Out with Jack

 

Here in Bangkok I don’t really have friends, but I have a lot of acquaintances. Friends are the ones that give you the advice you really need to hear, who lend you money if you really need it, and who invite you over to have dinner with the family.

Acquaintances meet you at the bar for a drink and the most meaningful conversation you have is usually about football.

Tonight I went out with one of my newer acquaintances; a fellow named Jack.

Jack has lived in Thailand for many many years. We’ve had a couple of drinks together before, but tonight we went on a relaxed restaurant, bar and go go crawl that lasted for about six hours.

Where’s the rubber?

 

My ex-girlfriend is in town. She’s a working bar girl, and she’s here with a customer, but he’s here on business, so she has a lot of free time. I gave her a key to my room (she used to live here) and instead of hanging around the hotel room alone all day, she comes over to clean and cook for me while I’m at work, and we have the occasional boom-boom when I’m at home.

I was expecting her last night for dinner, but she didn’t show up. I guess her customer got back from work early. Around 10 pm I went out for a drink. As soon as I got settled in the bar, my phone rang. It was the ex-girlfriend. She said she had been in a taxi near my home and she saw me go out. This is the third time in the past couple of months she’s given me this line about seeing me from a taxi, and I no longer believe it. Bangkok’s a small town, but it isn’t that small. I think one of the girls working in the bar next to my building is on her payroll and informs on me whenever I go in or out.

Even though we no longer live together, she’s a bit proprietary about me. And she’s the jealous type.

Anyway, last night turned into a big night out. Not so much because I went a lot of places, but because I drank a lot.

Sometime around sunrise I found myself cuddling up next to a naked cutie, and smiled to myself thinking how nice it was to be in bed with the ex girlfriend again.  I’ve always enjoyed the sex with her, and when we stopped living together it was very amicable.  For the next couple of hours I continued to hold her warm body close to mine and enjoy the press of our naked flesh.

At 9:30 this morning everything changed when my phone rang.

From the Bangkok Post 28 Nov 2007

 

Pirab Khao calls on PM to take action against Sonthi
YUWADEE TUNYASIRI

An anti-coup group has asked the prime minister to take action against Deputy Prime Minister Sonthi Boonyaratkalin for allegedly having registered three marriages.

The call came after it was made public yesterday the coup leader and his two wives had assets totalling 95 million baht.

Noparuj Worachitwutthikul, leader of the anti-coup group that calls itself Pirab Khao (White Dove) 2006, led 12 members to submit a letter to Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, demanding that action be taken against Gen Sonthi, former chief of the Council for National Security.

In the letter, the group said its in-depth investigation into the conduct of Gen Sonthi, who engineered the Sept 19 coup, found that he had committed an offence by registering three marriages.

Farang Physics

 

Physics is the study of matter and its motion, as well as space and time; it’s the science that deals with concepts such as force, energy, mass and charge.  As an experimental science, its goal is to understand the natural world.

A casual reading of popular texts on physics will reveal that  quantum physics (which deals with the really really small things in the universe) appears to operate on a different set of physical laws from classical mechanics where everything from ordinary breadbox-sized items to star systems seem to obey a single set of rules. 

Disturbed by this, the current holy grail of physics is to find the “Unified Theory” — the set of physical laws that works on every scale, large and small.  The last time I read about Superstring Theory the author thought that he and other superstring theorists were on the right track to finding the holy grail.

But for the moment it seems that things don’t work the same in every part of the physical universe, and even well-trained scientists don’t understand cause and effect completely.

It has recently occured to me that there is a similar phenomenon in relationships — the rules that Westerners understand often don’t work here in Thailand, and the bar girls and mamasans (in spite of being experts at what they do) often don’t understand the cause and effect of interacting with foreigners.  Its the same sort of issue as quantum vs. classical mechanics in physics.  You can be an expert in your field and still not understand the rules that apply when you deal with something unfamiliar.

Here are some examples:

Street Food

 

 When I first visited Bangkok there were many things that caught my attention: Of course the girls; also, the degree to which Buddhism and associated animistic beliefs pervade Thai society, even in Bangkok; the pollution and the grimy look of the city; the constant elbow-rubbing of the modern with the old, the rich with the poor that takes place in the city of heavenly beings; and the food.

My fascination with the girls hasn’t abated in the slightest, but most of the rest of it has become a forgotten part of the background of daily life.

   

I no longer marvel at people prostrating themselves at an outdoor shrine in the middle of the city, or notice the noise and smoke from the passing busses, and I casually step past legless beggars lying prostrate on the sidewalk begging for coins.

I also take the fabulous food for granted.

On every street and soi in Bangkok there are food vendors, and just like every neighborhood in a Western city has a predictable pattern of restaurants (pizza, hamburgers, Italian, Sushi, and so on), the street food here falls into predictable patterns as well.

As a Bangkok resident it has become part of the unnoticed background to my life; like driving past Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesday’s, Wendy’s, KFC and Subway when I lived in Washington DC. You see them, you know they’re there, but you don’t really think about them unless you’re hungry.  But Thailand has it’s own style with food.

Bangkok’s a Small Town

No one really knows how many people live in Bangkok.  The way the Thai government counts people causes this to remain a best-guess number, but typically the accepted estimate is something in the range of 10 or 12 million.  Wikipedia is fairly un-enlightening: “Bangkok is the 22nd most populous city in the world. Bangkok has a recorded population of about 6 million, but the actual number is thought to be much higher, as high as 20 million according to some experts.^“

Suffice to say that there are a lot of people here.  You’d think that you could get lost in the crowd; become fairly anonymous.  It ain’t so… at least not if you’re white.

I’ve always been aware of this.  Live here for a while and you see the same white faces day after day.  Even the tourists (at least the sex tourists) tend to return again and again, making them a bit indistinguishable from residents.  All this is exacerbated by the fact that we all seem to congretate into only one or two small areas of the city.

But it was brought home to me more fully the other day when I was in a bar with the BangkokBadBoy (one of Bangkok’s best known bloggers).  Most Bangkok bloggers make some attempt to keep a distance between the blog and their real lives, since blogging about Bangkok inherently involves airing some of your own dirty laundry.  I was surprised, then, when he asked me about a comment I’d left on his website earlier in the day.  Although we’d never met before, he knew me and I knew him.

But don’t suppose this is all about bloggers.  Quite the opposite!  For the most part, ferang go around town pleasantly unaware of each other beyond the normal social engagement you would find anywhere.

But the Thais know us.  I’m thinking especially about the pay-for-play scene here that takes place predominately between Sukhumvit Soi 4 and Soi 33, and in the Patpong area.  Suddenly the metropolis of Bangkok starts to look a lot like Mayberry RFD.

Thai bar girls may have a limited education, but they have phenomenal memories!  Nearly any punter who has ever been to Thailand more than once will tell you a story about walking into a bar he hadn’t entered in 6 months to be greeted by name, have his regular drink ordered for him and his favorite girl sitting beside him in a matter of seconds.  They remember. 

Loi Kratong

 

Today is Loi Kratong, a festival celebrated throughout Thailand.  It is one of my favorite festivals.

The Long Night Out

 

As noted before, I work for a living.  On Thursday I woke up a little before 6 a.m. and got busy working, which lasted until 7:30 p.m.  I was fairly knackered, and was only thinking about home and sleep, but I had appointments to meet friend at 8:00 and 9:00 so I girded my loins and headed out.

The first appointment went quickly… just dropping into a restaurant to visit a friend who started a new job as a waitress/bartender.  She was excited and wanted a little moral support, which I was happy to provide in the form of a quick beer and a tip.

I made it to my second appointment in Nana Plaza with a rumbling in my stomach.  I’d spent much of the day running to the toilet with emergencies, and after a slight pause, my digestive system seemed to be rising up to attack me again.  I spent 3 uncomfortable hours with stomach cramps and backaches, me providing lousy company to my friend, who doubtless after a long day at work wanted to be able to chat and enjoy the evening.

There were two notable high points of our three hours spent together.  First, I saw an absolutely stunning spinner in Mandarin Table Dance.  She identified me as a potential victim and squeezed in on the bench between me and my friend.  On another day I might have been glad for the company, but I was mostly focused on my rumbling stomach and so I shut her down.  For anyone who wants to see my idea of a Thai Beauty, check out Ning (#47) at Mandarin Table Dance in Nana.