The Footpath Files

Stories

  • The Rise of Skywalker(s)

    The Rise of Skywalker(s)

    Bangkok is many things in the minds of many millions of people, but what it is not is a city known for being ‘walkable’. Over the past two decades, the city’s increasingly sophisticated transport system has been striking back against its arch-enemy — traffic,  nurturing a growing population of incidental skywalkers. Read more

  • 36 Hours in Bangkok, Take Me to the River

    36 Hours in Bangkok, Take Me to the River

    Like the Naga, the serpentine river deity from Thai folklore, Bangkok is a big, bold, beast of a city, with its own mythic status. A heaving asphalt jungle born of the water, it remains forever captivating, sometimes seductive and persistently hard to grasp. If you only have 36 hours to take it in, stick to… Read more

  • Community Awakening: Bangkok’s Morning Market Where Locals are the Daily Special

    Community Awakening: Bangkok’s Morning Market Where Locals are the Daily Special

    In the blue hour of each morning’s twilight, the residents of Trok Mor (ตรอกหม้อ, Potter’s Alley) emerge from their nightly slumber at the same time. For most of them, each day’s first meal is perfunctory and necessarily rushed, taken in the darkness of pre-dawn. Many have myriad tasks to complete by 5am when the entire… Read more

  • Secret Sauce: Sriracha, a Bangkok Story

    Secret Sauce: Sriracha, a Bangkok Story

    Who doesn’t like a good food origin story? We all want to say we know ‘the real story’ behind something. Well let me tell you a Bangkok foodie tale about sriracha sauce, one you’ll be using to spice up dinner parties for years to come. In June 2012 the publishers of Oxford English Dictionary (OED)… Read more

  • Faces Forged in Flames: Thailand’s Last Portrait Miniatures Artist

    Faces Forged in Flames: Thailand’s Last Portrait Miniatures Artist

    Photos are so much a part of our lives nowadays that we all too easily take for granted the technical mastery behind one click of a button, and how the very innovation behind capturing that image itself was the result of our desire to mimic the hand of an artist. The last time I checked… Read more

  • The Secret Garden Where Tales of Mythical Mountains, Merchant Nobles and Medical Missionaries Span Two Centuries

    The Secret Garden Where Tales of Mythical Mountains, Merchant Nobles and Medical Missionaries Span Two Centuries

    Near the foot of Bangkok’s majestic Memorial Bridge on the Thonburi side of the Chao Phraya River, a thin, gleaming white spindle of a spire soars over 60 meters atop an elegant bell-shaped stupa, surrounded by 16 smaller, equally colourless and identically shaped constructions. Visible from across much of the nearby vicinity, the Maha Chedi… Read more