Thailand
Click on text Thailand above to see more pictures
Getting to Thailand from Dubai took some adjusting for me. It’s the equivalent of being yanked from the Ritz Carlton, thrown into a hostel where nobody speaks your language, your senses being attacked by sounds and smells that can only be described as more of an invasion than an attack.
It’s a guilt ridden paradox, as you can’t help but feel bad about the poverty and desperation, while reveling in how dirt cheap things are, and how valuable the dollar is here. We sometimes forget to appreciate what we have, but coming to Countries like these always remind me how lucky we are. You look around and can’t help but feel superior and lucky to be born into comparative royalty. Even the Hippies and the open minded you watch being careful to be respectful, and try to soak up the local culture, and act so politically correct, do it in a very condescending way, almost like being especially nice to a cripple, where as much as you try, you can’t help feeling bad and it just makes you a bit uncomfortable to be around.
My group was arriving the next day so I had a head start on Bangkok and the apprehension we all felt for this trip was replaced by sheer chaos.
There was a couple of Australian guys already there, let’s call him Matt and Christo (only because that’s their name) and we went out for a night of debauchery and regret (of which the details I cant share) and ended up coming home at seven eating breakfast “before” I went to bed.
I had my first Thai shopping experience in what can only be described as a tiring and harrowing experience. It comes something like this; you want a stupid trinket, and the process turns into an entire circus. They expect you to haggle so they start at some ridiculous price. They ask for five hundred and you have to counter with four, so you can meet at a reasonable fifty. In the process a calculator keeps getting passed back and forth, and all kinds of numbers are being crunched as if the calculator was their version of QuickBooks. You keep showing them the calculator and they keep punching numbers and you feel like an asshole haggling over two dollars but that’s how it must go! I have 17 nephews and nieces so my plan was to buy a big box of toys ship it back to the US and either all of them learn how to share, or kill themselves in the process. Its fair to say I am done shopping for the rest of the trip.
I had a death defying ride in a “Tuk Tuk” (look it up I am not Wikipedia) and I was starting to get comfortable.
The group started arriving the next day and we were slowly feeling each other out. Traveling with a large group is an experience in its own. Everything gets magnified on vacation, everyone gets pulled out of their comfort zones from all over the globe, we get thrown together, and told “this is your family for the next 30 days, you will eat, sleep, hang out, and literally spend every day all day together. It’s a good thing that people that travel are in general more adventurous and interesting, so it makes it a bit easier. Our group leader gave us an orientation and pretty much told us what to expect, different situations we might encounter, different types of people etc, all this was not helping our apprehension. Although she told us not to break up into clicks, the law of attraction was starting to take over, and people were gravitating towards their type of personalities and people were staking out their friends. It was like we were on “Survivor” and we needed to form our alliances to get through the trip.
Day 2
I’ve been here one day and it feels like a week, we are constantly in a whirlwind of activity and I have to remember to slow down because I am on “vacation”. Our tour guide was setting a precedent and stormed off because some guys were talking, when we were about to leave to watch some “ping pong” show which she ironically convinced us to go. We felt kind of abandoned but we had to remind ourselves we were grown men and woman and we can handle a night out on the town on our own. It’s fair to say we were grossly mistaken. Our group got split in two and interestingly enough, we had identical stories. We followed a questionably looking guy around to find the “Ping Pong show”.
In the interest of saving you what can only be described as a horrific visual, and undeniably stands to contradict the statement we were told “That you can’t visit Thailand without seeing “The Ping Pong show” I will vaguely describe what it is.
It involves a woman shooting stuff out of a private part of her body that I have only had experience putting things into. There was a cake that got its candles blown out unconventionally, and darts were flying through the air popping balloons. Some guys were hitting the Ping Pong balls back but my soul suffered irreparable damage knowing that there are woman in their fifties that spent the better part of their life doing something that would shock even the most veteran street walker. We couldn’t help wonder how someone went about finding out they had this talent. Would they just be shoving stuff up their vagina on a happy Tuesday, and realize they have this talent, and decide to go ahead and pursue a career in it? And why is it only in this country people have this talent? We didn’t have time to ponder these mysteries because as we were leaving we were accosted by the Madam, demanding we owed her thousands of Baat. Now we were told that it was free and just one hundred Baht (3 dollars) for drinks, and here we were being ripped off and screwed. We all heard the stories before, but it was surreal. The madam starting pushing me and hitting me and shouting in my face, and threatening to call the Mafia, I tried calming her down and after realizing we were shit out of luck, we agreed on being screwed on a more reasonable level. After leaving the club and calculating the damage, I was appalled that it was only twenty dollars. Had she told us the entrance was twenty from the start it would be no issue, but all the haggling and arguing has created a very high level of paranoia, that we just feel everyone’s trying to just take advantage of us, when in fact we were taking advantage of them. We were partying drinking and having the time of our lives for pennies, while they struggled for every dollar.