The day before winter break started was my last day teaching junior high. I will miss Chestnut, No Eyebrows, Gorilla, Eggplant, Japanese Toilet, Potato, Sweet Potato, Panda, and Big Face. Well, maybe not Eggplant, whose nickname, from the amount of laughter that it caused when I mistakenly used it, is most likely a reference to […]
Category Archives: Working as a Hotel Reviewer, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai
I walked to a laundry place across from the bus station this morning. I had all my laundry in a canvass bag, but when the laundry woman went to weigh it in the bag, I asked her to take it out of the bag, so my laundry would weigh less and I’d be charged less. […]
I got a massage a couple of days ago. There’s a tourist part of Kuala Lumpur–Bukit Bintang–where masseurs stand outside on the street at night and say “massage?” “massage?” and tourists say “No thanks,” “no,” “no,” “Um, okay.” So eventually I said, “Um, okay.” I’m not made of stone, you know. The first funny thing […]
There is a posse of recent hotel management graduates from Mumbai here at the hostel. They mostly get drunk at night and sit really close to each other and talk loud. That’s their thing. They’re staying here in the hostel for a month, and that seems to be the plan. There’s one who’s really thin, […]
My secondary reviewer decided to go to Cambodia. So after she left I just hung on in Bangkok working on projects in an empty hostel that smelled like paint fumes for a while. During this period I was feeling kind of low, but I was passing a guy every day who really inspired me. He […]
My secondary reviewer and I went to Pat Pong the other night. Actually for food. There are some pretty good noodle soups across the street from there. It makes me feel elderly to be roaming the streets in a city known for the illicit looking for noodle soups and pausing to look at kittens, but […]
I made it to Bangkok. So I got up early and went out to review a hotel. A room wasn’t ready to look at, so I went up to the rooftop pool to wait. It was beautiful. An Australian guy came to look at the pool and the view with his arm around a Thai woman. He […]
I picked up a little job reviewing hotels during my summer break in Bangkok, Kuala Lampur, and Singapore. The catch, besides the fact that I’m paying for my own flight, and hardly making money for this, is that I have to take along a secondary reviewer. So I’m taking my friend from Brisbane, and by […]
It’s irritating when people have children or teach school and then all they do is talk about that. But then you accidentally have a toddler or end up teaching adolescents in an island country, and then out of the incessant boredom, something happens, and then you want to share that because you think it’s funny, […]
emily maloney 