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Jim Thompson House
(at the very end of Soi Kasemsan 2, or just follow til you find where all the white people are coming from)

So this is how white well-off lived in old Bangkok.
A house, actually, six attached ancient teak buildings, right by the river;
two ponds; a manta ray; an art collection and a silk empire.
Then the man goes and disappears in the Malaysian Highlands.
No gratitude i tell you.

What the guides are eager to point out is how J. Thompson bent Thai architecture into forms that pleased his Western tastes.
Like how he brought the carvings on window sill bottoms into the house;
or turned Thai drums upside down and made them lamps.

Actually, even if the guide hadn't said he was American, i would have figured that anyway.
In the dining room, there were deer heads hanging on one wall. Except they were ceramic, haha.
Now that's what i call adapting.


DID YOU KNOW?
- Thais believe that evil can only travel in a straight line, so their doors are elevated, so evil can't "step through"

- For Buddhists, long ears mean long life. That's why a lot Buddha images have long ears. (Probably also why Thais
have a lot of those chunky, heavy, dangling earrings.)

- In maps of old Siam, distances are measured in "days it takes to cross" rather than a set metric system.
The maps were for military purposes after all.