Oompa Loompa at the T-Junction

Her phone rings…She picks it up, answers it, and as she is talking in English. She starts moving towards the hotel room’s door. Then she gets out of the room and closes the door behind her.

Before the phone rang, we were lying in bed and I was actually thinking about where we would be going that night. It was my very first visit to Pattaya and it had so far been a memorable time.

They say you never forget your first psychedelic trip. I think you also never forget your first trip to Pattaya. It will, never again, be like it was the first time and in fact, after a number of visits the place starts to lose the glamour that attracts single men like me.

But the first time…The very first Pattaya trip…it was like adult Disneyland. I knew it wasn’t a dream, but it was magical! I was like a child at the Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory! And what a big factory that was! But this chocolate factory was different: The Oompa Loompas were in fact all women and some of them were beautiful. And how amazingly well we were getting on!

You see, Mr. Willy Wonka did take most of the Oompa Loompas out of Isaan, sorry I mean, Loompaland. And they were there, at the Pattaya Chocolate Factory.

I had been to Thailand some 20 odd years before. But that had been a very short trip during a whole year of solo travel. When I reached Thailand at that time I hardly had any money to spare and basically just made my way to Singapore, by land.

But now, 20 years later, it was a different story. From the airport to Pattaya for a 3-week holiday, nice hotel and lots of money to spend. And lot’s of magic. I was a superhero, I was a sexy man! I was a handsome man!

I was having the time of my life! I had never seen gogo bars like that…beer bars like that…Soy I, Soy I, Walking Street and surroundings…So much catching up to do…

The first two weeks I just went for it. I was very busy. I was paying for love some 3 times a day with different darlings. I was getting better and better at spotting the number 7s and up.

I was so confident that I felt sorry for Brad Pitt. There was no way he could be getting more action. And as far as I was concerned, my handpicked darlings were just as good as Angelina… And you know married people don’t get that much action anyway… So for those 2 weeks, sorry Brad, but I was the movie star!

So after having been through a marathon of very rewarding paid love, I might have been looking for something different when I met her, on the dancing floor!

She was nice, good looking and we got on really well. Next thing we were together already for a couple of days… Suddenly the game was changing…I was getting funny thoughts in my head…

Was she a prostitute? Let’s see:

• She never asked for money. That’s interesting. In fact she never asked for anything. She was just happy to be with me…

• She was from Bangkok having a weekend out in Pattaya, with her girlfriend.

• I did meet her in a nightclub, not a gogo bar, beer bar or at the beach coconut bar. I know…I never really realised that there wasn’t any Thai guys on the dance floor…Food for thought!

• She was looking for a better life, looking for love, company and support. Looking to give and receive. She was a good person. A single mum with a 7 year old boy trying to find love, like so many of us…Nothing wrong about that. There are no rules as to how one should find love, or how love finds you…

• Was I using that knight in shining armor body wash…

There are special moments in life when we find ourselves in a T junction situation. After that, nothing can or will ever be the same again. It is pretty much as they say: A defining moment.

All throughout our rights and wrongs we have our defining moments. Act on it, on the spot, decisively, and a lot of pain will be avoided (our wrongs) or even great opportunities will be created (our rights).

But it is when we find ourselves in big shit that we can look back for that one moment when the alarms were ringing and we failed to act.

So let’s go back to that hotel room because that was a defining moment. Her phone rings…She picks it up, answers it, and as she is talking in English, she starts moving towards the hotel room’s door. Then she gets out of the room and closes the door behind her.

You see, back then I had not updated the ticking boxes and warning lights software to the latest Stickman antivirus firewall protection against Oompa Loompas done me wrong.

Thankfully I had my own sense of street smartness to smell a rat.. Oh man! I could hear alarm bells ringing…Was the hotel on fire?

So I got up and slowly opened the door. I noticed that she was walking out of the corridor then she took the stairs one level down and walked back down the corridor. So in fact she was right under me, one floor down and I could hear what she was saying, because we were next to the glass windows.

She was talking to another guy and she was asking him to take her to his country. She missed him and all of that…I had heard enough and went back into the room.

Then she comes back and I asked her who it was on the phone and she said it was her girlfriend. I asked if it was her Thai girlfriend and she said yes.

I pointed to her that she wouldn’t be speaking in English to her Thai girlfriend and therefore she was lying. Then I left to party on my own…

I still saw her a couple of times before I left and she even took me to the airport, but that defining moment had killed the trust and the relationship just died away…

My Thai innocence was lost and from then on, I would be very suspicious about having feelings in Thailand…

I have this theory and it goes like this: The size of the reward is directly proportional to the size of the challenge.

In other words, the easier girls to find and seduce are the more problematic ones as the harder to find and date are where the biggest prizes are…

I know it sounds pretty obvious. But when you mix the Thai ingredients, it all starts to get complicated. Let’s see:

• Easier girls to find: Beer bars, gogo bars, freelance nightclub spots and the Internet.

• Easier girls to talk to: Girls that speak reasonable English have many times been exposed to and hardened by the sex industry.

• Good girls take much longer to find and date. So it is much harder for the ones that can only visit Thailand 2 times / year for 2 – 3 weeks.

• And then there is the big temptation for us visitors to use some of that precious 2 – 3 weeks to catch up on our infrequent western sex life. That will mean even less time to find a good girl.

For you guys that live in Thailand and make an effort to speak the language a little, it gets much easier to find good girls. Time is a luxury you can afford.

For the rest of us it would be a “mission from God” to come to Thailand for 2 – 3 weeks, party a little, and still find good girl material…

Am I getting too cynical to think that it would be very difficult to find good girls in Pattaya…So why do I always start my trips there… I know, it’s my infrequent western sex life…

I am looking for a good girl surrounding myself with the naughty ones…Mission Impossible…I suppose I like the naughty girls…Problem is I don’t live in Thailand and 2 – 3 weeks is a very short time to do it all.

Sometimes I think I am too afraid of finding love and therefore having to give up on my single man’s life… But I am coming to a point where the wish to find a good girl is taking charge. In other words the upper head is trying to take control…

And here I come my final point: The Internet as a way of finding love…

I was recently at a beer bar when this girl “twisted my arm” and “convinced” me to go with her to a room at the back. To get there we had to pass through another room. She made a point of passing quickly and quietly, because there was another girl in there talking on camera to her boyfriend. And so we did.

I couldn’t not shake my head in disbelief felling sorry for the guy on camera, somewhere on the other side of the world happy that his girl wasn’t working in the bars…Yeah!…Sure…By the way, the buffalo is getting better…

I think the Internet may be ok when you are in the same country. At least you can avoid investing a lot of time into the wrong person. But getting to know someone when you are far away…that’s much harder…

Is it really Mission Impossible for a 2-3 weeks visitor to find a good girl? I am still working on that…

I must say I am ever so grateful to the guys that submit to this site. Stick has put together a collection of fine writers and intelligent people.

This community is by choice a big family. Like any family sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t. But what counts is the sharing of life’s experiences and knowledge that goes on here.

Beyond our differences, we are our brother’s keeper!

I will leave you with a little story…A story of a defining moment, you know the T-junction after which nothing will ever be the same again…Here it goes:

There was a couple that had been together for many years. A lasting and healthy marriage praised by the ones around.

One night, after an intense love making session, as the two are lying in bed, catching their breath, the wife asks the husband if he had ever been unfaithful to her. He answers no, in a dismissive way, but she is insistent. She tells him they will be together for life and reassures him how much she loves him, unconditionally, no matter what.

He continues to deny it but she keeps pressing on. She talks about the beautiful bond between two people that can only get stronger by openness and honesty. She talks about love between soul mates, unbreakable commitment and infinite trust. They hold each other tight. But she is not letting go and keeps pressing on.

Finally, after a very long time, he tells her that yes, he had been unfaithful in the past, but it had been totally meaningless. He tells her she is the most important thing in his life and he loves her very much. She doesn’t say much, but they hold each other even closer and they fall asleep.

Six months later he receives a letter from her lawyer. The letter explains her wish to renegotiate the divorce terms. Even so that she did get the house, the furniture, the car, half the savings account, half the retirement account, and a third of his net wages. But she knows he has got other assets and she wants it, along with more money for the kids, the pets, the house, schooling, food, clothing, transport, and other personal expenses.

Stickman's thoughts:

Certainly, when it comes to the best prospects for something long-term, one does not want to pick the low-hanging fruit.