Stuff
Scott went to Nana (one of the red light areas) the other day with his friend. His friend has a girlfriend but still spends loads of time in strip clubs, talking to bar girls. Scott said they went to one nice strip club where the girls were pretty and friendly, and then to a bunch of unpleasant ones where the girls seemed sad and beaten-down. Point being: now I know how the bar girls thing works, and I didn't have to take the bus out to Nana to do it. The bars/clubs sell drinks, which are listed on the menu under different prices: "regular" and "lady". If you buy a "lady drink", you're buying it for a bar girl, and she has to sit and chat with you while she drinks it. Lady drinks are about three times as much as regular drinks. In the area surrounding the bar are short-time motels, which cost about $10 for an hour. If you want to take a bar girl to one of the short-time motels, you have to pay the bar 2000 baht or so -- about $60. You also have the option of basically buying out the bar girl's contract, so that she will only have sex with you. You still have to pay for it, but she won't go to the bar and talk to any other men.
I admit, I'm not terribly familiar with the price of sex in other parts of the world, but $60 seems very cheap. I suspect that the girls (or the bars, really) make most of their money on the inflated drink prices, and that the fat old white guys mostly just want to sit in the company of a pretty girl (or lady-boy) for a few hours.
On the subject of fat old white guys, I don't understand the Thai opinions on race. It's seen as high status to be half white. Marrying a white guy is a goal for a lot of Thai women. Schools pay loads of money (by Thai standards) to employ white teachers. So... why don't they have the same attitude about black foreigners? There are plenty of black teachers here. Some schools won't hire them, and some pay them less money than they would a white teacher (I'm told that my school is one of the few that pays black teachers the same as white teachers, though Filipinos make less -- that's a whole 'nother issue). For most Thais, their experience with white people is largely going to be limited to "the fat old white guy who's married to my pretty 25 year old sister", or "the drunk idiots who patronize my store". There are lots of white tourists here making idiots of themselves and setting bad examples. There are almost no black tourists, so the Thai experience with black people is going to be "the university-educated, reasonably wealthy math teacher at my high school", or whatever. Almost all of the black people they know of are wealthy, educated, and have highly respectable jobs. So why the attitude? This is going to change, right? In a few years you'll have a whole generation of kids who had black teachers in school, and they'll start to associate being black with being high status... right?
I had to go to Immigration yesterday for some stupid bureaucratic nonsense. Getting there was relatively easy. One water taxi ride, one bus. Total time: 90 minutes. Total cost: 22 baht (about 60 cents). Getting home was a nightmare, for any number of reasons that I won't get into, but here's the summary: four buses, one Skytrain ride, two taxis, two failed attempts to take the water taxi. Total time: 5 hours. Total cost: 320 baht (about $12). I hate this city.
SyFy is airing back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation every evening. They're in the middle of season 4, which is pretty awesome. Lately we've seen the spooky 'everyone hallucinates because they can't dream' episode ("Night Terrors"), "The Drumhead", "First Contact" (with alien Bebe Neuwirth asking Riker to make love to her), and one where Barclay gets super-smart. On the flip side, yesterday I had to watch a Lwaxanna Troi episode, and then the one where Crusher hooks up with Riker.
I admit, I'm not terribly familiar with the price of sex in other parts of the world, but $60 seems very cheap. I suspect that the girls (or the bars, really) make most of their money on the inflated drink prices, and that the fat old white guys mostly just want to sit in the company of a pretty girl (or lady-boy) for a few hours.
On the subject of fat old white guys, I don't understand the Thai opinions on race. It's seen as high status to be half white. Marrying a white guy is a goal for a lot of Thai women. Schools pay loads of money (by Thai standards) to employ white teachers. So... why don't they have the same attitude about black foreigners? There are plenty of black teachers here. Some schools won't hire them, and some pay them less money than they would a white teacher (I'm told that my school is one of the few that pays black teachers the same as white teachers, though Filipinos make less -- that's a whole 'nother issue). For most Thais, their experience with white people is largely going to be limited to "the fat old white guy who's married to my pretty 25 year old sister", or "the drunk idiots who patronize my store". There are lots of white tourists here making idiots of themselves and setting bad examples. There are almost no black tourists, so the Thai experience with black people is going to be "the university-educated, reasonably wealthy math teacher at my high school", or whatever. Almost all of the black people they know of are wealthy, educated, and have highly respectable jobs. So why the attitude? This is going to change, right? In a few years you'll have a whole generation of kids who had black teachers in school, and they'll start to associate being black with being high status... right?
I had to go to Immigration yesterday for some stupid bureaucratic nonsense. Getting there was relatively easy. One water taxi ride, one bus. Total time: 90 minutes. Total cost: 22 baht (about 60 cents). Getting home was a nightmare, for any number of reasons that I won't get into, but here's the summary: four buses, one Skytrain ride, two taxis, two failed attempts to take the water taxi. Total time: 5 hours. Total cost: 320 baht (about $12). I hate this city.
SyFy is airing back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation every evening. They're in the middle of season 4, which is pretty awesome. Lately we've seen the spooky 'everyone hallucinates because they can't dream' episode ("Night Terrors"), "The Drumhead", "First Contact" (with alien Bebe Neuwirth asking Riker to make love to her), and one where Barclay gets super-smart. On the flip side, yesterday I had to watch a Lwaxanna Troi episode, and then the one where Crusher hooks up with Riker.