Would you like to see a lady boy?
Trip Start
Jun 05, 2008
1
22
38
Trip End
Sep 28, 2008
Bangkok,
Thailand
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Bangkok is a city massive, overwhelming, colorful and for a change of pace, clean. Every skytrain and subway stop goes hand-in-hand with a mall and every bar has dozens of massage parlours in hot pursuit. Skinny tube topped Thai women beckon you for a massage. Fuj and I fall easy victim to the shiny air conditioned skyscraper malls that contain everything from markets to grocery stores to Fendi to Daddy Dough Donut stalls. The gem of our mall experience has been the Bangkok Aquarium located in the basement of the Siam Paragon (pronounced see-yam) Shopping Center (connected by walkways and plazas to its neighboring Siam Center Mall and Siam Discovery Mall and the Siam BTS Skytrain).
Siam Ocean World was by far the greatest aquarium I've been to, even Baltimore! Designed in neon and yellow and purple Thai retro colors, all the tanks seem to glow this awesome trippy color and their selection of displays were phenomenal. We saw creatures of the deep that have yet to be named, baby jellyfish, razor fish that look like pancaked seahorses, giant craps with a wingspan larger than mine, an aptly named Cow Fish, sprightly baby turtles, humphead fish, stone fish that looked exactly like stones, sea otters and of course loveable penguins! We saw the growth stages of living baby sharks in a fake shark egg and even got to hold real shark eggs, sea cucumbers and star fish. The ultimate was the opportunity to dive and swim with sharks in their big fish tank and even get married underwater! Fuj and I contemplated it but decided that the marriage wouldnt legally hold in the US.
Siem Reap 2
We ended w/ a 4-D movie about predatory sea creatures of the past. We put on our 4-d glasses and are thrilled to see a giant sea tutrle is the narrator. However, upon the opening scene the entire theater of children and parents immediately erupts into screaming and crying since a giant hungry eel is right in our faces and about to pounce. Parents with little kids made a mad dash for the exits. We've managed to escape the heat of Bangkok by seeing every English speaking film in the malls including Wall-E, Made of Honor, the Dark Night in IMAX, - everything except the Mummy 4 or whatever. We've learned how much Thais love their king as they wear the same yellow polos w/ a Thai logo on Mondays and stand up for the Thai anthem before every movie in order to honor their king and queen.
We wandered the famed backpacker streets of Khao San and more than exciting it was rather quite disturbing especially to see all these old crotchety foreign men with stick thin beautiful young Thai women. Its the sad side of Thailand's opennness to foreign tourists and investment. And thankfully, a scene we've managed to avoid. Indians, Europeans, everyone seems to flock to Bangkok just to have a pretty girl give them their attention. it's not just in Khao San but throughout the city and while this may help Thailand economy push forward, it disrupts villages and homes as young girls are pulled or sold from their families and forced into a sad sad world where their at the mercy of foreign men with money. We saw this also in a really well done Thai movie that had me bawling throughout the movie called "Where Miracles Happen" about people struggling to provide a village w/ the most endearing children with a school and a safe place for kids while the government is canceling teacher salaries and allowing for the selling of young girls to karaoke bars and "massage parlours."
We changed tempo with a romantic dinner cruise on the Chao Praya River, the main river in Bangkok on which borders tons of awesome beautiful temples and the Imperial Palace and various other old ancient and glittering structures. They're especially beautiful at night when darkness covers all the other buildings and just leaves these golden bedazzled arching roofs of the temples and palaces against a night background. We had the boat photographer snap our picture as an ancient Thai cover performer crooned My Girl and had a fantastic "Thank you, Thank you very much" Elvis impersonation.
The next night for a change of pace to our couple-ness, Fuj and I hit up a Thai Boxing match at the famed Lumpini Stadium just a hop skip and a jump away on the BTS sky train and subway. The fighting is pretty awesome to watch especially from the nosebleed section among budget backpackers and all the yelling Thai men. Our first fight involves a knockout by a Thai fighter in hot pink shorts. The fighters are absolute rippling muscle on 5'4" frames and use kicks, punches, and knee jabs to the kidney to fight. When a crowd favors a certain fighter they yell "knee" or something soundling like that every time their fighter delivers a crippling knee-blow. Fuj and I struggled to discern the point system in these fights and didn't make much progress through the 7 fights we saw that night, as every fighter we predicted to win, walked off in shame. We saw two knockouts. It was both horrifying and exhilirating at the same time.
Comments
Dirty words
You said giant craps AND humphead in the same sentence....hehehe