You Are!

Phuket Post: Issue 138, Page 13

One of the most popular restaurant concepts in Phuket is the "cookit-yourself" venue. There are slight variations on the basic setup, but all of them have a hot grill sitting in the middle of the table and either you go and pick out your own raw scraps of meat or the raw scrapes are brought to the table.

As a rule, I hate these restaurants. If I could cook worth a damn, I wouldn't be going to a restaurant in the first place...

Renting True Thai Luxury

Phuket Post: Issue 137, Page 15

I originally began listing villas for you; the Phuket traveller. Instead of a little hotel room sandwiched next to another, you have beautiful, open houses perched on the side of hills with a great view of the Andaman surrounded by old-growth trees. Phuket traveller, why don't you stay there instead of a large international hotel? I despair. I visit one villa thinking that it has the best layout, location, or features of any I've seen, and then the next week I come across one better. They're the sort of places that you imagine when you think of "luxury" on a tropical island...

Legitimise Yourself

Phuket Post: Issue 124, Page 7

There's one thing that you need to do business in Asia. It's not a proper business, connections, inventory, partners, customers, nor even an idea. What you need to be taken seriously here is a business card. Woe to the businessman who enters a meeting and doesn't have a business card to exchange.

Indeed, a business card in much of Asia is considered almost an extension of the person, due the same deference and respect as the person himself...

Hard for a Farang...

Phuket Post: Issue 135, Page 5

The word 'farang' gets banded around quite freely in Phuket and regardless of which particular interpretation you wish to accept, it is always used to describe foreigners and non-Thai people. If you consider that there are approximately just 66 million Thai people on a planet with a population of 6.8 billion, then that leaves 6,734,000,000,000 farangs. Right?

Well not really, because they're not really farangs are they?