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Published: December 23rd 2006
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Living in Seattle for the last six years or so, I was involved in many short-lived group living situations, through the course of which I probably accumulated a list of around 30 former roommates. One of these roommates was Ed Bannick.
Ed and I lived together in a couple of different spots, and he ended up being one of my all-time favorite people to live with. He's got an unstoppable sense of humor, making corny jokes turn out funny and surprising everyone with genuinely hilarious summer-camp pranks.
One of Ed's recurring jokes begins by asking, "Hey Nic, what's the capitol of Thailand?"
"Huh?"
And then he slaps me in the junk and shouts, "Bangkok!"
He'd usually do this while I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, with a hot pan in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, hence the, "huh?" He might get the other guys when they came home too, causing many beers to wind up splashed all over the floor.
Anyway, I think this is funny because I'm here now, in Bangkok, again. It's also funny to me because no Thai person would ever get that joke: they call the
capitol Krung Thep, and they think a "cock" is a rooster.
Rendezvous Initially we had four reasons to come to the capitol on the 20th and 21st, then our roommate Poni's sister missed her flight from Nairobi and we only had three.
1. Chelly and I needed to inquire into travel options for our trip to Greece. We must leave the country in the first week of January, so we also had to learn what we could at a few embassies.
2. Su-Au Hwang, a German friend I made on my first visit to Bangkok--nearly three months ago--was going to be in town for one day before moving on to the south of Thailand and the Andaman peninsula. I figured it would be great to see him and that he'd like to meet the girls.
3. Another friend from Seattle, Gary Yetter, was also coming to Bangkok briefly on those same days. We'd initially planned this whole crazy trip together, but decided we'd be better on our own. Somehow, we'd each been in the same region for two months now and hadn't met up, so we'd get together here.
Of course, there's always
a lot of partying and shopping to do in Bangkok. We'd have to take advantage of those opportunities as well.
Bodyguard One of the most interesting parts about walking around Bangkok with two pretty Kenyans is having to play bodyguard. The girls become the objects of many lustful stares and thoroughly-creepy advances. I'm told a couple dozen times a day that I, "have two very beautiful girls, you are a lucky man." I have to always be watching out for their safety and my own. It can get annoying.
There was a middle-aged sex tourist that Scott from Kansas City and I met on the plane out of Taiwan. He'd been to Thailand many times and was something of an uber-John. He warned us of the mindset of many single young men who've spent a short time in this country. He said they get overly horny and lose all restraint and start going after every girl they see--including schoolgirls and other guys' girlfriends--as if they were prostitutes.
Probably the best example of this I've seen so far was in this pair of guys we saw in Pattaya and again in Bangkok (about 4 different times).
Chelly on the bus
(This trip was filled with positive expectation and joy) I call them "the Clones".
The Clones are a pair that could only have come from America. The last time we saw them, they each had on baggy red pants of the exact matching hue, with identical baggy white t-shirts, and the same New Balance shoes. They have bone-shaved heads, fake-tough-guy scowls, gym-rat benchpress muscles, and one or two bad tattoos on their forearms. They always look like they came out of a Xerox machine.
And every time we walk past them on a busy street, they give the girls these leering, carnivorous looks, as if they'd never seen them before and they'd really like to devour them.
The first couple times, I just laughed. This is normal behavior in red light Pattaya. But after the same thing twice in Bangkok, the girls felt offended. I tried for stern eye contact the next couple times, and even blurted, "dude, come on!". The Clones were oblivious.
Chelly and I ended up seated outside a cafe, talking with Gary and the two girls he was travelling with. We told them the story about the Clones. When we were all getting up to leave, I saw them again. They
were scoping Chelly as they passed in the opposite direction. I told the girls, "speak of the devil". We all looked back at these guys in their matching red pants, white tees, bald heads, inflated Lats, and running shoes. And everyone had a good, loud laugh there in the street.
It was pretty funny, but funnier was the night before when Poni got really drunk and just started talking to strangers. Sober earlier, she'd been afraid of the innocent advances of a black Frenchman with bad teeth. With booze in her, she was saying "hi" to street hookers and trying to joke with the stern, fatigue-clad, machine gun toting army troops there to regulate them.
A guy followed us down the nearly-empty Khao San for way too long. He said to the girls, "you look like you need to be rescued" (from me). Poni told him he was gonna need to be rescued.
I might have had to fight him, but we were all laughing too hard. Seeing that he was not taken seriously, he went on his way.
We're Going to India! Faithful readers will know that Chelly and I have been indecisive
about where the next phase of our journey might take us. We've been looking at the train route through China, Mongolia, and Russia. We've also been thinking about boat-hopping and railroading along the Indian Ocean and subcontinent.
The northern route sounded easy and gorgeous and romantic, but we couldn't stop making jokes about Roti and Tandoor, eating Indian food at every opportunity, and repeating lines from "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" like, "do I look like a turban guy?"
We'd told Su-Au about our notions, and then--while walking down an alleyway--he spotted a sign for plane tickets to India at only 5,750 baht (about $160 US). We jumped at it, got more info, and bought them on the spot.
This meant that we now only had one embassy to visit, opening our night up for more reveling and our morning up for more recovery. We posed for some new, awful passport photos and got a great taxi driver who sped us over to the Indian embassy in no time flat. My visa research has revealed that the entire world is engaged in a conspiracy to keep poor Americans from travelling beyond their own borders (China charges US citizens
double the visa fee of the rest of the world, and India adds a steep surcharge only for us, many other countries have similar policies), but I figured this route would take us across less borders and save all that hassle.
We paid for our visas, picked up our tickets, and somehow managed not to talk in our silly Apu accents in the presence of any East Indians.
We fly on the 4th.
Back to Sriracha We had a lot of mix-ups, but I managed to send about two hours each with my two friends. Su-Au was waiting for me at the MyHouse Guesthouse from 9am, but our late arrival to Bangkok and our two-hour taxi ride across it got me there around 2:30. We had good conversation, though, and he was off to Krabi by 5:00. Gary and I had been trying to plan by email. I also sent him Chelly's phone number, but he never got it. Somehow, we were both concurrently occupying the same small neighborhood for around 20 hours before we ran into one another on the street. We got our groups together and chatted for a bit, then his team
headed to the bars and mine headed east to our home.
This last taxi ride was awful, and the legendary Bangkok pollution hit us hard. Poor road conditions couldn't have helped, or blasting AC, not to mention our lack of sleep, or the effects of the previous night's libations. We all ended up feeling badly ill. Poni puked in a bag.
So we were headed home after a really great time, but incomparably eager for it to end.
And that was my third trip to Bangkok.
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