A couple of requests have arrived asking for more information about the locals. I've not been providing enough of the human element, it seems, so I hope this post goes some way towards providing too much information.
Khao San Road, Banglamphu
My first couple of days in Bangkok were a non-event as I spent time chasing visas for Vietnam (a reissue owing to a tour cancellation/change) and China. I've been staying in Khao San Road; a messy collage of stalls, shops, signs, and sightseers. The roads to the north and west are much nicer - less crowded and with trees providing some shade - but inertia tends to keep me ensconced in a place once I'm resident unless there are serious deficiencies, and I've stayed in many a worse place that Prakorb's House. Banglamphu is bigger than just the tourist mecca, of course: further out there are temples, monuments, palaces, and all those other attractions that are far more enjoyable to experience than read about.
Creatures of the Night
I'd a vision of Bangkok of being wall-to-wall Sin City, but the red-light areas are a fairly small part of it. Khao San Road, so busy during the day and evening, quietens somewhat after midnight when the stallholders start packing up, and there are shopping centres in the Siam region with a bigger footprint than Patpong: you can walk every street and alley of the place in under twenty minutes.
Patpong isn't just clubs (gentlemen's and dance), bars (go-go and otherwise), massage parlours, and short term hotels. Hawkers sell food - one had trays laden with deep fried insects (which I wasn't game to try). There are stalls with cheap clothing, nicknacks, tricks, and discs; a heavy concentration of Japanese restaurants; several 7-11s (they're ubiquitous here); Internet cafes; and even a few real shops. And, of course, farang accompanied by their Thai travelling companions, hawkers whispering promises of a smorgasbord of pornographic movies, and arm-grabbing touts flipping over near-identical pictures of massage parlour residents to reveal identical menus for go-go clubs' visual smorgies.
It almost made Pink's advertisement of "man-woman boxing" a refreshing change - I wondered momentarily if there were an World Intergender Boxing Champion who could match Andy Kaufman's wrestling run and then realised that with the number of ladyboys in Thailand, a World Intergendered Boxing Champion was more likely.
Before going to Patpong I did have have some concerns that I would wake ice-packed to discover that someone had removed my passport, money, memory and kidneys. I know the tales are supposedly apocryphal, but news stories like this one http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/904595.stm don't encourage confidence. A French tourist I met the other day had been drugged and robbed - it was GHB, he thought. It didn't seem polite to ask for details so I didn't, but using one's imagination is always fun.
Is that a wallet in my pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
I can't pretend to have had pure intentions* in visiting Patpong: I went specifically to see a show. Even if you've not seen one you must have heard volumes about the ping pong balls, blow darts, cigarettes, and other feats of admirable but worrying muscular control and accuracy.
[*A lie. Of course I could pretend]
The club had a name but I can't remember it. This isn't the GHB talking; it's just that I didn't really pay much attention to the sign.
- "No Cover Charge", the dwarfish tout said, as all the touts do.
- "How much is it really?", I asked.
- "No Cover Charge"
Ah, Semantics... how I do love thee.
- "I know there's no cover charge. How much does the show cost?"
- "Ticket 100 baht".
...and of course when the ladyboy in the nurse's outfit brought the bill, entry had been bumped up to 300 including one free beer, but since beers were 100 baht, this wasn't such a good deal. I negotiated a better price.
The Modern Striptease?
Inside the club, a scantily-undressed young thing named Nio draped herself around me. She spoke about as much English as I spoke Thai, so it was a match made in Patpong. I ordered a cola for Nio and a beer for myself. The beer arrived opened, which was no great loss as beer's still not my drink of choice. It was later knocked over by a flying banana, but in the meantime I pretended to swallow it, Nio pretended to be desperately in love with me, and I pretended to swallow that too.
She continued to stroke my id while the go-go girls gyrated with robotic enthusiasm and the star performers performed feats of admirable but worrying muscular control and long-distance accuracy. My internal monologue provided the usual running commentary.
For one, I considered the classical form versus what was on display. It wasn't just the strip that was essential to the classical
striptease, the tease was essential too: what layers to remove, what to
hide, what to flash momentarily before reconcealment, and when to ring
down the curtain or vanish offstage just as all would seem ripe for
revelation.
The show was hardly erotic, which wasn't much of a surprise. The club was rather dark so even when hands weren't providing concealment, you really couldn't see much from 15 feet away, and that was probably a good thing as some things are just plain wrong, and 30 or so of these were on-stage in rotation. Perhaps, though it had bypassed the strip in a rush for instant visual gratification, the modern form hadn't lost the tease after all, and even the use of all those props - balls, candles, darts - can be seen as being reasonably faithful to the spirit of burlesque.
Anyway, eventually Nio made the pitch to accompany me to my hotel for a price.
(Anti)climaxes
One of these days I'll complete my 10000 pages of bad writing, but in the meantime the endings to most of my posts will be imperfect.
