A prize-winning job

The Olympics are all about bringing sportslovers from different nations together: and not just as adversaries on the field. New Zealander Gay Horan has been coaching Thailand’s Olympic gold-medal rowing hopeful, Phuttharaksa Nikri, since 1996. “I read a newspaper article in The Nation about a girl called Phuttharaksa who wanted to row and had no…

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Thai me up, Thai me down

When I first arrived in Bangkok, I hated it. It was as if a black-and-white film of the post-industrial age was screening in front of my eyes and I wasn’t allowed to leave. I was overwhelmed by the traffic, the people, the noise. Slowly, I learned to see the colour. Unexpected beauty was everywhere if…

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A breath of fresh air: Yoga for expatriate women

The air might usually be filled with thick traffic fumes in Bangkok, but that doesn’t mean you should hold your breath. In fact, you’d be doing your body and your mind a great service if you were to learn to breathe properly in Bangkok – or anywhere else. Practising the ancient art of yoga can…

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Toward quality fiction

Like the Gaze of Statues: Selected Short Stories By Karen Schur What a refreshing book to find published in this city crying out to be captured by a competent fiction writer’s pen. But Karen Schur’s Like the Gaze of Statues ventures much further than Bangkok: this collection of twenty quietly-spoken short stories takes the world…

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Only the murder was missing

It was swish, smart and sumptuous. The Eastern and Oriental Express’ inaugural dinner journey from Bangkok’s Hualampong Station and back – the destination was hardly the point – was an extravagant, ostentatious affair. There was one disappointment to be had in the five hours of snaking our way through the Thai night in style: there…

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Just breathe

Canadian Lesley Hogya, an Iyengar yoga instructor currently teaching pre-natal classes in Bangkok, certainly makes yoga during pregnancy sound like a treat. "It’s a special time in your life, especially if it’s your first pregnancy, so you should indulge and take care of yourself. Yoga poses can nurture the pregnant woman in a way that…

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East-west fusion

When the chef has tried some 600 combinations of ingredients to make the best possible Indian naan bread – with a Western twist – you know the restaurant under their charge has got to be special.Willment Leong, chef at the lavish Merchant Court Hotel’s Doc Cheng’s, says he may have even tried 700 combinations to…

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Girl, Interrupted

By Susanna Kaysen When Susanna Kaysen is 18 years old she makes a feeble attempt to take her own life. After a single session with a psychiatrist she is diagnosed as having a ‘borderline personality’ and is sent away to McLean Hospital, the private psychiatric centre that treated Sylvia Plath and Ray Charles, among other…

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When We Were Orphans

By Kazuo Ishiguro Christopher Banks was born in Shanghai to British parents in the early 20th century while opium was all the rage. His father’s apparent kidnapping is followed shortly afterwards by his mother’s disappearance, and thereafter he is sent back to England. He becomes a successful detective, and eventually returns to Shanghai just prior…

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