03.28.06
Posted in Travels at 12:46 pm by Leopoldo
You read about it in the guidebooks and the travel web sites, but until you see it in person you can’t really know just how pervasive and disturbing the sex tourism in Thailand is. Every city I visited had girlie bars and working girls but the Sois at the East end of Sukhumvit and pretty much all of Pattaya were the worst. You constantly see old (and young but mostly old) European and American guys walking down the street with some beautiful and very young Thai girl on his arm. You never know if she is with him for the night, for the week or if he is living in Thailand and has hooked up with a Thai girl, what they call a Sexpat (pun on ex-pat or ex-patriot meaning a foreigner who chooses to stay). What makes it particularly disturbing is when the guy looks particularly creepy and disheveled and when the girl looks particularly young, like sixteen years old or younger.
Walking by girlie bars ropers call out to you, usually with ‘where you going’ or ‘come on in’ but at times with ‘hey handsome’ or cat calls. In the more aggressive areas they will grab at you, sometimes taking a strong hold of your arm and trying to drag you in. I got my ass patted more than a few times by girls trying to score a customer. The girls standing in front of the go-go bars all wear numbers, one assumes that the idea is you can select which one you want and either go into the back or pay for a room for a few hours with her. I never inquired but was told that $10 US would buy a blow job, $30 US would give you a few hours with a girl and $50 US would give you all night with a couple of girls. Streets specialize to different clientele with an all Japanese Soi in Bangkok, gay streets in each city and a number of European prostitutes from Easter Europe in Pattaya.
From what I saw there was no lack of customers in any area. Many tourists seemed to be in Thailand specifically for the sex tourism., most of all in Pattaya where I saw couples that seemed to be there for no other reason than for a bit of sexual excitement I overheard a conversation in Pattaya between two guys from the US bragging about their exploits of the week and got the impression they would head home as soon as they had enough of the nightly sex. It left me feeling like American and Europeans were repeatedly taking sexual advantage of the less wealthy nation and made me wonder if locals looked at me more as an exploiter than a curious traveler.
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Posted in Travels at 12:40 pm by Leopoldo
I spent my first day in Thailand looking at one Wat after another. While the temples are impressive I found myself tired of them after just a few. Some consideration on the subject and I realized that what I was missing was anderstanding of what I was seeing. Rows and rows of Buddhas (literarily, some Wats have dozens of them lined up) loose any meaning when you cannot tell the difference between one station and the next. Sure that one has his right hand up while the next one has his left hand up, but so what? I figure if I visit Thailand again I will have to spend some time learning about the religion it’s icons and their meaning. One thing I can comment on: For the first time in my life I have seen temples so elaborately decorated as to rival the great cathedrals of Europe.
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Posted in Travels at 12:38 pm by Leopoldo
The closest thing I have to a personal credo is this: ‘every day try to taste, see, hear, smell or do something you have never experienced before’. Working an 8 to 5 job that requires a bit of effort to accomplish. Traveling in a foreign continent all you have to do is step out the door. Thailand is full of new flavors, sights and experiences for the Western traveler, some are expected like tasty Curries everywhere while others make you stop and stare. These are the What The Fuck moments of the trip and they are a daily occurrence. WTF moments come out of the blue and catch you completely unawares. They are unique, circumstantial and nearly impossible to describe (you really have to be there). One of those moments was being in the middle of Bangkok with thousands of people bustling around to get to their destinations when the national anthem starts playing on loudspeakers and the crowd all suddenly comes to a communal halt. Another came walking down Convent street when Nick pointed out a baby elephant across the street and I realized with all the sights, noise and commotion I had completely failed to notice it! An Elephant, on the street and I DID NOT SEE IT! Some WTF moments lend themselves to photography:
Take for example this plastic Ronald McDonald greeting tourirsts with a traditional Thai bow on Sukhumvit road:
Or this Thai girl decked out in a German outfit at a ‘German’ restaurant in Pattaya:
Or this row of computers dressed up to look like cute little Penguins in Koh Samui:
My favorite of the bunch is a DVD cover for a (one assumes pirated) DVD of ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ being sold by a street vendor in Bangkok
For anyone who has seen the movie (or has the slightest inkling what it is about), say it with me: WTF!
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Posted in Travels at 12:36 pm by Leopoldo
3/23/06 8:59 PM, Portland
By my calculations I have now been awake and traveling for 30 hours, during which time I have slept for about twenty minutes. I want to go to sleep before the hallucinations start but I know the best way to adjust to a different time zone is to stay up until the local sleep time and get up at a ‘normal’ hour. It is good to be home, though I must admit I am already thinking of the next trip.
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Posted in Travels at 12:30 pm by Leopoldo
3/23/06 2:59 PM, Los Angeles Airport
After the neat and efficient organization of Hong Kong LAX is a total mess. I have shown my passport to and been looked at suspiciously by six to eight people, only two of which seemed to have any actual purpose (the immigration check and the check in counter). When you arrive from overseas in the USA you have to collect your bags and then check them back in, in case customs wants to make sure you are not smuggling anything (one assumes). Trying to make my connecting flight I received no less than four different answers on where I should take my bags, the last of which assured me that even though they were ‘checked through to Portland’ they would never had made it there had I not ended up at the Alaska Airlines check in counter. At this counter by the way I arrived (in a huge hurry because my connecting flight was an hour and a half late) first in line but waited twenty minutes to be attended (this while people who had just gotten there got attended to in a much shorter period of time). Then there were two local homeboys who skipped to the front of the security lines and when questioned by another flier just replied ‘hey I work here’ with total attitude. All in all, far from clear, not efficient and not at all friendly. Our flight from Hong Kong by the way was delayed in takeoff by an hour because they could not find a passenger who was supposed to be on-board. I have to wonder about the logic of messing up the connecting flights of a few hundred people because one person is not making it to the gate. I fortunately had a good amount of time to make my connection (which by the way is delayed, we were supposed to have started boarding by now) but I overheard a few people who had missed their flights and were trying to figure out other ways to get to wherever they were going. All in all I think I am ready to quit traveling for a while.
Oh, by the way the flight from HK to LAX played a rather cool trick. We left on Thursday the 23rd at around 5:30 PM (was supposed to be 4:00 PM) and arrived in LAX at around 1:30 PM, also of Thursday the 23rd (yes it took an hour and a half to make it to the next gate). Because of time zone differences my eleven hour flight took me about four hours back in time. Pretty cool huh?
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Posted in Travels at 12:24 pm by Leopoldo
3/23/06 3:14 PM, Hong Kong Airport
I staid up last night and set an alarm for this morning with the theory that traveling while tired would help me sleep on the plane. I did not need the alarm; I woke up around 6:30 and only managed to doze a bit afterward. I thought I would be wide-awake all day but am having a hell of a time staying awake right now. The last glass of white wine probably did not help matters any.
I walked Kowloon this morning, mostly along the waterfront. The haze I saw last night has grown to a cloud that obscures all the building tops. I was not hungry this morning either but did have some Dan Dan Mien (soda noodles in a peanut sauce with chilly oil) for lunch. As I checked out of the hotel it started to rain pretty hard. I am glad I got my walk in while it was cool out but still dry. Speaking of cool, the rain dropped the temperature a whole lot. For the first time on my trip I have been wearing my fleece jacket.
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Posted in Travels at 12:18 pm by Leopoldo
3/23/06 2:27 AM, Hong Kong
After the chaos of Bangkok, Hong Kong is most impressive. Wait, amend that to simple ‘Hong Kong is most impressive’. From the airport to the highways, to the city streets everything is very neat, well organized, well signed and controlled. There are police, security guards and cleaning people everywhere making sure everything stays nice and tidy… for the most part.
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03.21.06
Posted in Travels at 11:54 pm by Leopoldo
3/22/06 8:27 AM, Bangkok near the airport
Woke up early this morning. I would have preferred to sleep in but the curtains are crappy, there are aircraft taking off over the hotel every two minutes and well, I went to bed early. I lounged about some then had one of the worst breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Incidentally the worst breakfast I have had in my life was in Hungary. They served green peppers stuffed with sweet cream for breakfast. I did not eat it but did look around to see if the locals were peeking from behind doors to laugh at the foreigners.
The hotel has Internet access but only accessible through VPN software loaded on their computers, no use to me. The English speaking TV channel has been all financial reports all morning long but I did find a Japanese school kids soap opera dubbed to Thai that is really amusing. When I get back to Portland I think I am going to have to look for a book to explain to me the Japanese obsession (not interest, not infatuation, no much more than that, more of a fixation) with cute.
2:53 PM
God I love traveling business. Decent food, comfortable chairs and internet connectivity and that is just the waiting lounge at the airport. I think I will go back for another one of those little Chinese dumplings now.
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Posted in Travels at 11:51 pm by Leopoldo
3/21/06 8:35 PM, Bangkok
OK so as it turns out the 17th was not my last day in Bangkok, but tonight and tomorrow hardly count. My hotel is right by the airport, which puts it smack in the middle of nowhere. If I were to walk out the front door I would be able to walk to a highway and not a whole lot of anything else. Guess this building and I will become acquainted tomorrow. There is a small restaurant, a beauty salon and two computers by reception that adversities internet connections for 100 Baht / 15 minutes (it is usually 1 to 2 baht a minute with a ten or twenty minute minimum). Tomorrow I will see if I can borrow a network cable long enough to post some travel log updates and send/receive emails.
My room is huge, I mean freaking huge in all directions (height, width and length), has a comfortable bed and not a whole hell of a lot more. The view out the window is of a wall (keeping the drapes closed), the TV is not cable (i.e. only one news channel not in Thai) and the furnishings are pretty minimal, but hey it’s a place to wait for my next flight and seems pretty comfortable for that. I am very glad that I brought a couple of books and some movies and TV shows on DVD, I expect to make good use of them tomorrow. I have pre-loaded firefox pages with tab after tab of news items to read offline. I also plan on sleeping as much as I can.
I just went to brush my teeth and a Samui Cockroach walked onto my hand. God I hope there aren’t any more of those suprises waiting in my luggage. I also tried to take a picture of the room to illustrate what I mea with huge and the batteries I bought in Pattaya died. I had meant to buy another set but forgot while I was in Samui.
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Posted in Travels at 11:47 pm by Leopoldo
3/21/06 12:34 PM, Koh Samui
I am checked out of the Chewang Pearl Cabana and wasting time on the strip waiting for my flight out. Right now I am sitting at the Curry Pot Indian Restaurant where I have ordered a five-piece meal for 200 Baht. I am not sure how they will prepare everything since the island has lost power again, but they seem confident they can fulfill my order. I guess there are advantages to coal fired ovens and gas stoves. Still, don’t they need a blender for the Mango Lassi?
After a long day of diving and a beer I fell asleep early last night and rather than figure out the time and go out again when I woke up I just rolled over and kept sleeping. The sleep was interrupted at one time by eurotrash yelling at each other so they could carry a conversation across opposite ends of the hotel area and at another by high-pitched squealing. I think I found out what the cause of the squealing was this morning when a five-inch cockroach scurried out from under one of my bags.
From this point the adventure travels become a lot less adventure and a lot more travel. I booked a new flight directly out of Samui airport but found all the morning flights on the 22nd were full so I had to book to leave this evening. I will arrive in Bangkok around 8pm and intend on finding a hotel near the airport since I have to be back by 2pm tomorrow to fly to Hong Kong. Coincidentally I arrive in Hong Kong again at 8pm and have to again be at the airport by 2pm to fly out to Los Angeles. The hotel I booked in Hong Kong is about 5 miles from the airport and promises to be ‘Conveniently located in the heart of the shopping, dining and entertainment district’. I am hoping this is true as I would hate to just sit in my hotel for a day.
P.S. That is one damned tasty Mango Lassi.
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