How the girls live

 

Photo is my friend Oi on our trip to Samui in 2005

Since posting photos of my apartment recently one of the most frequent comments on the site and email is that people would like to know how bar girls and other single young Thai girls live.

This comment from De La Munte was enlightening:

I’ve also been curious to see how the TGs/bar girls live. I’ve been to BKK last year in August (only second time this far) and I spent some time with a freelancer that I met in Gulliver’s. After a couple of days I asked her to show me her apartment. This girl was around 28yo, was speaking english better than the average bargirl – she was in fact studying at Uni (She showed me her ID & Uni ID). I quite enjoyed talking/spending my time with her.

She very reluctantly agreed to take me to her flat and in handsight it was quite a bad decision for me to go there. I felt quite depressed for the rest of my stay in BKK.

She was living somewhere close to the PraKanon (?) BTS station. The building she was living had 4-5 “apartments” – all the girls living there except one were freelancers. The building entrance was a masive steel door directly from behind the street vendors. She had to talk to the street vendor in order to let me in (aparently that old lady was also some sort of owner/building manager) Inside the building were some very very narrow and quite dangerous to climb on stairs. There was a common bathroom area (..with no door and I had to wait for the non-freelancer girl to finish her shower…) I couldn’t spot any kitchen area.

The “apartment” had something like 7 or maximum 8 square meters. All concrete, no windows, and the painting was terrible – old and peeling from the walls. There was no bathroom or kitchen inside (couldn’t fit in 8sqm anyway). It was looking more like a prison cell. She had a very small table with a brand new (!) TV on it and she happily told me that somehow the owner will install TV cable soon (aparently some Uni courses are also broadcasted on TV). She showed me her laptop and her Uni uniformes (white blouse & black skirt from a very small wardrobe). On the floor it was some sort of rug that was serving as bed. And there was a fan on the ceiling. That’s all. I felt sick. I wasn’t expecting luxury, but I was expecting some decent living conditions. I was born and I grew up in Eastern Europe, so I know what tough live means, but I rarely have seen this sort of poverty. I really felt very very very sorry for these girls.

First of all, I want to stress that, just like you and me, there can be wide differences in how bar girls live.

I’ve written a blog about this topic before, but I’ll try to make this one a bit more complete.  I’ll tell you about a few places that I have seen, and then show you some photos at the end of the blog.

Here’s a comment from John Brown in reply to De La Munte:

This girl you speak of has SIGNIFICANTLY improved her standard of living by becoming a BKK freelancer. Make no mistake.

Maybe if you look at it from the perspective of where/how/when you were born and REALIZE how lucky you were, you might feel a bit better. OR, as an alternative visit her parents home some time soon, na? That ought to give you some extra perspective.

One thing worth spending a little space on is the issue of how these girls lived when they were growing up.  Here are a few photos to give you an idea what ‘home’ was like:

   

Entire families live in these homes.  No electricity or running water as a general rule.  Often cooking is done over an open fire.  You may notice the child in the photo on the right.  I’m sorry I don’t have any interior shots.  I got these photos just stopping at the side of the road when I was on holiday in 2006.

Back to bar girls in Bangkok.

The worst form of living I have personally seen was a room that was 4 cement walls and a dirt floor when I went home with a freelancer one night — but that wasn’t Bangkok, it was in Cha’am.  She was a tiny little spinner who was about 147 cm high and maybe 36 kilos.

In Bangkok the worst accomodation I’ve seen with my own eyes is the 3rd floor above a Soi Cowboy go-go bar.  I was out one day with a ‘pull’ girl named Song who worked at Dundee, one of the small gogo bars on the soi.  It was early or mid-afternoon and she said she wanted to go by work, so I followed her.  She went to the stairs in the back of the bar and she called me to follow her.

We went to the second floor where a lady was running a business.  She styled the girls’ hair in the afternoons.  A shampoo and haircut was a couple of hundred baht.  Song made an appointment to get her hair done later, then took me to the third floor.

This was the ‘dormitory’ for the girls who worked in the bar.  It was a large open room with a wooden floor and open windows.  There was no air conditioning, though they had two fans, both of which were turned on.  It was hot.

There were no beds or furniture — just straw mats for sleeping and portable wardrobes.  The ‘portable wardrobes’ were things you’d buy at K-Mart or Carrefour; closets made of cloth stretched over a light aluminum frame; one for each girl.  There was a single shared bathroom with a squat toilet, a small handsink, and a shower hose installed above the toilet, with a floor drain.

The sleeping area was open space, and was about 40 square meters (about the same size as my current apartment.  It was home to about a dozen girls.) 

There was no privacy, it was hot, and all the facilities (such as they were) were shared.  There were no cooking facilities at all.  By the way, the lack of cooking facilities in Thai condos and rooms isn’t as terrible as it sounds.  On nearly every street in Bangkok you can find a variety of good quality prepared food at low prices.  Most people I know here do very little cooking.  My personal experience is that it’s more expensive to buy fresh food at the grocery and prepare your own than to buy food from the street vendors.

Most bar girls are not interested in cooking.

When I went to the third floor of the go go with Song, the girls were sitting around with one or two Thai guys.  The guys were bare-chested and wearing only pants.  The girls were in various states of dress — mostly tee-shirt and shorts, though one or two was wearing a bra and but no tee-shirt, and one or two girls were in more traditional Thai wraparound skirts.  They had open bottles of whiskey and some street food.  A straw mat was unrolled in the middle of the floor and they were playing cards and gambling.  They offered me food, whiskey and the opportunity to play cards with them.  I declined everything offered.

I sat in the room with them and perspired for about 45 minutes before Song and I left.  If the same thing happened today I’d have accepted a glass of whiskey and some food and chatted a bit in Thai, but at the time I was fairly intimidated by the setting.  It was oneof the longest and most uncomfortable 40-minute stretches of my life.

The Simple Living blog referenced above offers a lot of detail on the next-worse place I ever visited.  My old girlfriend moved to Pattaya, and her room was an airless space of about 25 square meters with paper-thin walls and no window.  Here’s a short excerpt from that blog:

The walls of her room are as thin as cardboard…. Unusually, she lives alone.  She has no window on her room, and no air conditioning.  She has a ceiling fan and a floor fan to circulate air, but basically it makes her room into a convection oven instead of a standard oven. The only option for getting any air into the room is to leave the door open. 

The toilet is a traditional Thai ‘squat’ toilet….  You ‘flush’ the toilet by using water from a cistern in the bathroom that is refilled from a small tap. There is no hot water in the room, and no water source except the shower and the tap above the cistern. 

There is no bathtub or separate shower… the shower head is mounted on the wall above the toilet with a drain in the floor for the water to run away. 

Her bed is a mattress on the floor….   When I arrived, she didn’t have any sort of refrigerator in her room…  I felt sorry for her (and myself!) so I took her shopping and bought her a small refrigerator, a rice cooker and an electric wok so she can cook for herself. 

She has no washing machine, no TV, no home phone or computer, no countertops, no chairs or tables… just a simple room with a small space to hang her clothes. I guess I don’t have to say that there is no security in the building. 

She spent 5 or 6 years living on the third floor of a go go bar on Soi Cowboy.  I never saw it, but her descriptions made it sound similar to what I saw when I went to Song’s room.

She moved from the go go bar to my room in Sukhumvit.  I guess the room she has now in Pattaya is about halfway between go go bar living and the small condo she and I shared.

I find it interesting that De La Munte describes a ‘prison cell’ environment for about 3,000 baht in a building in Phrakanong.  My good friend has recently moved into a Phrakanong apartment, and her living is actually quite nice.

De La Munte says his girl was paying around 2,500 baht per month for an 8 m2 apartment; my friend is paying about the same price, in the same neighborhood, for an apartment of about 25 m2.  My friend’s apartment is rented unfurnished, and (as I’ve written several times on the blog) I helped her out by loaning her the money for the deposit, selling her all the furniture from my old apartment, and paying for her new bed, all on 18-month interest free credit.  Given that she pays me 1,500 baht per month, you could argue that the true cost of her room is 4,000 per month.

It includes free cable TV and a ceiling fan, but no air conditioning, no hot water, and no cooking area.

I mentioned above that most girls aren’t interested in cooking, and I’ve mentioned in other blogs that every time I’ve seen a Thai girl cooking at home they have done their cooking squatting  on the floor, preparing the food on a straw mat spread on the floor.  They seem very comfortable with this.

Since the water source is on the balcony in these types of rooms, the cooking is usually done on the balcony as well.

Click here to read page 2 of this post

Click here to read page 3 of this post