PEARL'S ASHES: Bangkok...and a lot more

Today I continue my nostalgic Pearl's Ashes series, focusing on Bangkok.  But there will be a few informational detours, leading to a nightmarish journey to my hotel in Tokyo, and finishing with a hint of what will be my posting next Tuesday.

• I flew first class, and left Honolulu on 1March2011, 24 hours later arriving at my favorite hotel in Bangkok, the Sheraton Grande Sukhamvit.
• My philosophy when flying is, "if free, every drink not drunk is money wasted."  I'm not sure my body, and liver in particular, would agree, but it makes for an enjoyable flight.
• Go to my posting that day for the details, but I had 16 different alcoholic drinks getting from Honolulu to Bangkok.

• 
  I selected the Grand Palace for Pearl's Ashes #15.
• Here is a short video of this attraction.
• Official residence of the Kings of Siam, now Thailand, since 1782, until 1925.
• Over 8 million visitors/year.

One of Pearl's very favorite spots on Earth is the Grand Palace in Bangkok.  All the kings of Thailand lived here, except for the current ones and Chulalongkorn.  Just to get your history correct, King Chulalongkorn is the son of King Mongkut, who was the depicted king in the King and I.

• The most sacred attraction in Thailand is the Emerald Buddha.  
• There are signs all over the place NOT to take a photo.  But here is mine anyway.
• From the 15th century.
• It is 26 inches tall and 19 inches wide.
• So you say, what a piece of emerald.  But the truth is that the Emerald Buddha is made of jade.
• Here is photo of a fake emerald weighing 253 pounds.  Named Theodora, specialists think this is a white beryl dyed green.  However, a natural green beryl is NOT an emerald, which, confusingly, is type of beryl.  Huh?  Read this.

• 
  But the Emerald Buddha is bigger than that fake.  However, the world's biggest gem ever found (in 2001 in Brazil) in a single shard is the Bahia Emerald at 836 (or 794) pounds.  But as this photo shows, even though it is more than four feet tall, a shard is not a crystal.
• Said to be worth around a billion dollars (or only $300 million).  In other words, a lot of uncertainty.
• Lot of criminal history, as it was smuggled out of Brazil and stolen at least once.
• In 2024 a DC court determined that this gem should be returned to Brazil.
• As I've segued into this subject, let me end it with two more interesting bits of information.
• 
  The Cullinan Diamond from South Africa is the largest gem-quality diamond at 3,107 carats, weighing 1.4 pounds, although Sergio from Brazil is a rough diamond at 3,167 carats.  The Cullinan was cut into 9 major stones, with the Cullinan I, or Great Star of Africa, the largest at 530.2 carats, set at the top of the Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross.

• 

  The largest authenticated crystal of any type is a beryl from Madagascar, being 18 m in length, 3.5 m in diameter, having a volume estimated at 143 m³ and a mass approximately 380,000 kg, or 836,000 pounds.  Not exactly sure, though what this gemstone looks like, but I would imagine it would look similar to Mexico's Cave of Crystals in Naica, Chihuahua.  Those orange things are people.  A beryl from here is in second place.

• Okay, so where was I?  I dropped Pearl's ashes at this spot.

Let me continue my journey through the Orient, for a nightmare of a natural calamity soon follows that made this journey maybe my most adventurous.  After Thailand, I caught the Eastern and Oriental Express from Bangkok to Singapore.  Train stopped at the River Kwai, where there is a Death Railway Museum.

• You might have seen the movie, Bridge on the River Kwai (Rotten Tomatoes 96/93). but did you know that there were 100,000 deaths associated with building this railway?  16,000 prisoners of war, but more the local workers, who should have known better, but drank water from the River Kwai and caught cholera and other diseases.

• 
  I've never before seen such horror in any museum.  I felt uncomfortable that I was of Japanese descent.
• If you are any way feeble, don't take this train, for the train track is narrow, meaning that everything jerks left and right, so walking is a huge danger.
• Went through southern Thailand, where Islamic militants were a problem.
• 
  I stayed at the Marina Bay Sands.  To quote my posting of 2011:

The Marina Bay Sands is an $8 billion integrated resort which had its grand opening last month.  There are 2561 rooms, a major convention center, casino (500 tables and 1600 slot machines), seven celebrity chef restaurants and an Art and Science Museum, topped by a 1280 foot long Sky Park with a 492 foot long Infinity Pool over three towers.  I'm at the edge of Universe:  There is a pool at the top.

While in Singapore:

A 7.2 earthquake struck 90 miles off Honshu in the Pacific and shook Tokyo, creating a 2 foot tsunami, but surprisingly causing little damage.  There has already been a 6.3 aftershock.  The truly worrisome speculation, though, is that there is a 70% chance that an 8.0 quake will crush Tokyo in 30 years.


• 
  It was here that I had my best Chinese lunch, ever, at Taste Paradise.
• Started with shark fin soup (this was a long time ago when this was not so controversial), Shanghai dumpling with foie gras and crackling pork belly, accompanied by Tiger Draft Beer and Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch. 
• Course #2 was braised abalone, seared foie gras, choy sum and sweet corn soup, with Kir Royale.
• Whole lunch, with tax an tip cost $84.
• Well, the really big one struck off Japan that day, so my posting was TSUNAMI COMING FROM JAPAN TO HAWAII.

• 
  The Huffington Post e-mailed me to again (I wrote for them an article, HAWAII TSUNAMI? on 27February2010 when I was in Amsterdam, and they thought I was in Hawaii) of the incoming tsunami to Hawaii.  So again, I accommodated them, watching CNN in Bangkok.  It was published the day of the earthquake, 11March2011, Hawaii Tsunami, Again.

• 
  My flight to Narita, Tokyo was early the next morning.  
• After the earthquake, Narita Airport closed down.
• A year ago when I was in Bangkok, there were red and yellow shirt protests at the Bangkok Airport, so I almost couldn't leave.
• This time, my calls and that of the hotel concierge came to a conclusion that I could take a chance, and if the flight was allowed, take it.  So I did.
• Here is my blog of that fateful day:  

  MY PEAK OF LIFE: THE CALM BEFORE THE CALAMITY

• It started out great.

I got confirmation at 4:30AM of my Thai Air flight to Narita at 8AM.  So I packed and made it to the airport by 6AM, paying the taxi driver 500 Baht (about $17…a bit high, I thought, but the hotel limousine would have cost $70).  Checking in at Thai Royal First Class is extraordinary.  First, you don’t stand in line but sit in a lounge area.  Then, a staff member accompanies you through immigration and arranges for a Segway type device with driver to take you to their first class room.  The ride was quite lengthy.  There might have been five passengers for a room that could easily hold a hundred or two, and a staff of a dozen and more.

Various dim sums, soups, rice dishes, etc.  I asked for a chicken fried rice with an egg, which they prepared in a kitchen, and ordered a Bloody Mary and Singha Beer.  Yes, 7AM, but it was already afternoon in Honolulu.  The flight was delayed an hour, so I had a chance to spruce up my Huffington Post Hawaii Tsunami, Again article, and field a few concerned e-mails.

• On the flight:

It frankly occurred to me at this point, notwithstanding the immediate above, of my real life fantasy that, while drumming my feet on the floor to the beat of Ravel’s Bolero, I was at the peak of my life.  One wonders when this will be, sort of like Peak Oil, but, no doubt, this was it. Things can only go downhill from here, and certainly will when I land in the chaos of Narita.  But it was an incredible ride and I still think I was (am, yet?) the luckiest person in the history of Humankind.  Finally, I felt a kind of euphoria traveling at the speed of a bullet at 33,000 feet, maybe akin to a prisoner on death row having his last breakfast.  I was mentally prepared for the next stage of my life, the calmness before the catastrophe.

• I landed at Narita.  To again quote from my 2011 posting:

My plane landed at around 4PM after a flight of five hours from Bangkok.  I had four bags with me, one very large, for I'm on a six week trip in hot and cold countries.  After the customs check I looked around for the usual sign with my name.  Saw none, so walked around with my bags and asked questions.  Half an hour later after determining that there were no taxis, no airport limousines, no NEX, and no Tokyo Westin pickup, I tried to call the Westin, but failed.  There was only one option, the slowest JR trains from Narita to Tokyo.

a.  I wasn't allowed to take the cart down the escalator, so that became a problem. After somehow getting my bags down one floor,  I stood in line for perhaps an hour to buy the ticket, but not being able to read nor speak Japanese, I wasn't sure what I was doing.  

b.  I finally figured out that I needed to find an elevator to go one floor down.  

c.  Half an hour later, I boarded the train.  But try getting four bags on.  

d.  After an hour or so, everyone got off the train at some obscure stop, so I lugged everything off, only to stand in line for another train.  

e.  Finally this second train got me to the Nippori Station for the Yamanote Line to Ebesu.  

f.  However, both the elevators and escalators were not functioning.  Amazingly, a nice man and a college student helped me carry my bags down.  She had just flown in from Brazil, and in conversation I found out that I should have used a delivery service to send my bags to the Westin.  I wish someone had told me that earlier.  I struggled on to the Yamanote train.  

g.  I've now been standing or in line for more than four hours.  Ah, there was an escalator to take me up to the walkway through Ebesu Garden Place, a path I have been  using for more than ten years.  

h.  Oh no, they now have this blocked off.  I asked, and they said take the escalator back down to the street level and walk to the Tokyo Westin.  

i.  The sidewalk was dark and bumpy, but, luckily, I was able to find a taxi for the final few hundred yards.  

I finally arrived at the Westin at almost 9PM.  It took me as long to fly from Thailand to Japan as to travel from Narita to the Tokyo Westin.  What an ordeal!

Read my Huffington Post article on The Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami: The Aftermath.  For the next month I tried to avoid the approaching radiation of the Fukushima nuclear fallout by first flying to China, then when the danger subsided a bit, waited in Seoul, before returning again to Japan.  But then the damaged nuclear reactors acted up, so I took the bullet train to Fukuoka, then gingerly moved up towards Tokyo over the next two weeks, finally getting the nerve to train through the Fukushima area all the way to Sapporo.  I returned to Tokyo on 7April2011 and got shaken by a 7.1 earthquake.  So, anyway, details next week.

Got these in my e-mail today:

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THE END OF THE UKRAINE-RUSSIAN WAR?

But first, an assessment by the New York Times this morning of what just happened in Germany:

Germany’s next chancellor is likely to be Friedrich Merz, a former corporate lawyer who has promised to crack down on migration, cut taxes and regulation and adopt a hawkish policy toward Russia. Merz leads a center-right alliance (the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, or CDU) that finished first in yesterday’s election, with 29 percent of the vote. A far-right party, Alternative for Germany (the party that Elon Musk supported), that promises even tougher immigration policies — but is friendly toward Russia — finished second, with 21 percent of the vote.  The center-left Social Democrats, who led the government for the past four years, tumbled to third place, with 16 percent of the vote. It was their worst showing in a national election since at least 1890.

The percentage of the current population born in another country is now 20%, which was only 12.5% a decade ago.  However:

Crime became a salient issue in the campaign. Recent data suggests that foreigners commit about 40 percent of crimes in Germany, Graeme Wood of The Atlantic pointed out. (Immigrants in the U.S., by contrast, commit crimes at a lower rate than natives, despite President Trump’s false claims.) Over the past 10 months, Germany has experienced at least four fatal attacks by migrants who had failed to receive asylum but nonetheless remained in the country.

Also, NBC News reported:

By design, Germany’s voting system means it is very difficult for one party to govern alone, forcing leaders to work together and form coalitions to govern this consensus-based country. Merz said that he hoped to form a government by Easter, but added that cooperating with the second-placed Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was “completely out of the question.” 

So until Germany gets settled, France and the UK are taking leading roles in determining the future of the Ukraine-Russia War.  Russia invaded Ukraine exactly three years ago.  In those early days, it seemed like Russia would roll into Kyiv in a matter of weeks to end the war.  Well, that did not happen.

I recall that the Ukraine capital as Kiev.  When did the spelling change?  The transliteration Kyiv was legally mandated by the Ukraine government in 1995.  However, it took until 2019  for the switch to actually occur internationally after the KyivNotKiev campaign.

President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Donald Trump in the White House this morning.  

• Friedrich Merz sent a strong message of support for Ukraine.  He urged for a fair peace.
• The UK announced new sanctions against Russia.
• A dozen leaders from Europe and Canada visited Kyiv this morning to show united support for Ukraine.
• It is clear where the European Union is in respect to support for Ukraine, with all those parallel events.
• 
  Trump and Macron were convivial to each other, but did not seem to be united in the basics of what would be negotiated to end the Ukraine-Russia War.  

• 
  Trump is taking an America First position, and hopes to get something out of this possible peace, as for example, getting rare earth metals from Ukraine as payment for what the USA has provided to them in the conflict.
• Macron feels that much of European support was given to Ukraine, but that repayment and reconstruction money would come from the $300 billion frozen Russian funds now tied up in the European Union.  There might be something close to a trillion dollars, if everything counted.
• There is general acceptance from all parties that peacekeepers in Ukraine would be from Europe.
• Peace could come in a matter of weeks.
• As Trump indicated, the threat of world-wide nuclear warfare triggered by this war is now not a concern, and also that consideration should be given to Russia being readmitted back into the G7 to become the G8 again.

• 
  Clearly, Ukraine will not be able to join NATO in the near future.
• British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will come to the White House on Thursday to further unify the West, and perhaps solidify the emerging plan to deploy as many as 30,000 European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine.  Trump wants the UK to raise defense spending to 2.5% of their GDP.

On a lighter note, my Saturday posting focused on Netflix as a streaming opportunity, for a cost.  Time magazine drew up a list of cheesy romantic comedies you can find on this channel:

• Why is cheesy and romantic desirable?  These  rom-coms brighten your day, while allowing you to fold laundry and only keep one eye on the screen.
• Unfortunately, none of the mentioned films scored all that well on Rotten Tomatoes, or were too new to be rated.
• Resort to Love received 65% from reviewers, but 86% from audiences.  I usually side with the latter.  This was by far the highest rated on this list.

• 
  Oh, don't watch Love at First Sight.  First, too old, released in 1977, starring Dan Aykroyd.  But worse, had a zero score on Rotten Tomatoes.

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THE STANFORD TRANSITION

My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.  Part 1  dealt with an overview and my early youth, while Part 15E a couple months later was on the afterlife.

Transitions 6 and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition:

I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer (and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the little league baseball team playing next to my apartment made it to the 1961 Williamsport World Series as an international representative).  This was the first time I had ever left Hawaii, so this transition might have been the most monumental of all.

That first summer I took a date for my first visit to Disneyland.  The smog was terrible.  My brother took me to a pool party hosted by a radio DJ.  He had on one arm a dozen watches.  He said take one.  This was the time just before the U.S. Congress began to investigate the payola scandal.  I looked at 1958 on The Nostalgia Machine, and selected Domenico Modugno's Volare, the Champ's Tequila and Perez Prado's Patricia, for I recall those songs booming into the crowd around the pool.

Then at the end of the summer in September of 1958, my brother drove to the Stanford Campus.

Silicon Valley had not yet formed, for the name was invented in 1971.  Thousands of high tech firms began here, many linked to Stanford professors and their graduates...Google, Apple, eBay, Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

David Packard, Jr., was on my floor in the next building, and he gave all of us an opportunity to invest in Hewlett-Packard, which was not quite yet known.  If I did, I would be very rich today, for they did not start selling their stock until about the time we graduated.

I noted that in 2014, Silicon Valley grew up, and the average salary of a technical level person was $144,800, with more female than male employees.  A decade later, this article says that this average is now closer to $150,000.  Not much of an increase.

Three songs were important to me in my freshman year.  The first two related to mostly unsuccessful dating adventures, Tommy Edward's It's All in the Game and The Teddy Bears To Know Him is to Love Him.  I did not know anything much about him in those days, but the guy playing the guitar is Phil Spector, who became famous soon thereafter with his Wall of Sound productions, then later went nuts.

The third song was Tom Dooley by the Kingston Trio.  My freshman roommate, Jim, one day indicated that this group was playing in the evening, so let's go.  I was not aware that two of the three members were from Hawaii.  They were classmates at Punahou High School, and in 1952 Dave Guard went to Stanford, with Bob Shane matriculating at nearby Menlo College.  At Menlo, they met Nick Reynolds.  However, they did not become the Kingston Trio until 1957 and called themselves by that name because they were into calypso music, and they associated this genre to Kingston, Jamaica.

I probably took and audited more art than chemical engineering courses, here with some of my charcoal etchings to the left.  Best as I can remember, there were, maybe 75 of us in ChE at the beginning, and I found myself scoring around the midpoint in exams.  Over the next few years the bottom kept changing majors into economics, psychology, sociology and the like.

Stanford has a philosophy that everyone they accept has some role in society.  Very few flunk out.  However, I recall early in our second quarter, a friend who was doing poorly stopping by to shake hands, relating to us that he was called in and told that the admissions committee made a mistake and shouldn't have admitted him.  He was asked to drop out.  Wow, can you imagine going home under those conditions?  There were rumors of suicide attempts and I just saw an article from Stanford about a crisis with this problem today, and specifically at Wilbur Hall (left), where I lived in my freshman year.  Each floor had a resident assistant, a super nice guy, plus a faculty family for each wing of the dormitory, also really pleasant, who are there to prevent these incidents.

Went back to the Nostalgia Machine to see if any songs meant anything. in my sophomore year.  I remembered a New York classmate mentioning he knew the Bell Notes, who had a hit song, I've Had It.  Nicely, jogged my mind.  I had joined an eating club, El Capitan, and for some reason, Chris Barber's Petite Fleur seemed familiar.  Then, from our junior year, a group of us drove across the Dumbarton Bridge to the Garden of Allah on the other side of the Bay, a large barn-like structure for dancing, featuring the latest stars.  I vividly recall Johnny Preston performing Running Bear and Marty Robbins singing A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation).

In our junior year, David Mason, chairman of this department, barged into our classroom and proudly announced that we were just accredited.  None of us knew we were until then not accredited.  However, in ten years, the Stanford  Chemical Engineering Department was ranked #1 in the nation.  Today, it is #3 to MIT and CalTech.  Back to 1962, there were only around ten of the original 75 who actually graduated in four years, and I was still in the middle.

In 1961, my junior year, during the Spring Break, someone almost talked all of us into driving to Florida, first stopping in Fort Lauderdale, which was then the spot for college students to congregate in the spring, epitomized by Connie Francis' Where the Boys Are, also a film by that name.  Then, we were convinced to join what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  We actually could have gotten killed.  Good thing I chickened out, for then no one went.

If I had gone to the University of Hawaii in engineering, I most probably would have ended up spending all of my life in Hawaii and comfortably retired in Honolulu.  While my actual ending  is similar, Stanford no doubt affected my life choice, and well prepared me for success.  I can note that something on the order of 1% of my classmates were non-white, and my subsequent jobs involved a similar disparity:  sugar industry (administration), NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Hawaii faculty and U.S. Senate.  Stanford taught me how to relate and compete in this environment.  One especially important trait I acquired was confidence, as mentioned in the next paragraph.

The Stanford Class of '62 had a 50th year reunion two years ago.  They actually published a thick classbook on our doings, and I responded to the question:

MOST VALUABLE THINGS I LEARNED AT STANFORD:

Upon graduation I observed tht my high school classmates were better engineers from their education at the University of Hawaii.  However, I was able to communicate at a higher level--better appreciated music, art and culture in general--had a more worldly view of things--and, most important of all, had the confidence to be innovative and enterprising.

Many of my classmates were inspired by President John F. Kennedy's creation of the Peace Corps, but I just could not see myself being sent to some impoverished developing nation for $99/month.  My arts interest had me leaning towards attending Sophia University in Tokyo to study art, for the classes were taught in English.

However, partially to also sacrifice for humanity  (Hawaii qualified) like my classmates, but mostly for reasons of security, I decided to accept an offer by C. Brewer to work in the sugar industry for something like $500/month.    My next transition took me to the southernmost community in the USA, Naalehu, where there was no radio in the daytime, and within a year I got married, went through six months of basic training in the U.S. Army and found myself working at Kilauea Sugar Company, where I made an initial link with my roots.

I might perhaps continue this transition next week, for these were my most difficult years of my life.  How can working in a safe environment, where tourists spend large amounts of money to visit, with opportunities for abundant fishing and like, be so tough?  Well, you'll see.  I'll close this transition with a song that somehow is the most meaningful about my life in Naalehu, Johnny Get Angry, by Joanie Sommers.

Yesterday I indicated that the 9 seasons of Suits, available on Netflix, was worthy of your time, and mentioned that the new Suits LA (they moved from New York to Los Angeles with new actors/actresses) will show their first episode on NBC TONIGHT.  Well, Rotten Tomato reviewers did not like it with a 36% score.  Time magazine also disparaged the series.   I'll watch this initial effort anyway and determine myself to continue or not.  I'm still on season 1 of the original Suits, and looking forward to the 100% ratings of S4-7.

About that transitional goldfish jumping from one tank to another above, I used it because I'm in the process of finishing a similar aquaria system.

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