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Bangkok, Thailand
13° 45' N 100° 31' E
Feb 14, 2003 13:30
Distance 0km

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Other entries in Bangkok

Valentine Bar fly

Text written in: English

Being in Bangkok - not of choice but by necessity - I decided to make the best of it and enjoy thriving activity and energy generated by 11 million thais working, eating and playing virtually 24 hours a day. Certainly there were many things to be had that were unobtainable both at home and at my ultimate destination - the southern islands.

I jumped in a cab and hit Thanon Khao San, which is a street in the centre of what used to be the rice markets of Bangkok, a very serious bourse in a country which much reveres its staple food. 'Plain rice' in thai is 'khao sway' which translates as 'beautiful/pretty rice'. With King Rama V covering many of the
khlongs (canals) which were the arterial routes through the Venice of Siam, new roads were created. Today Khao San Road is a sort of haven for backpackers and as soon as I arrived, I was not disappointed.

Thanon Khao San even busier than I remembered it on my visit two years ago April 2001. Tanned backpackers, weathered hippies and scores of thais in various modes milled around the bars, shops and stalls. The air was filled with thumping music, voices and the smell of Pad Thai and smoked chicken on skewers.

In one sweep of the street in a quarter-hour, I was satisfied nothing fundamental had changed and I set forth on my darker purpose.

First of all, when I asked a thai, he said "No, no, no have! Finished! Want tuk-tuk?". Not entirely convinced I walked back a little and then spotted it - a placard with all sorts of ID from press cards to driver's licences to UN Security cards. I can see the potential for a second driver's licence but who would want the UN card? The most convincing were the International Student Identity cards (ISAC), which I suspect were real ones which had been smuggled out the back door of a valid travel agent which made them for people who could show the correct papers. Of course, I was just observing and checking up on the seedier aspects, but had I purchased these cards I might have got 10 for B700 (approx £1 each).

Khao San is place where backpackers can taste a small sample of the exotic without leaving the safety of the herd, learn the local phrases for 'one beer', 'too expensive' and feel like they have been in close contact with the local culture. It's also a place for opportunistic thais with a flare for languages to tap into outlandish foreign funds and possibly hitch a ride.

For all its banal predictability, the meeting of these two powerful forces in the buzzing hub of Thailand creates a rare atmosphere. A Cart containing an altar laden with flowers and young puppies is pushed along by a man playing a mouth-organ. A dozen girls dressed in marshmallow colours promoting Valentine's day soirées stand outside a bar covered in massive heart-shaped balloons. A
lady whose arms and legs have been amputated leaving just her torso and a few chiselled stumps collects donations while her companions feed her Pad Siew, bought from a passing vendor, and pass her a cloth with which she nimbly manages to wipe her brow.

I decide to have a drink and take in the scene, after all it may be a couple of years before I return. I soon get talking to an American who has lived in Thailand for 25 years. Well-groomed and tidily dressed, he seems laid-back and converses fluently with the thais around us. Even I can tell he speaks it pretty damn perfectly, his voice effortlessly following the obstacle course of
syllable tones, on which the smallest of tonal slip-ups can alter the meaning of a sentence entirely. If I closed by eyes, I'd believe I was standing near a thai with an unusually deep voice.

Tonal Thai... Thai is a mono-syllabic language, which means that each syllable individually has a meaning. Complex words or concepts are put together using multiple syllables, but these are just compounds like 'water-room-person-male' -> the men's toilet. Although thai has a large number of sounds to make up these syllables: 21 consonant sounds and 48 different vowels, there are still a lot of words that need to be covered with not many syllables, so the difference is made up by including different 'tones' on each syllable, which also alter the meaning. There are five tones: low, middle, high, falling, and rising. All tones are relative to the basic intonation of the sentence, so it depends on the speakers voice. In this way, it is possible even to make an entire sentence from just one syllable: mái mài mâi mãi - "New wood burns, doesn't it?". If you find that the phrase for your favourite food is not being understood, you are probably asking about it using an inquisitive (rising) tone, which will confuse things. It won't necessarily help if the actual tones are very different, but try saying them with flat even tones, all the same as this raises the chances the listener will separate the confusingly false tones from the syllables themselves. If this works and you succeed at getting your phrase across, listen carefully and try to remember the intonation on the syllables. Copy them a few times and maybe write down on each one how high it was and whether it was rising or falling.

Of course, I was envious, and took my opportunity to drill him on various aspects of the language that have puzzled me ~ being most of it ~ and eventually he suggested we go hit a bar near Patpong markets, a seedy patch of town crammed full of markets, bars and go-go bars. I told him I've already seen the go-go bars and sex shows on my last visit. Once is basically enough. My companion,
James, insisted the bar he has in mind is only mildly seedy, that there are no shows and that the women know he has no money so they leave him alone. I laughed at his candid description and we jumped in a cool air-conditioned taxi.

It turns out the bar he had in mind was fairly narrow with two small stages one at the side and one at the back. It was packed full of UV lights and the stages had a small handfull of half-naked women joking around with each other and gyrating on a small stage. Predictably enough, the clientele was mostly male, with a few falang women scattered about, chatting, sometimes with their husbands but mostly acting like this visit is just a sociological experiment and when they get back to their hotel they will write their report for home-base. There are also some thai women who don't appear to work here, chatting amongst themselves mostly. One wearing jeans is going beserk to the beat. I wonder what she has taken.

I had an uncomfortable feeling I might get pressured into spending too much money or leaving abruptly. I had a feeling there are expectations on me, so I asked my companion James what the deal is. He grined and told me if I don't get cocky and order bottles of champagne, my money will be safe. We ordered a beer each, and immediately received a slip of paper in a cup each with our bills on it. Mine said B70 (about 1 pound), I relaxed a little and looked around.

The music was good, with a slow groovy bass line and the volume allowed easy conversation if you raised your voice a little. This was certainly feeling different to the sleazy sex show Julia and I saw last time, which was more of a comic theatre than a place to hang out. It turned out my new friend travelled frequently and used to teach English in Bangkok until he got into business exporting silver. He told me of markups of 400% and that his business basically runs itself, allowing him to treat Asia as his playground.

The beer was relaxing me, I didn't feel quite so uncomfortable or immoral being here, so I checked out the girls on stage. They were messing around, dancing, sometimes pushing each other or making fun of some of the more slack-jaw patrons ogling them. They didn't have the forced mechanical boredom of a pole dancer or a strip-tease and seemed to come and go from the stage at will, seemingly depending on whether they liked the track that was playing at the time.

A beauty that had been serving drinks behind the bar threw the drink gun over to her workmate and strode over to the little stage. She was wearing a red skirt and a shirt which exposed her back. Before she got up, she did a little wai (small bow with hands together in front of the face) to a small shrine built into the wall with joss sticks smoking away, and then turned to flash a smile of unaffected pleasure at the whole place as she began to move to a funky beat.

It was Valentine's day, and some of the patrons were holding roses, the girls mock falling in love with each other and exchanging them, there were a few heart-shaped balloons floating around. The girl with the red skirt had removed a little water pistol and was taking pot-shots at the other dancers and some of the patrons. The girl wearing the jeans standing near the stage was going nuts to the music and was clearing a bit of space around herself with her flailing arms.

There was a pause in the music for an announcement, first in thai, then in English. A number was called out, and everyone who had ordered a drink looked at their slips which all have a pink number glowing in the UV light on them. It's not mine. I turned to James who is grinning at me in the dark, the UV lights illuminating his big pupils and beaming smile. "I've won a bottle of wine! This is the second time in my life I've actually won anything! The first time I was seven!". I told him he's obviously not the gambling type and someone whisked his slip off and brought back a bottle of red wine. It turns out to be French and is neither startling good nor spectacularly bad, but it goes does a treat. A feeling of total benevolance washed over me, and we talked for an hour or so with a guy from England and his girlfriend who were sitting nearby and when we finally left the bar I was pleasantly pissed and only a pound poorer. As I left the bar, the girl with the red skirt pressed a rose into my hand and gived me a kiss on the cheek, and goes back to put the chairs up.

My taxi driver was a young guy who turns out to be quite a joker and I was in the mood for talking shit. We chatted in broken English and even more broken thai and he talked about his life. He seemed content and laughand when he spotted the rose and I told him about the bar. Eventually the conversation settled on the inevitable topic - what food is good to try in Thailand. He suggested Sóm Tam which I gather is some sort of salad involving papaya.

All this talk of food had done it for me so I got him to drop me off a block or two from the hotel near some stalls... It was about 7pm at home, no wonder I was up for a snack. Fortunately, I wasn't alone as a couple of dozen or more thais were hungrily tucking into bowls of noodles, salads, plates of rice and various curries. An older guy said hi and helpfully showed me around the food stalls. I asked him what his favourite food was and he took me to a stall where the guy is just packing away his ingredients. He fired a volley of thai at the stall owner who shook his head without meeting our eyes. The older guy explained "Oh no - finished, no more, and then more quietly and with a grin suggested "He's too stuck up - motherfucker". I laughed and he elaborated "Stuck-up, but no tell him because good food. Very good food, come back tomorrow. Oh yes, try this". He organises a plate of duck curry from another stand which with rice and a salad costs B30 (40p). Pleasantly full and tipsy I head home to hit the sack, wondering how an elderly thai man comes to develop such a fruity vocabulary.