Asia - June, 1998

6/13 - Away again

It seem's ike it's been quite a spell since I headed out over the ocean to another side of the world. It's been nice to be home more, but I missed the "adventure" of world travel. This itinerary is not planned to cover any new ground. Just my old stomping grounds of Singapore & Bangkok. I'm expecting to get in some tennis at both ends, but I don't think there will be much in the way of sight seeing. I will have a Sat PM & Sunday next weekend in Bangkok to fill, so I will look for something interesting to do. My pal Madan may have some ideas, but I don't expect too much in that regard since he now has an 18 month old baby & another in the oven.

The pilot just went over our route, the "great circle" to Tokyo that goes by the islands of the Alaskan peninsula & then on down past the Kamchatka peninsula. He said we will only be a couple hundred miles from Russia. Odd that my Mom is just now at the far western end of Russia on her cruise of the Baltic. I hope she is having a great time.

Well, this is just a quick departure note. I'll write more later, but unless something interesting comes up, maybe not too often or long.

6/17 - Spa-ing in the rain

Hi. It's Weds evening in Singapore. There's a tropical light show in progress outside... It's been thundering for several hours. After I worked out a little this evening, hitting tennis balls off the hotel wall, I popped into the spa for a relaxing dip. After a bit the sky opened up & we had a tropical downpour. Everyone else in the spa & pool jumped out & ran for cover. What the hey!?? We're wet anyway, what's the rush? I just sat in the spa & let it rain. It was great! Of course my stuff got wet, but it was sweaty anyway so who cares. Last night a had a real tennis work out, hitting against a tall Asian gal from New York.... that lady could really hit! I saw the Aussie guy I have played with the last 2 times I stayed here, but he was just finishing a game & he left town this morning. Guess I'll have to wait until I come back again.

My favorite tropical fruit is in season: mangosteens. I bought a few at the mall grocery down stairs last night & had some after dinner yesterday & today. In case you don't remember me talking about them a few trips back, they are kind of an ugly purple, plum sized fruit with a thick citrus/pomegranate type peel but with delectable white sections inside that taste almost like sorbet. Yum!

My work here seems to be going well. I have trained a team to travel to all the plants in Singapore & China to make sure they are all doing an adequate job getting ready for Year 2000. It's been kind of interesting because a couple of the guys are key technical leads in the drive business, so I am getting an inside view into the nuts & bolts of our business that I haven't had before.

Folks here are getting just a bit nervous about the Asia financial problems. They admitted that when Jakarta was burning, it really made them nervous as a destabilizing event for the region. Also, I saw in the main Singapore paper today an article with the d-word in a headline (depression as opposed to recession). I'll probably have more to say on that after a few more days.

Guess that's all for now...

6/20 - On to Bangkok

I'm over the South China Sea on the way from Singapore to Bangkok. Off to the left is the Malay peninsula, through a slight haze. If you're not familiar with the geography around here (why not?!), Singapore & Bangkok are at the poles of this peninsula which is about 700 miles long & separates the lower South China Sea from the Indian Ocean. Singapore is at the southern tip, beneath Malaysia which comprises about the southern third of the peninsula. Thailand has much of the rest of it as well as a fairly large block of south Asia between Burma & Laos/Viet Nam. So Thailand looks like an elephant's head with Bangkok at the mouth and Malaysia kind of hangs off the trunk. Probably more than you wanted to know, but at least it explains what is off the port bow as we fly up the elephant's nose!

It's Saturday morning & I will arrive about 10 AM. I gain an hour because even though Singapore is directly south of Bangkok, they chose to stay on the same time as Hong Kong (or maybe the Brits chose & they decided to keep it). This evening I am supposed to play tennis with my old partner Madan. It is going to be hot. We are at the summer solstice now, just about the peak time for heat here, basically 100+ every day. I played last night too, became a 4th for some Singapore guys playing doubles. We had a great match & my side won!

Well, that was a relatively short flight. I stopped typing when they served breakfast & now I'm here (at the hotel). I've had lunch & spent a little time at the pool already. Had a little misadventure... At Arrivals there was a transit driver holding up a sign for Keith Brown. I thought maybe they just got my middle name, so I asked him if he was for the Delta Grand Hotel. He seemed to understand & said yes, so off we went. We started going a different way than usual, so I asked him again if it was the right hotel. He said yes & confirmed the flight I was on. Then when he turned off the main road, I was pretty sure it was wrong, but he still said yes. Of course it turned out to be the wrong hotel & the real Keith Brown was stuck back at the airport waiting for a pickup! When the driver finally realized what he had done, he was in a panic to get back for his guy. I had the hotel call my hotel & send my driver over to get me.

I thought about going on an excursion tomorrow, but they all leave kind of early & I want to be lazy in the morning. So I may not do much but hang around the pool & maybe shop a bit. Prices on local stuff should be really cheap with the currency crisis here. I may go to a Thai dance theater tomorrow night.

So that's the way it is. 10/4 good buddy. Later man. Ciao.

6/22 - Stick Figures

I have to share this little item... Today as I was attending to bodily functions at the plant, I noticed posted on the inside of the stall, a sticker with instructions on how to use a toilet. It showed 2 stick figures, one sitting on a commode in the accepted fashion, the other squatting with feet on the seat and a NOT marker. We take for granted that everyone knows how to sit on a toilet, but in much of the developing world, people still squat. In fact some stalls have squat toilets, basically a ceramic hole in the floor that flushes!

Well, after I last signed off I played 2 hours of tennis with my partner, Madan. Quite a workout. It was in the evening, so not brutally hot & even a breeze to help out. While there his wife brought out their little kid, now about 18 months. He was really cute of course. Interesting heritage with Madan being a dark Indian & she a light Thai with some Chinese ancestry. We play tennis again tomorrow (Tues) night.

Last night I went to a tourist oriented dinner house where they also stage traditional Thai dancing after the meal. The din was pretty bland as Thai cooking goes, de-spiced for western palettes, but still flavorful. We sat at low tables on cushions, but there was a "well" under the table for our feet so we could sit normally instead of on scrunching up our legs. The dancing was interesting with lots of exaggerated hand movements & theatrical posing. The costumes were very elaborate, with lots of gold & glitter, fancy headwear, etc. The band consisted of a hand drum, finger bells, a wooden xylophone type instrument & an instrument played like a xylophone with sticks on a series of sort of bells. The dinner & entertainment cost 550 bhat, about $14, including transportation.

In the afternoon I had bought a Thai silk sport shirt for about $6. I didn't even bargain, I would have felt guilty taking advantage of them, after all the currency problems, etc. I saw a piece in the paper this morning about how the crisis has affected Thailand's billionaires. Two years ago there were about a dozen, last year 3, this year none. Madan told me that at least 80% of the middle class has had their life style affected. There are unfinished new buildings scattered all over Bangkok, some almost ready, just not enough money to complete interiors. Traffic is down because some people have lost their cars, some can't buy gas & some have no jobs, so no place to go. It's grim.

I've been enjoying several of my favorite tropical fruits... I have papaya at breakfast every day & I buy mangosteens to have for desert after dinner. I also bought a mango for a snack yesterday. There's a supermarket right down stairs, under the hotel, along with McDonalds, KFC, Baskin-Robbins & Hagen das, so I am pretty well set. Just need a cookie shop to complete the picture.

Bye for now...

6/27 - Broken Spirits

I think I have told you about Thai spirit houses before... Most Thai homes & businesses have them... The idea is sort of take care of the spirits & they will take care of you, or if they are bad spirits, leave you alone. So I was going from one plant to another with my contact over here, Pisit, & I noticed a whole bunch of spirit houses dumped along the side of the road. There were probably hundreds, extending for maybe 100 yards. I asked Pisit what was that about & he said that people don't want to keep a damaged spirit house around because it might attract bad spirits. So at some point someone left one there & everyone else decided to dump their bad spirits there too. I wonder if the Thais think bad spirits have invaded their economy. I didn't ask, but Pisit informed me that he does not have a spirit house at home, common I think for the educated class.

As part of the work I was doing this time, I suited up in what are affectionately called bunny suits to go into some of our clean rooms. It's the first time I have really seen first hand what we do at some of our operations since I usually hang out with the computer programmers, etc. Our clean rooms here are really impressive, some of the largest in the world. One plant has 135,000 sq feet of clean room... 3 acres... almost enough for 4 football fields! And it is packed. There are row after row of assembly lines, as far as you can see. Each has a conveyer running down the middle & up to 50 or so Thai women on both sides doing repetitive hand assembly. It is quite detailed work, with many on high tech instruments, most staring thru microscopes to perform their individual step over & over, all day long. It must be mind-numbing, but I guess they are grateful for the work. At any one time there must be several thousand of these little white robed figures toiling away in virtual anonymity since with the bunny suits & face masks, they are indistinguishable from each other. Donning the suits is an affair: Start with hair net & face mask, put on your hood, then coveralls, wrist gauntlets, boots, latex gloves, then walk thru the "air shower" where any dust is supposed to be blown off of you. Sometimes you also have to stand on a static discharge device too. They build head-gimbal assemblies, which are the part of a disk drive that actually reads & writes the bits on the platters, 2 heads per platter & some drives have up to 9 platters. The head is a tiny black speck, literally the size of a large grain of pepper. The completed assembly is only a couple of inches long, mostly the wires & arm. These then get packed off to another plant where they are assembled in stacks which finally go to another plant to end up in disk drives. And the heads went through 2 other plants before they got there. Same idea for platters, 3 different factories to make platters before they find their way into drives. No wonder we have so many factories! Well, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about the drive business.

I'm on the way home, only a couple of hours out from SFO. I managed a few hours of sleep (got a bump to first class which helped) so I shouldn't be too much of a zombie after I get home. I had to get up at 3 AM for the 6 AM flight, but I actually woke up at 1:30, so it's a long night. It will still be Saturday morning when I get home.

I got in a total of 5 games of tennis on this trip. That's 5 months worth at home where we have had games washed out by rain more times than I can remember this spring. With all the rain I am expecting the homestead to look like a jungle, so I know what I will be doing tomorrow: weeds!

Well that's it for this trip & I don't know when I will hit the road again.