One night in Bangkok. Followed by another.
10th July, 2008.
We made it to Bangkok. However not all of out luggage was so lucky. In fact only two of the five bags made it and they were both Sam’s. Lucky bastard.
So after checking into the hotel we went shopping. Just your basics – a pair of jeans, some shirts, socks, underwear, etc. The funny thing was that the person who spent the most was Sam. 20,000 baht!
Bangkok from our executive suite on the 20th floor.
Then, dressed in our snappy new threads, we hit the town. It was Saturday night so of course we had to check out one of the bars.. We jumped into a cab and gave the driver his instructions which he promptly ignored and turfed us out at a friends bar that promised a “live ping pong ball show”. Luckily the place we wanted to be at was only about 10 minutes walk away.
There are obviously no “maximum” occupancy laws in Bangkok. We struggled to the bar to order our drinks only to find that once we had them there wasn’t enough room to bend our elbows to actually drink them. It was just a crush of people all desperate to get from point A to point B by barrelling through point C, which was me.
We didn’t stay for a second drink.
So we headed back to the respectable part of town and checked out all the street vendors selling everything from genuine Relox watches to tasers. (Note to Jimi: If you are passing through Bangkok on your way to Oz, this is a great way to get yourself arrested at Mascot.)
It had been a pretty long day so we decided to call it a night. Well, after we got some food from room service and raided the mini bar.
The next day we went to the Sunday Markets which is a huge affair of more Relox watches, tasers, knockoff t-shirts and sewage smells. We spent hours there but not a huge amount of money. It seems that we got the exchange rate wrong so when we were bartering we were probably coming in a little too low for some of the vendors. Some did agree which just goes to show how cheap the stuff is.
On the Sunday evening we chose to head upstairs to the 31st floor of our hotel for Happy Hour, where all cocktails are free. A couple of hours later we were once again staggering down the street giggling and feeding elephants.
The source of the smell in bangkok? Effluents.
We ended up doing a bit of a bar hop. As the evening went on, the bars got seedier and seedier. It was an amazing experience for the three of us to walk into a bar, take a seat and have a girl hover around supplying more drinks as soon as ours ran out. It was even more amazing watching the 20 odd bikini clad girls on the stage all start dancing on our side, winking and licking their lips at us. At one stage they were all hanging so far over the stage I thought the club was at risk of capsizing.
And then there was the lady-boy bar.
Luckily Sam and Bailey were sitting on the outside, protecting me from the grabs and gropes of the dancers. You could see how the ones on stage would choose one potential client and focus all his/her attention on them. I could tell they really liked me. It was obviously true love. There was a connection there. Let’s get out of here!
We headed downstairs to a slightly less seedy looking bar. There we ran into a lovely boy from Bristol. When I say lovely, I mean hot. Sure, he was straight but we managed to play the game for long enough to keep him talking so that we could undress him slowly with out eyes several times over.
Maaaaaate!
I wonder if he had any idea.
Back to the hotel but no more drinks. Something I didn’t notice the previous night was that in our room on the 20th floor, you could feel the hotel swaying.
Sam & Bailey at serious risk of being loved "long time".
On our last day in Bangkok we checked out the geek market but there wasn’t much interesting. It was then into our luxury van with all of our luggage, which had eventually turned up.
There was a BA flight, flirting with a hostie, smuggled bottle of French Champagne with compliments of said hostie, sleeping in our lovely business class beds, express passes to get us past all the queues at Mascot and the smiling faces of Greig and Chris at the gates.
There was only one thing we needed to do before heading home to unpack.
Real coffee. Oh god how I missed real coffee.