By population, Bangkok is the 33th largest city in the world with around 10,890,660 people living in the metropolitan region as of 2019. To put this in perspective, the entire population of the country of Cambodia is 16.5 million. Bangkok has roughly five times the number of residents as Phnom Penh. It was interesting to…
Category: Around Asia
Caleb Visa Run to Bangkok 2023
In August, Caleb’s US Passport was issued and he was officially acknowledged as a US citizen. However, technically, Caleb was in Cambodia illegally because he is a foreign national without a Cambodian visa. As is in the case in many countries, Cambodian visas can only be renewed – not issued – inside the country. So…
Flowers of Bangkok 2023
This week we had to make a ‘visa run’ to the Cambodian Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand to get Caleb’s visa. The bright side of having to wait for three days for the Embassy to issue the visa is that we had time to explore the city and visit a few of it’s many wonderful gardens…
Airplane Meals
I’ve been meaning to write about airplane meals in Asia for awhile. The quality of the in-flights meals, snacks, and drinks surprised me when I first flew here back in the early 2000s and that hasn’t changed over the last two decades. It was a particularly stark contrast during our visit home last year when…
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit
Last week Cambodia hosted the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) annual summit. Foreign ministries and leaders from around the world gathered to meet with Southeast Asian leaders in Phnom Penh. The heavy influx of motorcades brought traffic in the city to a standstill. Schools were already closed for the national holidays of Water Festival…
Bua Tong Sticky Waterfalls
While we were in Thailand we traveled about an hour and a half out of Chiang Mai to visit the Bua Tong Sticky Waterfalls. When the MCC Nepal Reps first invited us to join them we had no idea what sticky waterfalls were… It turns out that they are waterfalls in the jungle that have…
Incheon Airport
I thought I’d share some photos from our six hour layover at the Incheon Airport in Seoul. The airport was much quieter than normal, far fewer passengers and many closed shops. Yet there was still plenty to see and do. Let’s start with the robots. There’s airporter – who will carry your bags to your…
And we’re on our way!
And we’re on our way back to North America for our first home leave! I’m writing from the Seoul airport where we have a six hour layover. It’s been a long time since we’ve been home and almost as long since we’ve left the Kingdom of Cambodia. The last time we left Cambodia was a…
Update from Myanmar: April 2022
I wanted to share an update from a check-in earlier this week with one of our partners in Myanmar. I am not including our partner’s names for safety reasons and have removed any specific details that might identify them. I’m also not including the details of their current MCC project. I might share this in…
Winnie the Pooh and Milk Tea too
There’s a new Milk Tea shop near our house and I couldn’t help but notice that Winnie the Pooh is out promoting it. This might seem like the kind of innocuous copyright infringement that often occurs here but in Asia the combination of Winnie the Pooh and Milk Tea are actually a meaningful political statement….