Word: thai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...grade Bangkok detective named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Jitpleecheep is a devout Buddhist, and his firm belief in reincarnation and the transience of the physical world colors every aspect of his investigation. "We do not look on death the way you do, farang," he tells us, using the Thai word for foreigner. "Would you be sorry about a sunset?" Jitpleecheep is also half American and half Thai, which makes him uniquely qualified to understand both the tourists lured by the promise of sex, money, drugs and contraband jade and the Thai nationals who make sure they pay dearly for Bangkok's many...
...Bali killed 202 people and wiped out much of what was left of tourism there. By early 2003, Burma was a recrudescent human-rights disaster; more than 2,000 drug suspects were gunned down in the streets of Bangkok, and Cambodians went on a violent rampage against the Thai. Armchair audiences overseas might as well have contemplated a holiday in hell...
...thar tourists became evident, Asia greedily tore down barriers to foreign travel. Over a decade, China went from being a xenophobic recluse to a tourism junkie . Vietnam pursued a parallel course; visas for travel there, formerly very difficult to obtain, were suddenly not a problem. The Western boom in Thai cuisine and a massive promotional campaign made the Thai kingdom a hot destination; the buoyant rise of tourism in Bali in the early 1990s encouraged the building of resorts in new destinations in the Indonesian archipelago, such as in neighboring Lombok. Even creepy Burma tried to polish its image...
...Constantly evolving and mutating, Chatuchak?probably the largest market on the planet?is split into 26 sectors sprawling over 112,000 square meters. There are more than 10,000 retailers, stocking everything from mass-produced teak furniture to great bolts of raw Thai silk, to bushels of imitation fruit and vegetables. The sartorial detritus of yesteryear, shipped to Thailand by U.S. and Japanese wholesalers, can be found in the 400 or so ramshackle stalls crammed into Sector...
...Note also that Chatuchak gets unimaginably busy, so don't operate in an unwieldy brigade. Split into mobile hit squads of twos and threes, and arrange to regroup at the prominent central clock tower (the vital landmark was donated by the market's Chinese Association in honor of the Thai King's 60th birthday...