Bangkok´s Mandarin Oriental Hotel voted best hotel for the second year

Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Thailand: Flickr.com

Finance Asia readers have voted Bangkok’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Singapore Airlines as the best in their sectors in an annual Asian business travel survey.

The online survey was conducted on 462 Hong Kong-based readers, with the result published in the November issue. The Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, Thailand, was voted the region’s top hotel for the second year in a row. The second best went to the Four Seasons in Hong Kong and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the same city. For the airline sector, Singapore Airlines, which regularly wins people’s choice awards won the best business and first class service. But for long-haul flights to New York and London, Cathay Pacific emerged as the readers’ favorite.

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Contemporary photography by Georges Rousse

As part of the annual French cultural festival, La Fête 2009, a visionary French artist and photographer visited Thailand for his first exhibition in the kingdom. Having developed powerful work by blending painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture since the 1980s, he transforms deserted spaces before they are destroyed.

Inspired by abandoned spaces, Georges Rousse has created his works of image to look like overlays of colour. Each photo is only viewable in its intended and precise focus.

“Lap Lae Khaeng Khoi” SeaWrite SeaWrite-winning novel, A prize for the prodigal

SeaWrite Award winner Uthit Haemamoon

THE NATION – “Lap Lae Khaeng Khoi” (“Mysteries of Khaeng Khoi”), the novel that this year’s SeaWrite judges just “couldn’t put down”, stays close to the heart of author Uthit Haemamoon.

Told as a somewhat mysterious and complex first-person narrative, it’s an emotional, semi-autobiographical story about an ordinary family of the Thai countryside dealing with its problems.