Day Three

My new friends friend arrived. Upon which I thought initially that I would be alone again. Luckily, however, they invited me to spend the day with them. I was relieved.

It was at times akward. Perhaps a short description of their relationship is in order: Two women who have known eachother for sometime. They are both from Twin Falls, Idaho. The most important detail though is that this meeting was the first time in nearly two years that they have seen each other. The second one, Victoria, has been in the Peace Core in Kyrgyzstan for that time, and has come here on Vaction to hang out with her friend. Needless to say, they had a lot of catching up to do. I know quite a bit about the social network of middle twenty somethings in Twin Falls now. I felt a bit out of place. But most of this chatting occured at a place called Larry's Dive, which is probably one of the only Mexican Restaurants in all of Bangkok. The food was good, so I was happy.

But they are both very kind, and never once did they make me feel as though I were in their way.

So then more fun. I have had enough experience with this in my life that it is strangely relieving: we went shopping. Or rather, they shopped and I followed. The markets here are giant. And everything is really cheap.

Two things first. The only real chain store in Thailand is 7-11. They are everywhere and the are air conditioned and have really cheap water, so they are very useful. Secondly, nearly every place that is flat has some vendor on it. So accross the street from the hostel is a 7-11, and surrounding that are stree vendors. Mostly food. Well, they wanted to get some food. So we found a place, and this extrodinary man who owned the place started to chat with us. His english was very good, and he was wearing a navy hat. He was in his mid 60's I would guess. So I immediately thought that he must have spent some time in the military, probably during Viet-nam. As his story unfolded, and as he proudly showed off his Social Security card, and FCC radio operating cards, he let it be known that he had flown for Air America, the private airline secretly owned by the CIA that delivered supplies to the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia during the Viet-Nam war. He was very kind, and interesting.

Later that evening we went out to the Sukhumvit area of Bangkok to find some bars. I should have known better. Somewhere I had read that this area was frequented by sex tourists, and that we should have gone to the Backpacker area where there would be people our age. So in this area there are prostitutes everywhere, and middle aged white men. The first bar we tried to go in was this area down an alley with all kinds of pretty lights. We were whisked up an elevator into a balcony area. The elevator only went up, so we had to walk all around. The first door up the escalator, some people tried to push us into, and as they opened the door, we saw, to our surprise, mostly naked women dancing. We all took a step back, and gasped. Not what we were expecting. So we had to walk all the way around this balcony area, every few feet a door opening with the same thing. At one point a prostitue grabbed my arm and tried to pull me in. It was frightening. Some of them were poorly disguised males. They even grabbed one of my companions, who is female. We left there berwildered, but found a very nice bar on a rooftop with only a few prostitutes entertaining a couple of men, very laid back in comparison. That wasn't the end of it though, as we were walking off of that street some strange women walking by stuck her hand out and tickled my stomach. I also thought prostitution exploited women, but here I felt objectified and uncomfortable, not the other way around.