In Thailand Mr Gray Gets Play

Come to Bangkok and you’ll notice it right away, older White guys with much younger partners.  To my eye the White guys have a much younger woman Thai woman on their arms but sometimes the older white guy is being accompanied by a much younger Thai man.  This situation was much less noticeable in Singapore.  So what’s going on here?

Just as the US has different ethnic groups that have been drawn at different times to different areas of the country (such as Blacks leaving the South for the opportunity in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest) the same is true for Thailand.  Darker skinned country people are drawn to the wealth, glitter and jobs in Bangkok, leaving the farm, poverty and traditional Thai village life.  Thai men get traditional Thai male jobs and women often find their fortunes administering traditional Thai massage, which, depending on the situation may or may not be prostitution.  I’ve been approached over and over for “massasse”.  I didn’t pursue which propositions were for massage and which were for the world’s oldest profession.  But some looked like country girls and some looked like workin’ girls.

So what about the farang men (I suppose it happens but I’ve yet to see an older Thai man with a young white woman on his arm)?  They’re often gray haired, bald, bubble bellied and/or gimpy.  Back in Europe or Australia he’d be Grandpa and no chance to be in the company of a much younger man or woman, much less live with and sleep with them.  Back at home there’d be no play for Mr Gray. 

It’s also a great opportunity for the woman to play Thai social leapfrog.  Darker skinned northern Isan women seem to be at the lower levels of the Thai social pecking order.  Skin color seems to be very important in Thailand, skin whitening and lightening creams are advertised on billboards and in TV commercials that end with a woman finding love only after she finds lighter skin.  With an older white man in her life she can dress better, wear cosmetics and have lighter skinned hapa children.  It seems to be win/win for everybody.  And everybody deserves the chance to be happy.

Getting Out of the Tropical Sun

While out for a stroll in Bangkok this morning I notice a part of the street was covered.  See the covered area, right above the blue bus?  Refuge for me.

The sun was bright ands broiling, the air was thick and smothering with humidity and diesel exhaust and I was going to walk down that street anyway, I wonder what’s going on under there?
Well, it’s a kind of local market.  Not the kind of market I’m used to with a dairy section, frozen vegetables and ice cream.  But there was plenty of fresh produce and an abundance of of meat.  Chickens and ducks were crammed into cages and were cackling and calling .  Live frogs encased together in nets that were as big as soccer balls.  Tubs full of squirming eels wriggled in desperation.  Catfish were being grabbed and having their heads hacked off with cleavers.  Turtles were climbing over each other trying to escape.  The sidewalk was slippery with a residue of guts and blood.  It was just another day at the market for the locals in the tin shacks who were gathering up the ingredients of their next few meals.

Viva La Revolucion!

Bangkok seems to have an attraction to Che Guevara.  Locals wear the famous Che shirt and there’s no reason that the attraction should be any less in Bangkok than it is back home in Seattle where an expensive clothing store for children at Pike Place Market sells them to well healed high earning revolutionary parents in baby sizes.  This stall at the Chatujak Market in Bangkok can fill the reddest of cadre’s Marxist-Leninist needs with posters and T shirts.

But Thailand is a monarchy, Massachusetts born King Bhumibol Adulyadej is currently the world’s longest reigning monarch.  The people of Thailand revere their King and the government in Thailand is famously intolerant of dissent on the subject of the King and the royal family.  The Internet is routinely searched for any signs of lèse majesté and those who brave or foolhardy enough speak out against the monarchy are hunted down, found and tossed into a prison system so harsh that even the most conservative or senile member of the US Supreme Court would be sure to find it cruel and inhuman.

Here’s what you see if you try and research the subject of the King of Thailand, even in English, from within Thailand:

Here’s the URL that I was delivered to: http://58.97.5.29/court.html  It seems that it’s not only the Chicoms that have a Great Firewall

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Go East (not so) Young Man

International travel sounds so easy.  Find an overseas destination, land an agreeable airfare and jet for adventure.  But oh what a pain in the ass it can be sometimes. 
It took around 24 hours from the moment I set out from my house in Seattle until my taxi pulled up at my hotel in the Sukhumvit section of Bangkok.  Only 24 hours to traverse 14 time zones.  On the other hand it’s quite uneventful, long stretches of sleepless boredom punctuated by an occasional meal, an announcement in Korean from the cockpit (I flew Asiana) or a screaming child.  It would help if I could sleep on a plane but for I simply can’t. 
I awoke at dawn and hit the soi to see the local street food vendors selling breakfast to the locals:

Out of the Jungle

On our 3rd morning staying at the resort on the Ping River we were marooned. The friendly owner had promised to take us into town with her but when we reported for breakfast at 7 AM to be ready for a 9 AM departure we found that she had already gone into town. A taxi would set us back 300 baht each way or around $9.50 US. That is, if we could find a taxi. The accommodations were fine although the owner admitted that the reason she hadn’t picked us up at the airport was because she accidently deleted my email containing our flight information.

When we checked in the owner asked if we had any dietary restrictions and since she was asking I checked “no pork” but each meal arrived containing pork, sometimes in multiple forms such as pork ribs with a side salad garnished with fried pork rinds. Moo! Moo’s the Thai word for pork. So we went back to our cottage, broke out the laptop and booked a room in town and found a way to call a cab. Within a half hour we were gone.

But by the afternoon we were back, in my haste I had left a bag behind. Eleanor did some hard bargaining with a tuk-tuk driver who took us tear-assing through traffic and into the hills and back for only 200 baht to retrieve the bag. Most of Chiang Mai’s foreign visitors seem to be European. I’ve seen and heard more than a few willowy gay German couples with shaved heads around town. Souvenirs seem to be targeted to Europeans as well. Lots of soccer jerseys with European player’s names on the back are for sale along with some snarky and offensive t-shirts. Lots of shirts for sale in Chiang Mai equate George Bush with Adolf Hitler, because if anyone would understand that the deaths of 20 million Russians, 6 million Jews and countless European Frenchmen, Dutch, Englishmen, Czechs, Poles, etc are being repeated on the same scale today at the hands of George Bush it’s Europeans. Pictures of Bush and Hitler with the caption, “Same Shit, Different Asshole”, pictures of Bush with a furher moustache, drawings of Bush as a monkey being blown up by the dynamite in his paw. Picture of a woman’s public region labeled , “Good Bush”, next to a picture of a smiling George Bush labeled, “Bad Bush”, pictures of George Bush labeled, “Public Enemy #1”. Che Guevara staring into a bright revolutionary future, Mao as a disk jockey. Hard hitting satire that’s obviously far beyond a course American cowboy understanding like mine. Non political shirts say strange things like, “Eat Your Rice, Bitch!”.

In the afternoon I decided to go for a walk on my own and within minutes I was lost. I had wanted to get away from the touristy Chiang Mai of souvenir t-shirts and massages and instantly succeeded, within minutes I was in a land of tin shacks, dog packs and strange street food that I knew would curdle my tender North American stomach. The tropical sun rocked down out of the sky and toasted my pale white skin that has been nurtured on winters of Seattle’s cold and damp. After several hours of walking in what I later discovered to be a circle that was nowhere near my hotel I swallowed my pride and succumbed to a tuk-tuk driver’s pitch. I heard thunder off in the darkening distance and if there was anything worse than being lost under the searing tropical sun it was being lost in a tropical downpour. When I got back to the hotel I discovered that I had soaked through all of my clothing with sweat. My shirt was sopped and my pants looked like I had forgotten toilet training. I had even soaked through my belt. The friendly tropical sun that on this trip has given me abundant banana, mango, mangosteen, lychee, rambuttan and especially durian had a darker side. Actually the sun has given me a darker side, perhaps there is affirmative action in my future. Or skin cancer.

Look carefully, some of those signs are in Hebrew.

 

Bangkok - I saved the Best for Last

BANGKOK

I'm back home and that means that at least I have a good idea what I'm eating and I'm free to drink tap water again. Without knowing I saved the best for last. I had been looking forward to going to China all year long but in the end two weeks in China became something of a chore. Because of language and cultural barriers getting the simplest things accomplished in my daily solo tourist routine such as getting a taxi or shopping or even something as basic as getting a meal just wore me down.

This dawned on me when I came down with a cold and went to the supermarket to buy, among other things, a small pocket pack of tissues. I caught it before I got to the cash register, what I had actually put into my basket a small, purse sized pack of sanitary napkins. Because I couldn't read the goddamn label and for whatever cultural reasons a package of sanitary napkins in China while colorful contains no visual cues, pictograms, frilly pink flowers, much of anything to give away to someone who can’t read Chinese characters what lies within.  Chinese road manners made me fear daily for my life as a pedestrian, Chinese food in the supermarket was a daily mystery, or worse. Chinese restaurant menus were either unintelligible in Chinese or brutally repulsive in Engrish. I love Chinese food but what I found in the home office of Chinese food was usually unrecognizable to me as something I’d want to put in my mouth and made me fear, it turned out for good reason, for my digestive health. Chinglish was whip out my camera cute when I arrived but as my time in China went on dealing with and deciphering it became just another chore in my daily solo tourist life.

But Bangkok and I connected. Is there any place in Bangkok where you can't buy copied software and music? Pantip Plaza is 5 or 6 floors of IT crap and other than the counterfeits (and Pantip’s got plenty of phony everything) the prices are OK, but only if you've never done business with Newegg or any other Internet retailer in the US. In other words, for a US based shopper Pantip prices are lousy, at least for someone like me who can’t do a deal in Thai. There's a 7% VAT in Thailand on most everything but even so the prices are still high. I’ve had my ear’s eye on a pair of Sony ear buds. I bought a pair for about $50 in Tokyo, a city not known for hard shopping bargains. At Pantip Plaza they were either marked at $80 with a small golden genuine Sony sticker on the box or $11 without. In my experience the folks selling copied software at Pantip Plaza deliver service after the sale. The label on my “copy” of Office 2007 promised English but it refused to install because my laptop’s version of Windows XP isn't in Thai. I took it back and got it swapped for English but it meant going back to the Pantip pressure cooker. There's an ongoing constant amplified floor show on the 1st floor that reverberates through the bones of everybody in the place. I packed my MP3 player to successfully dampen the din.

Going shopping seems to pass for sport in Bangkok and there’s lots of it. I went to a fancy mall, MBK Center. Most of it is upscale goods but one whole wing is devoted exclusively to cell phones and copied software and music. They even sell the software and music in the food court. Oh, did I mention that prescription drugs are available over the counter at any pharmacy simply for the asking? Want that certain drug for men that's responsible for the bulk of your bulk email? No problemo, just walk right in and ask for it but don't ask for it by name otherwise you'll overpay. It turns out that there really are generic versions of the stuff, produced in India. You can't get it legally in the US without having Pfizer's lawyers nipping at your nuts but Bangkok ain't the US. Bangkok and I connected on other levels. Depending on where you’re going getting around can be easy and civilized, just go up and take the new BTS Skytrain or down for the new MRT subway.

Without those two the only other choices are taxi or a kind of a cross between a motorcycle/rickshaw called a tuk-tuk. Citizens of Seattle will often tell folks from elsewhere that Puget Sound traffic is among the worst anywhere. Bad yes, but it ain’t Bangkok. Bangkok traffic is a filthy, hellish Blade Runner nightmare of backed up streets and clotted intersections overseen by traffic cops wearing some kind of gray hybrid of a respirator/surgical mask. Street vendors and locals make due with disposable surgical masks. Tuk-tuks and taxis seem to run on compressed natural gas but older city buses and trucks belch blue clouds of life shortening smoke all day long. Oh, here's something from the Skytrain that you don't usually see on mass transit in the US. Some of the women in Bangkok are absolutely drop dead, heart palpitatingly pretty, like God took another crack at His failed recipe for Filipinas and got it right this time. So it’s not surprising to see a certain element in Bangkok of white men of a certain age, like mid 50’s and up with much younger local women. Some even have small hapa kids. Gray haired white guys, some balding, some with pot bellies with Thai women old enough to be their daughters or grand daughters (Less prevalent but still noticeable are older white men with young Thai guys). Perhaps she sees him as a walking wallet and with the help of a certain prescription drug for men maybe he sees himself once again as a stickman and her as a walking vagina. I've overheard some of these guys talk, some are American but many are European and Australian. They're living their dream, I guess. They’ve left their same old used to be on another continent and now they're in tropical Asia where they can spend their days drinking good Thai beer and screwing young Thai stuff. So Bangkok and I connected. It was easy, I don’t know why but not only is the defacto second language English, it nearly always makes sense. No Engrish. Bilingual signs make sense to English speaking eyes and ears. So cars are right hand drive and there’s a functional use of good English, curious since the British never colonized or ran Thailand. Then there’s the King of Thailand. It's good to be the King. I had no idea that the King was such a big deal. His picture is everywhere, he looks like a Chinese waiter and Woody Allen somehow had a son. Yes, he was born in Massachusetts and like Woody Allen he plays the saxophone. I bought 3 yellow shirts with His royal crest on the breast pocket. When they say "Long Live the King!" in Thailand (and it's everywhere, even in English) they ain't talkin' 'bout some guy named Elvis from Mississippi. Thailand’s King is like some kind of benevolent Kim Jong Il, his picture is everywhere both public and private. The King had the cover of the local equivalent of the TV Guide that I found in my hotel room. Bangkok is a great city. I barely scratched the surface, this time.