What first brought you to Asia?

I have been connected to the hotel industry since I was 16 years old. When my mother remarried, her new husband was a hotelier. So I lived in a hotel for a few years in Scarborough then joined them in the family hotel business in Devon.
     
After that I worked as a cook in Austria for a winter season, followed by a housekeeper position for a Nigerian Prince and his family (I could write a book on that alone!) – then I got a position as a systems administrator at London Hosts, which ran 250 pubs in Central London. I was living in London in my mid 20’s – then my flatmate got a job in Hong Kong. It was to change my life as I followed her months later.

Cascade Club

DECKED out with top-of-the-range machines and equipment, this private health club on levels 6 and 7 of The Ascott Sathorn offers membership packages to suit all exercising needs. Prices range from B7,000 per month for a short-term membership to B95,000 for a four-year platinum membership.

WITH a guaranteed market of millions of women, the beauty products industry in Thailand is huge. Cosmetics, lotions and perfumes under top name brands are widely available in shops, malls, and markets across the city – sometimes for prices that seem too good to be true. Before you go snatching a bargain, though, consider what’s in the bottle: It may be fake and possibly even dangerous.  

Fake cosmetics and perfumes of famous foreign brands have been sold at shops, markets and on the streets for decades, and more recently on the internet, for a fraction of what the genuine products sell for in a reputable department store. 

IT’S been more than five decades since the novel Emmanuelle shocked and scandalized Bangkok’s high society with its revelations of the sexual adventures of a bored Thai-French diplomat’s wife. Made later into a movie, these lurid memoirs and the still mysterious woman behind them changed forever the way people perceived Thailand, especially its indolent rich and the foreign emissaries who apparently had a healthy but secretive appetite for the country’s sensual pleasures.

Hundreds of other books of erotic and often pornographic nature have appeared here over the years, of course, but none has been penned by a woman. This may well change, however, if an Estonian writer based in Bangkok can persuade a publisher that her novel ‘Mango Maiden’ has the potential to become another Emmanuelle or, better still, the current blockbuster ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’