Warning, the following story is not parent safe. If you’re over, say… 45 years old, please skip this entry.
On arrival to the “Silom Nightmarket” (as the concierge from your hotel will suggest describing it), neon signs and live sex show pimps won’t leave you alone till you’re sitting in/at a bar with a beer in your hands. That pink sign in the middle of this pic says “Super” and then something starting with a “P”. You figure it out.
Last night I met Ed at Patpong. It was my second time at Patpong, the entertainment district found on Silom Road there, my first time having been with Marc and his girlfriend Kelly. That first Patpong experience consisted of checking out the night market - which was cool and worthy of said checking out - followed by a few beer, a live Thai coverband and finally a discoteque where another band, this time American-ish black and white farangs rapping to both their own stuff and grooving-enough hip hop covers of the American rap-star genre of which I’m happy to be oblivious. Last night’s shenanigans also included said discoteque but that’s where the comparisons end. I mean, what do two late 20s Canadian males do when they find themselves in the midst of a street reknowned for the quantity (certainly not the quality) of live sex show bars and other bad stuff, drinking the proud local 6% beer?
Guy with the biggest zippo I’ve ever seen. Also the guy who thinks it’s a good idea to eletrocute his patrons.
Well during the warm up, ie. the first few beer, they get a few laughs out of the local merchants hawking their trinkets, particularly the dudes with the massive zippos (about 10x the normal size, like a small shoe box). One of these zippo guys was rather unfond of my bargaining skills and did the ol’ jolt the tourist with the pen-lighter that isn’t a pen-lighter cuz when you push the clicker it just zaps the hell out of you. Then he still tried to sell me a zippo. I politedly told him where to go (no really, I was polite).
Having grabbed a quick sandwich and another beer it was back to the market for the Canadian travelers. Of course one doesn’t walk 10 feet without being molested by the live sex show touts, waving their little laminated cards listing off every imaginabely disturbed thing one can do with household objects and the female genitalia, punctuated with a few basic kamasutra-esque diagrams on one side and a list of beer and drink prices on the other. The drink prices were surprisingly tempting once you’ve paid 130 baht for a couple Singha beer that you’d pay 60 baht for outside of the Patpong district. So I had my impetus. Ed, I guess, had his own, whatever it was we didn’t really need to discuss it I think. Okay, curiosity is kind of overwhelming at the 4 beer mark. Curiosity also killed the cat they say.... hmmm.
Despite the warnings of a friendly passerby-er who’d obviously spent a lot more baht than he’d wanted to in one of these places, up we went, up into a bar called, well, Showgirls, following a tout who promised us no problems after she listened to our passerby-er systematically destroy every cost-related argument she’d just made when I initially inspected at her drink list card.
Top Secret Patpong Insider Photos!
What they don’t want you, the buying public, to see.
Really, in the end, you DON’T want to see it anyway.
At this point the story kinda blurs along quickly without detailed accounting because just as the signs everywhere discourage evidential recall -> “NO PHOTOS” (oh, but I had photos anyway of course), I’ll leave this part of the story to your imagination. To spice that picture you might have brewing in your skull right now I’ll tell you that we walked out of Showgirls about one hour later, about 1500 baht poorer, 2 shirts in need of laundry service, at least 15 cigarettes lighter, 4 beer happier, 10 displays of human anatomy to be more burdened by, and 2 curious Canuck minds satisfied scarred - collectively speaking that is. Oh yeah, we were actually saved by a group of 6 other Canadians from I-can’t-remember-but-probably-Toronto, who, with 3 of them being ladies, were unmolested by the tip-for-having-done-nothing demanding staff. Once we met them it was clear the night’s activities needed to relocate, so they did.
That’s when we went to that discoteque I mentioned earlier. The place was jam packed for the most part and I gotta say I was rather unimpressed by how much groping goes on on the dance floor. No, I’m not talking about eager couples grinding away lustily, I’m talking about these Thai women (not girls, and no, not lady boys) who grabbed me as I’m walking through the dance floor; I wasn’t even dancing. By the way, don’t be too surprised when the bathroom staff suddenly grabs you from behind in the midst of whatever you’re doing (yes, in the midst) to help you with those back pains you’ve been having with a big *CRACK CRACK CRACK* combination of chiropractice and Thai massage. It’s definitely worthy of a tip, albiet kinda dangerous, just make sure they wait till dude’s back in your pants.
Thailand-Ho readers, meet Ed. He’s a good Canadian lad.
A couple 180 baht ($4.50 USD) beer later and we decided to make our way back to the taxi queue. It was like 3am by this point, everything else was closed and the music just wasn’t doing it for, well, me anyway. Of COURSE we had to stop at 7-11 to grab some smokes, water and food. The checkout ladies wouldn’t let Ed buy these salad rolls which was kinda funny as they were pointing and arguing that they were “ex-pai-yad” and Ed repeatedly retorted that he didn’t care - he really wanted the spring rolls. Ed: I remember an expiration date of 25/9 on the package there… those checkout ladies probably saved you a trip to the hospital dude.
Back on the path to our taxi-catered hotel rooms I foolishly spotted a bar with pool tables. Ed proved to be up to the challenge and, playing rather well really, we battled our way through two alcohol-inspiringly long games. Some farang (probably an English teacher) and a little Thai guy looked like they were going to try to kick eachother’s asses at one point when the tall blonde kid escalated to shouted in the Thai’s face. After hearing about the Thai “face” cultural thing I thought forsure it was gonna be all over for one of them.
This morning I woke up half an hour past the hotel’s check out time. Thereafter I figured out why they have telephones next to the can in some hotel bathrooms when the front desk called me to discuss my lateness.
“I check out at 2 okay?”
“No, you check out at 1!”
“I need half an hour, at least.”
“How much time you need?”
“30 minutes, please?”
“15 minute?”
“Um, no, 30 minutes okay?”
“15 minute?”
“Okay, 15 minutes then.”
I hung up, swigged down a Red Bull, and started the recovery process with a cold-ish 15 minute shower.
Patpong gets its name from the family that owns much of the area’s property, the Patpongpanich (or Patpongpanit), immigrants from Hainan Island, China, who purchased the area in 1946.