Fortunately, getting from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap no longer requires sitting on top of a speed boat in the middle of a giant lake for six hours getting sun stroke. Instead, for a quarter of the price, you can spend the same amount of time in a cramped, aggressively air conditioned bus while listening to the hits of Khmer Karaoke. The bus operators were even kind enough to include several microphones for those who wished to sing along. Luckily, nobody took them up on the offer. I was starting to feel under the weather, and sentimental Cambodian pop music along [View Full Entry]

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Columbus, Indiana is a strange place. It's an industrial, company town, home to Cummins Diesel, that happens to have some of the best architecture in the US. The philanthropist J. Irwin Miller offered to pay the architects' fees for the public buildings, not for their construction expenses. While this arrangement doesn't result in architecture on a monumental scale, it does result in clever solutions to architectural problems faced by many small, American towns. The best buildings in Columbus are Aero Saarinen's North Christian Chu [View Full Entry]

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Note: I'm on a slow connection right now so I'll put the pictures up when I get a chance. Alex has some excellent ones on his blog Shoppers delight. Coming in directly from Cambodia, Malyasia feels like more like New Jersey than Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur, their "futuristic" capital city, is, like most capitals, not really intended for tourism. Nonetheless, we were able to get a cheap flight out of Siem Reap to Kuala Lumpur that saved us from spend 20 hours in a cramped bus traveling back to Bangkok. As soon as we got through c [View Full Entry]

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