Author: CBT

  • Morocco

    Day 1 By the time I’ve got off the plane, picked up my luggage, humiliated myself in front of the immigration officer by forgetting the names of the places I’ll be staying, and left the airport, the sun is setting. My first host, Saïd, is waiting for me, and drives me to my first destination…

  • Why is Singapore so militarised?

    Singapore has a number of notable elements. There’s the grey business of the skyscrapers, the glitzy consumerism of the shopping complexes, and the bright colours of the tourist magnets like Sentosa and the Gardens by the Bay. It seems unexpected, then, that another notable feature is the number of military sites. There was one just…

  • How much Korean cultural influence is there in Thailand?

    In the midst of Bangkok’s teeming ecosystem of adverts, all over the walls of the metro and infesting the huge shopping centres, something occurred to me. Thai people can have a wide range of skin tones, but the people grinning and holding up products in the adverts were exceptionally pale. This could be attributed to…

  • Thailand & Singapore

    Day 1 Through windows of the train from the airport, I could see the spires of temples emerging out of a green tropical landscape. It was such a textbook definition of exotic, but the hours upon hours of air travel had numbed me to it. The numbness may not have been an entirely bad thing,…