Lots Of Porn

I am complaining too much. But if you want to see the positive sides of Bangkok, go to Siam Square after school and look at the nice white legs of the university girls.

First complain today: The Thais always stick together. From a certain angle it’s not a complaint, it’s actually something positive and we as foreigners should do the same. We lose here big time because we do not manage to stick together, the Thais know that and they take brutal advantage of that.

Let me tell you a story. I ordered a taxi at reception. It was there when me and my girl came down to the lobby. The driver looked nice and he had been instructed by the doorman to drive to Siam Square, to the Discovery Center exactly. I get in the cab and tell him the same again. My girl says it in Thai. The driver is a nice guy and says ‘krapom’. Again the driver is a nice guy, but in the first minute he drives us I realize that he can’t drive a car. That should have been the moment we got out of the cab. Anyway. He gets out of the apartment and gets on the main street. The traffic is not bad, but he stops in between two lanes. He does not know where to go. I am constantly very paranoid that one day a car will drive into a taxi I am sitting in and I will get a whiplash injury and become a vegetable for the rest of my days. So this guy here stops in the main street. Great. I tell him to take the right lane. He is so insecure and frightened that he pulls over without looking. A car almost hit us, then a motorbike. I am starting to get really scared. But there is no way we can stop so, we just drive all the way to Siam Square. God must have had a very good mood that we made it. Some taxi drivers have the habit to rock the taxi, like a boat. Mhh let me explain what I mean. I think it’s a bit neurotic, they just steer the car quickly a bit to the left and then back to the right again. It’s only cool when they repeat it 10 times. Maybe they think that they are rally drivers? Anyway this guy does it too. He can’t drive, but he pretends he can drive. How great. I tell him to stop at Siam Paragon. He had never heard of that either. I show him the entrance, but he misses it. Like a kamikaze he crosses the road and we stop somewhere we did not plan to end up at, but at least we were still alive. Then of course he has no change. Fine. Luckily I have a couple of twenties and I just give it to him, even without counting them. I just want to get out of that suicide machine. Then I say to my girl ‘Jesus, that was the worst taxi ride of my life’. Of course it was not, I have lived in Bangkok for too long, but it was not one of the best ones either. Anyway. You know what she says: ‘Calm down, he is just an old man.’ Well sure he is. And he is not a bad or rude guy, it was just life threatening to drive with him.

Would I ever get support from my girl if I was up against a Thai person? No, I don’t think so. Not all girls are like this, but I have met many who are. Most are like this. The Thais stick together like glue. I am quite lucky that I never got into real trouble here, and I don’t want to test it out. Frank Visakay wrote a couple of weeks ago that the police will most likely take sides with the Thais. I believe it right away.

Talking of police: I know a foreign girl here, a very dedicated teacher. She told me the following story. Hellas. She went out with her friend, another foreign female teacher and that girl's boyfriend, a dark tanned Thai guy from Ko Samui. Yeah that type of guy, you know. Useless, living off the girls he meets on the beach. A male prostitute if you like. Anyway. They all went out, the boy got very drunk. He started to beat his white girlfriend in public, on the street. The other girl, i.e. my school teacher friend calls for help and flags down two police guys on motorbikes. You know what they said: ‘If she is his girlfriend, she is his property and he has the right to beat her’. He continued to do so under the vigilant eyes of the Thai law. What I heard was that the next day the girl kicked him out. But then, I am quite sure he moved in with her again. Women can be quite eccentric in these things. Like we men run always after the wrong girls too. At least I did more than once in my life.

Intermezzo: While writing you this story, the girl from the taxi story called and said her father got drunk and smashed his head on the floor. She is on the way to the hospital with him now. Apparently he is bleeding a lot. Of course there is no one to blame.

I was working on an island in Africa, ten years back. The white girls came and usually ended up with the blacks who had Rasta hair. The white girls thought it was cute. Of course these guys were operating like the girls on Sukhumvit (Sukhumvit as a figure of speech). Well with the difference that the women did not pay for sex, they paid for love and many of the Rastas had been to Europe many times, America and believe it or not, Japan (actually most of the Japanese girls who went there spoke the local language, because it was easier to learn it than English and if you read Suaheli it can make it sound like Japanese). The girls who took them were aged between 18 and 60. Sometimes I got really jealous, because these girls were quite beautiful. Me, I had no chance to get one of these girls. It’s like I would try my luck to get a white chick at Khao San. I would need to find a Rasta wig, get stoned first and wear a stonewashed Che Guevara shirt. Yeah that might really work. This kind of girl doesn’t want a ‘normal’ looking guy like me with a side parting. So I kept on watching the comings and goings of the white girls and I observed one thing. The white girls never went for the decent guys. I knew tons of decent young African men, but these fellows were too nice for these girls. The drug smugglers, the thieves and the freaks always got the best girls.

Once I was in Cuba and I stayed with a Cuban family opposite the Hotel National in Havana. It was a very nice location and the apartment they rented out legally was beautiful. One night a girl arrived, I think she was from California. Beautiful, beautiful girl, brunette type. She arrived and dropped her bags in her room. I just saw her briefly and I thought, well this is convenient. I will have her by tomorrow. But then, as I said, she went out and came back 30 minutes later with a black guy. I was shocked, but then I thought it must be her boyfriend until the owner of the flat told me that guy she brought in was just a black guy selling dope on the corner of the street. That much for female sex tourism. I kind of lost track now. What made me write all this? Ah, yeah I remember now, because of that Thai guy from the island. The island of Dr. Moreau haha. But it would be very interesting to find out what fascinates us educated people about these uneducated people. Like what fascinates these white girls about these African beach boys? What fascinates some guys on the girls along Sukhumvit? Are we so decadent that we need to fill up our animal instincts? Do we need to feel the earth below our feet, take our shoes off? Do we need some grounding? I guess it is that. I don’t blame anyone, I also have my days when I need some primitive recreation, once every three months. Then I usually go to the Eden Club. But of course, I don’t want to take an Eden girl to live with me. That might be the little difference.

Anyway. Today we are just talking. Not analyzing too much. I wanted to say something more, but I am tired now. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.

A couple of days later.

Let me start with what happened this morning. I go to see the Da Vinci Code in the gold class cinema at Siam Discovery. My motorbike takes me there. Taxis I only take if I am with a girl and she wears a skirt. I asked a Chula girl to come with me to see it, and to check what time it will show. I suspected the movie will show at 11 AM and she calls me to tell me exactly that. When I arrive at ten past eleven, there is no sight of her, but I know she is going to show up. This girl is reliable, no beauty, but you can’t have it all. Anyway I check the ticket booth, empty. Then I see the sign: Sorry, we are closed. What? I check the schedule in front, it says 11 AM – The Da Vinci Code. So why the hell is it closed. I storm inside. Nobody around it looks deserted, just a girl, a waitress on the phone with someone, does not look that she is talking business, so I ask her gently to tell me if they are closed. She ignores me. Fine. I walk out and I want to call the Chula girl. Then I see the waitress entering the ticket booth. Are you open or closed? She looks at me like I am an idiot. Open she says. So I ask her why she puts up the sign that they are closed. She asked me what sign. I point at it. That one. Ah, sorry Sir, this is only for Amex. What do you mean I ask. Ah, that they temporarily don’t accept Amex cards. I ask her to turn the sign and I buy 2 tickets. I know it is an absurd story, but this shows pretty much how the ‘logic’ of these ‘aliens’ works. I seriously raise the question who is the ‘alien’ in Thailand, me or her.

Then back home in the elevator. I just cancelled my contract, because they turn my serviced apartment into a hotel, of course without a hotel license, and more and more Asians move in for just a day or two. Not that I have anything against Asians, but there is a difference if someone lives in a hotel or in his home. Hotel guests don’t care if they make noise. They just see it as a short stay and do not feel responsible for their actions. If you live in a place where you know your neighbors, you behave different.

Anyway, the first thing I want to say is that the management is pricing the rental of the rooms according to the tenant’s ethnicity. That goes like this: A friend of mine came over from Europe and he wanted to stay near me. So I suggested he takes a studio room in my serviced apartment for a couple of days. I asked the reception, they said it’s 4,500 baht per day. I thought that was too much and I bargained them down to 3,500 baht, still thinking that it was overpriced. One night I saw the new contracts laying out at the reception and I took a peek. There it was. They sold out the rooms for people with Asian sounding for 2,200 baht (except Japanese they were priced almost like Caucasians). People with Caucasian sounding names had to pay 1,000 more, still 300 baht less than I could arrange for my friend. Next day I contacted the management over this. You know what they said? They told me that the cheapest rate was 3,500 baht. They lied to my face. I told them what I saw. They said it must have been mistaken. Fine. I knew they were a bunch of liars and I was not too surprised. Like when the internet is down in the whole building and I tell them that I get no connection, they say that it’s just my computer. They did that for about 10 times until I told them to come and check with their own laptop. Then it was just a bad connection in my room, of course the rest of the building has no problems. Fine. Until I spoke to other people in the elevator who told me they always had problems with the internet… Of course today I don’t take any shit from the management or reception and they really really hate me for it. I am sure they are throwing a party tonight to celebrate that I will move out. (While reading this submission I just received a letter from some sales girl wanting me to pay some enormous penalty for the early termination of my contract, but I think that is just barking. I replied to her on what legal grounds I am terminating the contract and copied some imaginary person at a well known local law firm into my mail to make it look more serious. The penalty letter they sent me is just a test to see if am foolish enough to fall for it.) <Just be careful here because they might not return your deposit! – Stick>

So after I told them I will move out, I took the elevator up. Then I saw that they were putting up some new information: The fitness room and the swimming pool would close now at 8 PM for security reasons. 8 PM? I thought 10 PM like they had it before was already quite early, because many tenants may have some business dinners and would come back home after nine, so they would hardly find the time to exercise. But 8 PM was absurd, but as I knew the management, it was possible. I was angry, even if I had just told them I would move out. It was the whole system of raising prices, limiting the tenants' rights and lowering the service standards. For instance they closed down the whole facilities floor after 10 PM, just because some hotel guests threw some loud parties there. Well, they restricted my freedom and I could no longer watch the stars from the swimming pool chairs with a girl. Anyway, when I called the reception about the new 8 PM curfew, nobody knew about it. They said they would call me back. So, after an hour of waiting, I called them again and you know what they said: Sorry Sir, it was a mistake. A mistake? I mean, there might be a typo in a memo, but that the whole message is a mistake? God, what people.

The last thing I would like to add today is indeed very interesting. I was negotiating with a company over certain things, and I had to deal with a Thai female communication manager. Normally I would talk only to the foreigners in the company, but this time, since it was not such an important deal, I thought I would give it a try, like a test so to say. The inevitable happened. The whole negotiations were very slow and took over three weeks to complete. She even asked for my resume and I gave it to her. But when she had it she said that would not have been necessary. Then she asked for my references and I gave them to her again. She then said she meant something else. The whole time she was missing the point, what I actually wanted from her company. I explained it to her in every way possible. Then I met her boss, a (Continental) European guy and the whole deal was done in less than 5 minutes. After that she was supposed to give me some information, a text which I needed to publish somewhere. Well the text was full of errors (all important business related texts I let be written or corrected by native speakers, certainly not myself) but her text was just horrible. I corrected it and showed her the correction. Also I saw their website, which obviously she must have written. Total chaos. It seemed also the company who made the website was Thai, because many elements of the website did not work. I wondered about the ability of the foreign management of that company, but then they were not English native speakers (but I don't think it counts as an excuse). So I corrected her version of the text and I showed her (and copied her boss as revenge for the long business ordeal). You know how she replied? She said the company would appreciate if I would use her version of the text. She said the company, but I am sure it was just for her ego. I did not reply. I just used my version.

I have to add one thing, right now a girl left my apartment, a nice looking girl (also with a plastic nose, I seem to attract the kind) and she asked me if all the porn sites and all the porn movies in the world were with Thai girls as actresses. I thought that was a quite funny thought and I understood where it came from. The name Porn is very common in Thailand and she probably thought all the actresses must be named Porn. So the ‘Farang’ sex sites would be called ‘Suzie’ or ‘Brigitte’ depending on the name of the actresses. Well, since I think it’s legit to ask anything and it’s better to ask than to stay in the dark, I checked with her on the Wikipedia to see how the name ‘Porn’ came to the sex movies. Here is the explanation:

Pornography (from Greek πορνη "prostitute" andγραφία "written material") (also informally referred to as "porn," "pr0n," or "porno") is the representation of the human body or human sexual behavior with the goal of sexual arousal, similar to, but distinct from, erotica, though the two terms are often used interchangeably.

Good night and good luck to you wherever you are.

Stickman's thoughts:

The problem for us who live in Bangkok is that this sort of thing really does happen all the time. Bangkok can be fun and interesting at times, but hassle free it is not.