My Early Years in Bangkok Part 1

I am 70 years old, happily married to a beautiful Thai lady half my age, and living in Canada with our 6-year-old Thai-Farang son. While that may be interesting to some, how I arrived at this stage in my life is more interesting.

The year was 2009 and I was retiring from a successful 30-year career in education in Canada. My wife of 30 years, also an educator, convinced me that teaching overseas would be interesting. I was not sold on the idea as we still had 2 children enrolled at university and I enjoyed watching them play university sports.

We decided to attend a recruiting fair for international schools and were subsequently hired to teach in a Canadian school in Malaysia. At that time, I knew very little about South-East Asia but had heard you either had snakes or rats to deal with, but not both. I was surprised that these developing countries were way more advanced than I was led to believe.

We settled down to teach, and I discovered now that my wife and I were now empty nesters and had truly little in common other than our children. We had no sex life and had had none since our last child was born, over 22 years ago. I have discovered, in talking with many of my male friends, that this is not uncommon in western relationships. At 59, I was very fit (I am a former university athlete) and was still interested in a physical relationship despite the 22 years of abstinence.

A very good friend of mind, also an educator, was a principal of an international school in Bangkok. He had arrived the same time as I had, with his wife and daughter. His wife bailed on him, with the daughter after 4 months as she did not like living in ‘sauna hell’. That left my good friend footloose and fancy-free in Bangkok and you can guess what happened. My friend suggested I visit. I did, and my life has never been the same.

I discovered that Asian women turned my crank and also discovered, despite my anxiety, and 22 years of non-practice, I could still perform with the help of the little blue pill. On my return to Malaysia after my weekend in paradise, my wife and I separated due to irreconcilable differences. I still taught during the week but flew to Bangkok every second weekend on a Friday night and returned by the early 6 AM Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur flight.

Money was not a problem as I was receiving my pension from Canada and was getting paid well in Malaysia. I was a fool and stayed in 5-star hotels in Bangkok and often entertained 2 ladies at once in my hotel room. I was a kid let loose in a candy shop.

I then met Jip, a mid 30-something lady, whom I grew quite fond of. I made all the usual mistakes of renting a condo for 30K baht / month in Bangkok for her to live in. However, most of the time she stayed with her 4 roommates in a room above a bar on Soi Cowboy. When asked why, she told me she was not comfortable sleeping with ghosts in the condo.

I suggested that she enrol in an English language course and gave her 25K baht to pay for the course. She never did enrol but bought rubber trees for the parents’ farm back in Issan. Of course, Jip continued to work at Cowboy during the week and when my Bangkok friend ratted her out, she admitted to doing so. Jip was my Thai girlfriend for about 2 years until I left Malaysia to live in Bangkok full-time. We eventually grew apart as she grew tired of waiting for my divorce to be finalised. Jip is now living in Issan and is married to a Thai man who has a successful internet company.  It is what she always wanted, to be a hi-so Thai. We stay in contact via LINE.

At the time that Jip and I were parting ways, I met a lady at Hillary 2. She was quite different in that she asked me if she could sit at my table and if she could buy me a drink. She had 2 friends with her, and they were all good in English. We parted ways at the end of the night and 3 days later I saw her at an ATM and said hello. It turns out she worked in a massage shop around the corner from my Asoke condo. I followed her back to her shop and had a beer with her. I asked her if she played pool and she said that she did. Playing pool with pretty Thai girls is something I love to do so I said let’s go. Nam informed me she would have to be barfined in order to leave work. She arrived at work, most days at 10:30 and finished up at 2 AM. That left little time to play pool so I barfined her for the day and we had lunch and then set off to play pool at Hustlers in Times Square.

I was only seeing Jip on the weekends and this was a weekday so I had no other plans after pool so we headed on to Hillary 4 on Nana to have some beers and then decided Hillary 2 would be good fun. We eventually arrived back at my condo for some physical activity. Nam was awesome at everything to do with physical activity. She became my weekday girlfriend. I broached the topic about how much cash she would need to leave the massage shop and she stated she made 50K – 70K baht / month depending on who was in town. Customers would take her to Chiang Mai or Pattaya for a week. Nam was good at what she did for a living.

I mentioned to Nam there is no way I would spend 50K baht / month to free her from the shop and she was good with that. She said she needed to make money to support her daughter and her mother which is what she did with most of her earnings. However, Nam and I were good for each other and she would often stop by my apartment at 2:30 AM during the week, spend the night and have breakfast with me before heading back to the shop. This went on for about 4 months and there was never any money exchanged between us, although I would barfine her sometimes to go play pool or hit the bars. I liked to take her shopping for clothes and the odd piece of jewelry.

At this time, I had 2 Thai girlfriends, one for the weekends and one for weekdays. Nam knew about Jip, because she could never stop by on Friday to Sunday, and Jip, not being a fool, suspected I played on the weekdays. Life was good.

To be continued …