Thai Thoughts And Anecdotes Part 3

1. I'm at an elephant show with Chandee. I love elephants and I love elephant shows. So if you are my girlfriend we are probably going to go to an elephant show. The show is fun but she isn't too animated. She's Thai. She's seen elephants before. So she's sort of sulking. Then the elephants go away and they bring out an ox pulling an ox cart. Boring. I mean what have we got here. It's a box with a yoke plus two wheels and an axle. The ox looks like he couldn't spell ox and watching him pull the cart is like watching grass grow. Boring. An announcement is made. People can take an oxcart ride and have their picture taken. All of a sudden my sulker is up and leaping down the stands, pushing Japs and Germans and Danes aside. Under the fence, across the paddock, and slams herself into the cart. She turns and looks back at me as they take her for a ride. Boring. I just don't get it. Weren't there oxcarts in her village? She is smiling as if she just won the lottery. I go down to the fence and snap some pictures of her. Then I forget the whole thing.

A week later we are in Pattaya at the Pattaya Park Tower which has a restaurant on the 53 floor. She has me taking pictures of her at every window. She thinks that the view outside the window will be in the picture. I tried to explain that all that would be in the picture would be her posing in front of another window. But it was hopeless. So I took picture after picture of her in front of windows. She was beaming. Let's see, where have I seen that smile before? Then it hits me. Back in Chiang Mai at the Elephant Show. The oxcart ride wasn't about being pulled in a cart by an ox. It was all about having her picture taken. She's a picture junkie.

2. I'm staying at a lovely guesthouse on a hill overlooking a lake. It is very rural and very quiet and beautiful. It's a good place to go on the weekends to escape from the city and to get your heart rate to come down. It's my first afternoon there. I'm sitting in the sun/shade in front of my little cabin reading a book. It's been quiet. No one has been around. Then I start to notice young women. There is one on the veranda fluffing up cushions. There are three on the stairs to the shore sweeping with brooms. There is one setting a table. There are two on the lawn doing something. It's an invasion. It turns out that they are all high school girls and they have part time jobs at the hotel in the afternoons. Do I have to describe to any of the readers of this web site what Thai high school girls look like? And some of these little flirts are playing the "look at the man and then look away" game. I had planned to spend the afternoon visiting the temple at Three Pagoda Pass. I don't.

3. On my first trip to Pattaya I was booked into the Diamond Beach hotel for obvious reasons. On the way down in the bus I met an experienced guy who turned me on to the AA Hotel. He took me there, helped me check in, and got me a discount. This was one of the luckiest things to happen to me in Thailand. The hotel is simply fabulous in every way and a hidden gem. If you didn't know where to look you would walk right by the entrance. The only fly in the ointment is that the maids in the AA Hotel simply do not understand what the DO NOT DISTURB sign means when you hang it on your doorknob. They either knock on the door or just come right in. I have tried looking disgusted, perplexed, smiling, looking pissed, and showing them the card and explaining the meaning. It's a waste of time. If their inventory sheets for my room show that a towel has to be delivered or that the refrigerator is missing a Milky Way bar–they are coming in. And apparently they either have X-Ray vision or there are hidden cameras in my room–because they ALWAYS come in when I am naked. ALWAYS. I was once so disgusted that I jerked open the door naked and stood there. She pushed past me, put some soda pops in the mini-bar, and then left. You'd think they were delivering plutonium. I imagine that when their inventory sheets for my floor are finally complete, that they notify the King at Government House. Room 6, floor 2 has his Milky Way bar. The nation is safe.

4. I like a little foreplay sometimes. Unless it is some short termer off the street, I still cling to the dream. Maybe this girl will like me. Maybe we will have something in common. With the language barrier it is a little hard to get a conversation going. Props help. You show her some stuff you bought. She shows you pictures of her girlfriends (boring). You go through the Thai-English-Thai dictionaries together. Etc.
One day I thought it would be fun to have maps of the world and of Thailand. I could show her where I live and how I fly (get to) her country, and she could show me where she lives in Thailand. This would be fun. The perfect foreplay props. Where to buy them!? Now I am walking down Sukhumvit trying to puzzle out how to find these goofy items without it becoming too much of a hassle. I don't really want to be taking taxis all over town. It's too hot (April). And as God is my witness there near the Landmark is a Thai guy sitting on the curb with two maps for sale. They are big and they are laminated. One is of the World. And one is of Thailand. I buy them. Weird. Very, very weird.

5. I'm staying at the Vientai Hotel and I want to go to the Oriental. Geographically speaking they are very near each other. The Oriental is world famous and Thai famous and Bangkok famous. And any taxi driver will recognize the word Oriental now matter how badly mangled by a Dane or a German or an Aussie or me. This will be easy. Who said that? No, this won't be easy. It will be a fucking nightmare. I start out flagging down taxis in front of the Vientai. Complete incomprehension. You would think I was asking to be taken to a crater on the back side of the moon. So I walk two blocks over to where there is a round-a-bout with a lot of traffic. This should increase my odds. Nada. Goose Egg, Nothing. Bupkus. Zero. I could walk to the hotel but no one in the taxi business ever heard of the world's most famous hotel in their neighborhood. I get an idea. I go back to the Vientai hotel and have one of the nice girls behind the front desk write Oriental Hotel in Thai on a piece of paper. Back to the round-a-bout. I show the paper and I show the paper and I show the paper to taxi drivers. You'd think I was asking a dog to decipher the Rosetta Stone. None of the taxi drivers read Thai. . . ! Then I get an idea so clever that I should receive the Nobel Prize for tourists. I go to a pharmacy and I buy a postcard that has a picture of the Oriental Hotel. The very first taxi driver takes me there.

6. We have all read about these big, big massage parlours where a man can receive lots of pleasure from a beautiful woman. It is an obligatory trip for a western sex tourist. I went. It was awful. The place was in Bangkok and it was one of the big places. I went in the afternoon but there were at least 35 women to choose from. The manager told me all the wonderful things that would happen to me. It's a big production with a nice sexual payoff. It's 3000 Baht. I pay. I'm in. I'm a player. Now I have to pick a girl. The problem is that I am short so I always want a short girl. Well, in the room the girls were in there was nothing to use as a point of reference. You really couldn't tell how tall the girls were. So I asked the manager to help me. He gets on the intercom and calls out a number. And here she comes. I nearly have a coronary. She is about four and half feet tall, shaped like an hourglass and half Thai-half Chinese. She is wearing a leopard skin dress and high heels. Her jet black hair is long. I haven't been near a woman like this in my entire life in the United States. Following her down the hallway watching her naked rear twitch under the dress I am nearly catatonic.

So what happened. Nearly nothing. I didn't receive 95% of what I had been promised, or what I had paid for. And then she wanted a tip. She didn't get a tip. It turned out she was a man-hating lesbian who wanted to talk about her Japanese girlfriend. I went out afterwards to complain and to get my money back. And guess what? Nobody was around. The manager was gone. The front desk lady was gone. And the formerly smiley girls didn't know me. I left.

A few things here:

1. First of all these girls never pull this shit on their Thai clients because the Thai men don't take this crap and disrespect. We farangs are too nice and we aren't respected for it.
2. If I had had a good time I would have gone back over and over. This simple business concept is beyond the Thais.
3. I probably will not go to one of these big-production Thai bath houses again unless I get a good recommendation–preferably a particular girl. I would like to visit the bath houses in Pattaya on 2nd rd.–but I need something more than a promise from a manager.

Stickman says:

More wisdom from Dana…