An ongoing joke Mr. Smith and I have going is whether this “hotel” actually ever has people calling to reserve rooms. I found the BathHouse at the Alexis Hotel late one January night in ’08 buried in a sea of web pages about Indonesian night life.

What interested me the most about this place was that not only were there local women there, but also lovely ladies from Thailand, Uzbekistan, Myanmar (Burma), Russia, and mainland China. After determining that this place was well indeed worthy of a trip, I telephoned Mr. Smith and made plans for the following night to hit up the Alexis Hotel.

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I recently read in The Guardian, that bible for middle-class twits like myself, that while sales of cheap mobiles and expensive mobiles were healthy, phones in the middle range were suffering.

Seems that Bob Customer’s mindset is either, ‘Ahh! Credit crunch: I’ll have to downsize!’ or ‘Right, if I’m going to lose my job, I want lots of buttons to play with and a big screen containing more pixels than the combined populations of India and China to stare at in between hunting for a new job.’

I empathize more with Bob number 2. When I was obsessively hunting (is there any other way?) for reviews and info on the latest phones recently, all I wanted to know was, which one had it all without being prohibitively expensive?

Finally, a winner emerged – the Nokia N82. In black, of course, not the cheap silver that it was originally released in.

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Living abroad is an experience full of adventures in adaptation, diversity and change. As the global economic situation worsens, I’m reminded of how lucky I am to live abroad. While back home I was making a livable wage, I was not saving any money, nor was I able to enjoy the lifestyle I’d prefer.

In China, I make a similar salary to my former career in the States, but with added bonuses. Here I do not have car payments, my rent is low, my bills consist of a few random RMB for electric and water and my only real expense is food- of which there is a vast international array. That leaves me with the extra cash to invest, save, or blow on travel and other hobbies.

So, in the middle of an economic crisis spanning the entire globe, how am I in such a comfortable, care-free condition?

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All expats who frequent the gogo bar scene tire of it at one point or another. In the beginning, despite only drinking alcohol on a limited basis, I hit the bars from the early afternoon until six or seven in the morning, daily. This went on for three or four years before I grew weary of my carousing.

Nana Disco (Angels) was open until three or four in the morning, as were the Go-Go bars across the street and the legendary Thermae Coffee Shop was open until sunrise. I could never get enough. I constantly made mental notes of who worked where and added them on my “to do” list.

Upon awakening, I would work for two or three hours (yes, that’s it), hit Starbucks for breakfast and then walk to one of the many bars on Soi Nana. If I was feeling halfway decent and there was decent company available, I would head back to my apartment for a two to three hours of stress relief.

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My mate was sat in a café in Hanoi the other day, reading a book, slurping coffee in that annoying way that only a man on holiday can manage and periodically surveying the scene. He’s an artist (the oil on canvass kind, as opposed to the fashioning vomit into semi-recognisable body parts and labelling it something like ‘Freud’s First Dream’ kind), a teacher and a thoroughly decent human being.

Anyway, there he is, clad in a Napalm Death t-shirt and shorts, when an, at first tentative but increasingly confident address arrowed its way into his lug-hole.

‘Excuse me, that’s not very nice, is it?’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘Round here, ya know? They died and that.’

‘Sorry, can you explain to me what you’re talking about?’

‘Your t-shirt. Napalm Death. That’s what the Americans used to kill the Vietnamese with.’

‘Yes, I know they used napalm. This is a metal band from England though.’

‘But it’s, er, insence, no, I mean, it’s incessan…it’s rude!

You should cover it up.’

‘Are you suggesting that I advocate the use of napalm, or condone the actions of the Americans during the conflict?’

‘I just think that they don’t deserve to be reminded, that’s all.’

‘Actually, they’re quite proud of the fact that they won and have built museums gloating over their victory. Most of them aren’t able to read it, but even if they did, I’m sure that they wouldn’t take it personally, or worse, beat me up. Well done for being so concerned though.’

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My first trip to a strip bar in Panama was to the infamous La Mayor in San Felipe, Panama City. I had been lounging at an outside bar all day drinking Seko and O.J. with a guy from Sweden and another from Tennessee and we were all getting a bit fidgety. Big Swede (as they call him) mentioned that he wouldn’t mind going to a nudie bar and it didn’t take much arm twisting to get me and Tennessee to agree.

I had only been in the country for a few days so I wasn’t going to be much help in selecting a venue and Big Swede who has been to most of the skin dens said he just wanted to go some place different. This left the decision to the gentleman from Tennessee who sort of grinned and said “I know a place we can go to.” A few minutes later we had downed our drinks, paid our separate tabs and stumbled out onto the sidewalk together to wait for a taxi.

Although some expats complain about them, taxis in Panama are plentiful and relatively cheap. You never have to wait too long for one to stop for you and on this evening we didn’t either. The tiny Toyota pulled up looking like it had spent several years doing the derby circuits and sporting a paint job of several different shades of yellow. Tennessee approached the driver side window, leaned down then sort of grinned and said “We wanna go to La Mayor in San Felipe.”

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Given that the long Christmas/Muslim New Year/Ordinary New Year holidays were falling from weekend to weekend this year I decided we’d spend the week down at our place in Anyer on the west coast of Java, and hope to God that Anak Krakatau (’Son of Krakatoa’, he’s a big lump of an adolescent now with all the temper tantrums and eruptions and emissions that that entails) wouldn’t be emulating his old man’s finest performance while we were down there.

I chose Anyer quite deliberately, it’s a quiet little resort and only two hours drive straight out of Jakarta and for most of the time you travel along a decent toll road, although it should be pointed out that once past the grim industrial town of Cilegon the road is pretty awful. Now when I say “resort” don’t imagine we’re talking about Pattaya or even Kuta here, we’re not, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s a place for local people and the night life consists of hanging around roadside sea food restaurants eating delicious freshly caught fish, but little else.

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