Back from Bangkok...

Just got back from a quick weekend trip to Bangkok and I didn't take a single picture! But really, the photo ops went something like this: 1. Pictures of Greg sitting on the couch watching football. 2. Pictures of the ladyboys in Patpong (these actually would've been interesting to post, but I was too lazy to get out my camera) 3. pictures of all the food I ate or 4. pictures of me studying. So not too many interesting photo ops, but a nice weekend overall.

Whenever I head up to Bangkok, I realize how much I miss living in Hanoi (though that may simply be because I don't live there anymore, so have the luxury of missing it...). What I mean is, Bangkok and Hanoi are still very lively places to live. The streets are just teeming with life. And while, yes, you may find yourself stepping into foul smelling puddles, you may also find yourself in altogether more charming situations as well. KL, while I still very much like living here, has modernized enough, that that kind of chaos is fewer and further between. Now, after making the above statement, I will say also that to do so is kind of arrogant on my part, and this is why. One of the reasons that you see so much more life on the streets in places like Bangkok and Hanoi is that there is a lot more poverty, and this is how people make their living. So, if I'm saying that I enjoy it purely for the entertainment value, then yes, I deserve a stern talking to. However, there IS actually more to it than that. The Buddhist societies in Northern Southeast Asia tend to be more open societies, and life out on the street is not confined solely to poor people. In Hanoi especially, around 5 in the evening, you'd see the whole fam damily sitting outside their front doors on little plastic chairs watching the people go by, letting their chickens run loose (urban farming), chewing the fat with the neighbors, and just generally finding their evening entertainment this way. Though one could still argue that there is an economic side to this, it is still primarily a sense of community and just part of the way of life in this part of the world. Either way, I see far less of it here in KL and I miss it.

Then there was the other part of the life on the streets that I saw whilst in Bangkok that I don't miss so much. My fault for hanging out with an old friend with a taste for really good food located right in the heart of the raunchiest part of Bangkok. Patpong. The thing is, the area is raunchy, but it also just an area that is heavily frequented by tourists, so you see a rather interesting mix of people on the streets down there. So as we picked our way to one of the more mundane places on the street (ie a restaurant that actually specialized in serving food) we were constantly accosted by young Thai men trying to entice us into their establishments with a list of things we could see that read something like this:
1. *censored*
2. *censored*


49. *censored*
Oops... sorry, but if the Malaysian censorship board (or my grandmother for that matter) were to see what those cards really say (on my blog), I'd be deported. ;-) This kind of goes back to my post about the poor English you see in this part of the world. The offerings are bizarre and unpalatable to most (but must be interesting to many, or they wouldn't all be in business) and they are listed in the basest, most banal, outright crude language... But here, one could hardly believe that this is an accident. What was kind of surprising was that the guys were as eager to get me to go into their establishments as they were to get Greg in there. Which means, had I said yes, I wouldn't have been the first Western woman to step foot inside one of these not so reputable places...

Truly, a place like this will depress the hell out of you, if you can't laugh at the utter ludocrisy of the place (and even then, it will still depress the hell out of you eventually). Things like, while, yes, the place is swarming with prostitutes, it's a decent guess that half of those "ladies of the night" are likely men, and tonight, one of those sleazy western men who come to this part of the world solely for the purpose of visiting a place like that is going to get the surprise of his life tonight when he realizes that his "lady of the night" is really a ladyBOY of the night!