In search of the Bar Girl Factory – Part 2 – One Night in Burriram

Excerpt from Part 1:

For years I’d been wanting to come to Burriram, and now I was here.  I had a hotel.  It was just after nine o’ clock in the evening and I was anxious to get out and look for some girls.

Blogger X and I had the same idea:  We would take 30 minutes to shower and get into some quality fabrics, then head out into Burriram to see if they could handle two wild and crazy Americans.

We agreed to meet in the lobby at 9:45 and we went off to our respective rooms.

Click Here to Read Part 1

The photo above was actually taken as we were driving through Burriram on Monday — it was taken perhaps 8 minutes from the city center.  These guys crossed the road in front of us, forcing us to stop the truck.  Unfortunately it took Blogger X a minute to reach in the backseat and pull out his camera, so we didn’t actually get the photo of them in the road.

Prior to our trip I imagined that the Burriram nightlife might actually look a lot like that picture.

Instead it looked more like this:

The nightlife scene was not large, but it was vibrant.  While Blogger X and I did not make a comprehensive search of the entire city, one reason was because there was a very compact nightlife area on a single street with about a half dozen clubs.

The photo above is Tawandaeng, and it is very similar to its cousins of the same name in Bangkok.  This picture was taken well after midnight on a Sunday night in Burriram (though to be fair, Monday was a holiday for many people).  The place probably held 500 people or more and it was standing room only.  In tandem with the car show coyote photos in Part 1 I think it’s fair to say that there’s a decent amount of nightlife in this small town in Northeastern Thailand.

But I’m gettting ahead of myself.

Blogger X and I were freshly showered, shaved, deodorized and dressed in quality fabrics.  In short, we were ready to go hunting for LBFMs in Burriram.

It was around 9:45 p.m. and I was actually worried it might be getting too late to catch the Burriram scene.  Not to worry.  It hadn’t even started yet. Just like Bangkok, the Thais don’t really bother to go out anywhere until around 11 p.m.

I asked the receptionist at the hotel if there was any nightlife around.  She sent me to the Bamboo Bar with a fairly simple set of directions.

The Bamboo Bar was what I was expecting of Burriram… small, quiet, empty.  Don’t get me wrong; it was a nice place.  It was clean, nicely decorated and furnished, and the two girls working in the bar spoke surprisingly good English (I’ll take a wild guess and say that the cashier was probably the owner’s wife).  It wasn’t hard to figure out why the hotel receptionist had sent us here — this was a farang bar.  English menu, football on the TV, English speaking service girls.

But not farang prices.  At least not farang  Bangkok prices.  My bottle of Heineken was 50 baht — barely more than 7-11.

We weren’t gonna find what we were looking for in the Bamboo Bar so we asked the girls where we could find some real night life.  They directed us to the Cute Coyote Bar and some other clubs around the corner.  We went to the truck to drive there but that turned out to be a silly notion as the bars were literally around the corner, just meters away.

I guess it’s fair to call this an entertainment center… I read one description of it on some website that called it a ’square’.  That seems as good a description as any.  It reminded me vaguely of the Ratchada Soi 6/8 area or even Washington Square in Sukhumvit, though it wasn’t exactly like either of them.

Blogger X and I arrived a bit past ten o’clock and proceeded to go to each of the large clubs in turn.  There was the usual collection of Johnny Walker signs, service people in white shirts and vests, girls in cocktail dresses and an abundance of motorcycles.  But at this hour the clubs were empty.

Based on the number of staff hanging around I was sure that they weren’t gonna remain empty, but everywhere we went initially the places were deserted, or nearly so.

After a careful inspection of each place and asking a few questions of the staff at each venue we thought we had a good feel for what was what.  We decided that we should go kill an hour or so at the karaoke bar where we could spend time with two specific girls in  small room, then go to a club later after things got started.

Here’s the outside of the karaoke bar:

Inside the club there was a large center stage in a very dark room with upholstered booths.  We talked to the service girl at the front and found out the prices:

private room   100 baht per hour

girls    120 baht per hour

lady drinks     100 baht each

whiskey bottle   priced by brand, but not expensive

barfine only    500 baht

barfine + sex with girl in your hotel  1500 (one price)

We asked for a private room and then asked if we could see the lineup of girls so that we could choose a couple of likely candidates.  Instead the service girl delivered two hostesses to our room.

Blogger X was not very pleased by the failure to produce a lineup, but I was so pleasantly surprised by the decent quality of the girls that were delivered that I didn’t want to complain.

The two girls looked terrified as they entered.  I’m guessing that the fact that neither of them spoke a word of English had them very worried.  Without any discussion the first one through the door landed next to Blogger X, while the other plopped down next to me.

Things were happening fast since the service person was trying to get our drink order and Blogger X was still trying to see the lineup, so it was a few minutes before I managed to get a good look at the two girls and to make any assessment.

Blogger X’s girl was definitely the cute one.  She was a tiny thing, but she had a great body with large natural titties.  Later in the evening I danced with her a bit and when I touched her I could feel her tiny little waist and feel the hard spinner’s body that she sported.  Her face was impish and cute.  Blogger X had drawn the long straw.

In this case, though, the short straw wasn’t too bad.  My girl didn’t have the same tight body, but she had a nice smile and she was easy to talk to (in Thai).  Although she was a little tense at first, a few whiskey and sodas loosened her up and we ended up having a good time.

I’m not a real karaoke lover, but me & the girls drank, they sang and Blogger X was uninhibited about belting out a song or two even though he is no more talented a singer than I am.

My Thai skills are not great, but they are constantly improving, and I found that I was able to converse fairly well with my girl.  Blogger X is just a little behind me in his Thai language studies.  He has nearly the same vocabulary as I do, but is still polishing his pronunciation.  Even so, he was holding his own with his girl, using his language skills to good effect.

I can’t imagine that it would have been possible to enjoy this small karaoke room and these two girls if at least one of us didn’t speak Thai.  The fact that both of us have some level of facility with “kitchen Thai” allowed us to relax and enjoy.  We were able to help each other out any time there was a communication breakdown, and pretty soon the atmosphere was very loose.

At one point we were making some of the usual senseless chatter that you have with bar girls and I asked Blogger X’s girl if she had hair under her arms.

No, she said, and she raised her arms to prove it.

I lifted my girl’s arm to check for fur or stubble and was greeted by the funky cheesy fishy smell that tells you that the girl spends too much time sweating and not enough time scrubbing her pits.

I commented.

She thought I was joking, but I had actually touched my finger to her armpit and I held it to her nose.  She caught a whiff.

Eeeww!

Thai girls are notoriously clean… way beyond the level of most other girls.  Probably something to do with the heat and humidity of a tropical country.  To tell a girl that she smells bad is horrifying.

And she was horrified.

She jumped up and left the room.  I assumed she was gonna run upstairs and take a shower.

Instead she came back moments later with a solid-stick deodorant which she spread all over her underarms.  Now she smelled like cheese, fish and deodorant.  I’m not sure it was an improvement.

She wasn’t filthy, and she didn’t stink generally — it was really just her underarms that were offputting — but honestly, if that was how much attention she paid to the area where her arms were hooked to her body I wasn’t enthusiastic to find out what was going on where her legs connected.

Sometime after midnight the girls asked if we would take them out to Tawandaeng, and they were perfectly happy to go back to the hotel with us afterward.  We weren’t totally convinced that we wanted to go short time with these two, so we agreed to pay the bar fines (500 baht for each girl) and that if we decided to go take them home then we would pay them 1000 baht cash in hand.  They were enthusiastic about this arrangement.

Blogger X and I had planned to finish the night at Cute Coyote Bar, so this was a deviation from plan.  I was thinking that we could catch Cute the following night so I didn’t really worry about it.

Off we went to Tawandaeng.

The place was only 50 meters or so from the karaoke bar.  It was mobbed.

On the very large stage was a live band playing popular Thai music at a loud volume.  People everywhere in the crowd were drunk and sanook was the order of the evening.

The place was packed to standing room only (the server walked us all the way around the large room before seating us at a small table near the door where we first walked in).  The people in the crowd were singing and, to the extent possible in the crowded conditions, dancing.  This showed once again that the secret to live music isn’t girls, girls and more girls, but playing the music your audience likes to hear.

Blogger X, who had been the one to set the sanook tone in the karaoke room while I was still sober and self conscious, was a little less enthusiastic about joining in the fun than I was.  This was understandable, since he was still sober but I was feeling no pain.

I danced with my girl.  I danced with his girl.

There was a table of eight gay guys next to us.  I joined them in toasting to good health and good luck and I danced with them.

I was embarrassing.

It was fun.

But finally it was closing time, and we needed to head home.

I have to say that I would have gladly taken Blogger X’s impish spinner back to my room for a right good thumping, but I wasn’t about to take Stinker to my bed.  When she asked I shook her off and looked dreamily at those bodacious hooters on the Imp.

In the end it was an empty bed for me.  Blogger X made his own decision regarding his girl; you’ll have to use your imagination to fill in the details of his night.

Hopping out of the taxi we agreed to meet at ten in the morning to decide on our next move.  I was leaning towards another night in Burriram, heading back to Cute Coyote Bar on Monday evening to see what was happening there, but now didn’t seem like the time to discuss it.  We could sort it out in the morning.

I said goodnight and wobbled off to bed.

End of Part 2

In Part 3 I’ll tell you what happened in the morning and why we didn’t go to Khon Kaen as originally planned.

In subsequent installments I’ll tell you about our Ubon adventures, getting lost and confused on the Laos border, and maybe even how to pronounce “Nevada” in Thai.