Week 5: Melly Fucking Clismas

So Christmas is done and dusted. Thank fuck. I went to Sydney for about five seconds to see everyone and partake in some festive cheer, Sydney style. Lost my voice completely as a result. Christmas eve eve eve had a long night on the town with Ed, Doc and various other people we will hopefully never see again, Christmas eve eve had dinner with the girls & went to BJ Westfield at 1am to remind myself why I hate people then the next day I drove Aarron to the airport and made it home to mum's for actual Christmas eve before leaving for here again on Christmas day. All the pilots on my flight rolled up dressed as paedophiles in red suits and white beards, which everyone thought was so amazing.

Back in BKK for half a day before heading off on a bus for a two-day work thingy in a beach place called Rayong. Mostly it was just everyone from the office eating, skolling tall glasses of whiskey, singing badly then falling over into bushes. Not enough sleep was had and I was going to head down to Koh Pagngnagngng (or however the fuck you spell it)to meet Jo for NYE but instead I'm staying here and rocking the 'Kok.

At the moment, I'm kind of just writing this to prove Ed wrong about me giving up on my blog after a few weeks cos right now I'm struggling with the concept of coherent words and sentences. I feel like rolling up like a foetus on my bed and sleeping for the rest of the year, so can someone please fire up the smallest violin in the world for me because I'm tired and all partied out. One more day of recovery before NYE, so yay.

See you next year.

Week 4: Deep Dish, more alcohol, ladyboys

Well, it's six-thirty in the evening on Saturday and I've just woken up from three nights of intense drinking. Over the last three days I am reminded repeatedly of Nicolas Cage's death in Leaving Las Vegas and wonder how far off such a fate is for me (minus having sex with Elisabeth Shue. Unless...).

Weds night Jon & I acquired the last thing we need: another drinking buddy (Ed's lovely friend and our soon-to-be housemate Philippa). We visited yet another bar on soi cowboy. Met yet another new thai 'friend' - Bum - one of the girls at Dundee (a Steve Irwin themed titty bar), and ended up hanging out with her for the night. I bought a new camcorder that day and Jon took some gonzo footage of the stagger back to the apartment when cowboy shut - that neither of us can remember him taking. How we managed to figure out a new camera, load a tape into it and record stuff while in that state is a testament to what the human body can acheive while clinically dead. Then there were bits of brocollini all over my room when I woke up some hours later - I think I must have made 'dinner' then rolled around in it before I passed out face down.

Thursday night Deep Dish played at club Astra, who seem to have completely ripped off the artwork for Sounds' Hordern event with the gay rainbow and the plane. Apart from a two-hour soundcheck and early technical fuckups it was really good to hear music without words in it. At the end they played like half a bar of 'Flashdance' - the riff that sounds like Bodyrockers - and just finished like that without playing the whole thing. Everyone was screaming for an encore or for them to at least play the whole fucking track already, but you know what DD are like. They were out of there and back in their five-star apartment blowing coke up one another's arses before the lights even came on. Probably.

Jon had invited Bum to come along, so that was interesting. Not because she's a thai prostitute or that her name is Bum but because she's a thai prostitute called Bum who got super jealous of who he was talking to and dancing with, like THE WHOLE TIME. Plus she was really pissed. And she kept dragging me into toilet cubicles to tell me how much she wanted Jon and oh he don like me and what I dooo and he like the other girl and I so drunk etc etc. That whole scenario just spiralled downwards and flashforward to the end of the night with Jon trying to console her while she's sitting in the gutter, sobbing. Jon's going, 'Bum, Bum, it's OK, I'm tired, I want to go home' and waving 1000 baht in her face, which she tears up into atoms and throws all over soi 23.

Finally we just had to walk away. Later on, Rog and I went back to see if we could piece the 1000 baht back together, but there was a big chunk missing. That was my 1000 baht, too.

Friday night the gang headed to Nana to look at some ladyboys. In Jon's case, replace the words 'look at' with 'ogle and kiss'. Nana plaza is a big mall except where the shops would be there are girly bars. The first bar had lots of amazingly pretty katoeys in - some of them look mind-bogglingly feminine - until they lean forward and show you the bollocks squashed into the backs of their pants OR you take them home, whatever comes first. AND FYI, if not for the bulge you wouldn't know. And don't tell me you would, because you wouldn't. You're not gay for not knowing, so don't freak out and feel funny about me saying this: even the most heterosexual dude would definitely want to sleep with one. Jon 'befriended' one who was really tall and thin and slightly manly in the face. She came to the next two bars with us, but left when shit went pear-shaped.

It's unclear exactly when shit did take on a pear-shaped quality, but it was probably shortly after we arrived at soi Cowboy (henceforth to be known as 'home'). They make these frozen blue kamikaze drinks at this after-hours bar that makes your lips look blue like a corpse's after you've had, oh, about twenty or thirty of them. Which is funny, because I start taking on that appearance after twenty or thirty of anything, and also good because the blue lips nicely complement my yellowing skin and bulbous red nose.

Jon was an excellent source of amusement. He fell over a few times, tipped an entire bottle of water over my head, put on a thai hostesses' strapless bra, ate an entire packet of listerine tab things at once, tried to hit on the mama-san and was periodically subdued by Rog, who does muy thai or whatever and knows how to separate your oesophagus from the rest of you without even moving, apparently. At times I think we sorely tested the management's goodwill, but in the end the thing they were pissed about most was having to mop up the water Jon threw on me. At about 6 o clock we left for the apartment - my blue lips, wet hair and panda eyes were visibly frightening people, we all had minor bruising, Jon made Philippa cry, the ladyboy had fucked off long ago and it was just generally time to stop inflicting ourselves on the public.

I come home to Sydney in three days' time. It will be cooler than the other side of the pillow (I stole that from someone else) to see everyone again. Let's get pissed.

=)

Week 3: Girl pashes were seen as passe...

...but (as the inside cover of my bang gang CD says): fuck it! All the boys are doing it.

And on that note, a recap of the last week(end)

Starting in backwards order, Christie Norwood arrived last night. She's with a uni friend, Harmonie, on their way to some rural town in the north as part of their medical thing they're doing (becoming doctors or whatever). We went to soi cowboy for a few drinks then I had to crash out because those drinks pushed me into triple figures for alcohol units this week and I want to at least make it to Deep Dish on Thursday before my liver is handed over to scientists. Right now the girls are buying bus tickets and seeing wat po, so hopefully we can go out again after I finish 'work' cos they're leaving tonight already (boo!). It's a public holiday today dammit, I shouldn't even be here.

Sat night was a fun and wholesome one. Especially if you replace the word 'fun' with 'drunken' and 'wholesome' with 'unwholesome'. We headed to Q Bar, which is one of those cool, minimal bars where you can never work out how to turn on the bathroom taps. Met up with some dudes from work and liberally applied jelly absinthe shots, tequila and Bangkok-style Bloody Marys to my stomach until thehangoverfromhell turned into being drunk again. At closing time (1am) Jon, Roger and I went to a new place but it was mostly boring, so after harassing the waitress and spilling our drinks all over ourselves and most people around us we went back to ours and did something I'm a little embarrassed to admit to: we played GTA. San Andreas (which, in case you're not a nerd, is a video game) is like our latest fun thing. We're about a year behind the average geek but insert something here about being fashionably late. Jon actually thinks I'm turning into a man, since I: a) get on the playstation every spare waking moment, b) keep getting asked by thai girls if I'm a man (taking this as a compliment) and c) have resorted to snogging girls...

Which reverse-segues nicely into Friday night. Started off respectably enough by going to State Tower which is a posh, Hilton-like deal with rich haughty-looking Germans and high-trousered Japanese oil engineers. The Dome is on the top floor - it's an open deck bar - bling and all smothered in marble and granite with amaaaaaazing views over BKK. Sixty-four flights up is really fucking high – makes you feel all woooooooo when you stand near the edge, which is a chest-high glass wall. In Sydney on the outside deck of AMP tower I think they make you wear five harnasses and you're standing in a big glass cage but in BKK, a building twice as high as Centrepoint, it's cool that they trust you not to fall off. Of course there was a 'no photos' rule, which was sucky but we did sneak some in anyway. There was a wedge of pineapple begging me to be thrown off the side of the tower, but there was also a 'don't throw things off the side' rule and we met some sensible Dutch guys who looked like they might cry if I broke it.

At midnight we asked a cabbie to take us somewhere good, which naturally ended up being his friend's dirty, seedy brothel at the end of a dark soi. Strangely enough, staring at thirty bored prostitutes didn't inspire much joi de vivre, so after one drink we all headed back to base: soi Cowboy. To cut a very long story short, the four of us went into a go-go bar, drank more, Jon convinced me it would be a fun thing to take two girls home and before you know it the Dutch dudes are running as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Everywhere started to shut, so we went home, there was music, drinking, dancing (romancing ain't quite the word) and fast-forward to the morning when we woke up with hangovers and selective memory.

For the record, I only kissed the girls. It was innocent and cathartic and harmless, like Marissa and Alex on the OC. After the novelty wore off I crawled into my room and waited for my bed to stop spinning. Jon's account of the rest of his night remains conspicuously vague, but from what I can piece together the two girls started getting jealous of one another, 'his' left without taking any money and he ended up with 'mine' (the feisty one). And we don't have pictures because in all the excitement Jon sat on his camera and broke it. Maybe next time (there's not going to be a next time).

Photos of State Tower to go on my webshots a/c this week, along with all the other poorly taken photos.
(http://community.webshots.com/album/515134318xdfzyZ)

This week: Jon's birthday @ Deep Dish.

Week 2: We love the nightlife

So this week I checked out a bit of night life and we moved into our apartment, which is like Japanese 80s ad exec style. AWESOME DESU!!


Ping pong and other forms of foreplay
Went to Suan Lum markets which is acres and acres of cheap yet bedazzling crap being bought by farangs. I paid too much for two stuffed elephants (their trunks are up) and a t-shirt I thought was cool but have since seen on some of the local hookers and may therefore have to never wear again.

Also checked out one of the Heineken bars, which was your standard five thousand pissed Thais in a courtyard drinking kegs of beer. We were there with some of the thai dudes from work, who, if you know anything about drunk asians, were pretty funny. The universal truth for the ladies' toilets held true: the one closest to the bar was shut for cleaning (all night) and the only other one was in a distant mall with a 10-girl (and one lady-boy) queue and a pool of vomit out the front.

All the bars and clubs shut at 2am, so after that we had to head underground. And by 'underground' I mean 'bars exclusive to sleazy farang men with their white sweaty sausage fingers all over thai prostitutes'. The 'bar' was in the bottom of an old decrepit building and really did seem just like a brothel, but Roger, our farang colleague and human lonely planet guide to Bangkok, assured us it was OK. Plus it was the only place still selling alcohol, so I didn't really care that I was the only white girl in the whole place, or that I had to pee in the men's room, or that I had to be escorted everywhere. We drank some more and left when Jon started trying to set me up with a prostitute. She actually gave me a reeaaaally good shoulder massage, but not good enough for me to catch the gay.

Bo, our Swedish company CEO, knows everyone in the entire universe, so when we went to soi patpong the next night, we got VIP treatment wherever we went. The sneaky thing about patpong is that there are lots of cool bars with live bands which are completely normal, except for all the ladies/ladyboys of the night. This didn't bother me, due to the lack of b/f and even though the sight of a dorky, ugly white dude with a beautiful thai barely-legal makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, I think, if I could pay $50 and be made to feel like the only person in the room for a whole night, I'd probably do it, too.

The show in the proper strip club was enlightening. It included (but was not limited to) the following things being done with vaginas:

- shooting ping pong balls great distances into a basket
- blowing darts with precision to hit balloons across the room
- smoking a cigarette
- writing on a piece of paper with texta "How Are You?" (Jon still has the piece of paper)
- storing razor blades tied together with string
- opening a beer bottle
- hurling bits of banana at people

After that, we went to another bar which Bo told us had a bunch of super famous Thai pop/rock stars singing in a collective. They were really good, and extremely cool looking people. By that stage I was drunk enough to be dancing around like a jerk right up the front near the stage where all the cool peope could point and laugh at me. Jon was being groped pretty aggressively by one of the Thai 'girls' and Roger was deliberately 'dancing' into people to make them clear the floor. Proud ambassadors for obnoxious drunk white people all over the world!! Later, Jon told me the aggressive girl tried to stick her finger up his bum and also grabbed his hand and put it on Roger's crotch, comfirming my suspicious that she was a dude.

That about wraps it up. Everyone has headcolds after all the partying but I'm OK. This week we're working hard and will probably let off some steam at Soi Cowboy (the neon go-go dancer street like 5 min walk from our home) or Bed Bar or Q Bar – somewhere with more farangs and where, as Jon put it, I'll be popular again.

Pictures of apartment & work:

http://community.webshots.com/album/515134318xdfzyZ

No pics of patpong tho - it's not allowed!!