Bangkok: City of sin

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My last day/night in Bangkok will definitely never be forgotten. After a long ride on a night bus with a squeaky chair, and a good conversation about American politics with a British guy with an Australian accent I was back on Koh San road. We arrived just after 5 am and all was quiet on the little street. The vendors had all been cleared away and construction was underway to set up stages for the Songkran festival. I managed to convince three of the guys off of the night bus to share a hotel room with me (they were only staying until the afternoon when they caught flights to Koh Samui). Once we woke after a four hour nap the festival was in full swing. It was impossible to get more than five steps outside of our hotel room (which was right in the middle of Koh San Road) without getting completely soaked bu waterguns, buckets, water bottles, bowls, and anything else that could be used as a portable reservoir. Everyone was loving it and in the full heat of the day it was wonderful. It was so nice to see Thailand in this relaxed atmosphere, there wasn't a face to be found without a huge grin. After four hours of full on fighting I kind of started to miss the shouts of the vendors. You can walk away from vendors, but you can't get a break from soaking-wet Songkran. The water fight was exhausting as well. After struggling back to the hotel I headed up to the rooftop pool where I met another Canadian named Lee, a friend of the Brits I was sharing the room with. Lee introduced me to JP, a French-Canadian with absolutely no boundaries. We spent the day fighting it out on the streets and in the evening when the waterfight didn't die down we wandered as far away from Koh San Road as we could.
When we arrived back at the hotel and I was getting ready for bed I could hear a woman calling for help from my bathroom. Based on her pleas I could tell that she was a prostitute and that she'd been put in a compromising position, since she was offering money back to the man she was with in exchange for him letting her go, which he was refusing to do. I thought it was coming from the floors above me so I headed up to 6 and checked all of the doors. The only room that had any noise coming from it was full of drunken British girls who apologized for being too loud. I went back to my room and I could still hear the pleading woman crying from somewhere in the hotel. I checked all of the doors on my floor and eventually knocked on the one next to my own room. A naked Thai girl answered and I offered to help her. I locked her in my room and went down to get help from Lee and from reception (reception, I found out, does not help prostitutes). Once I was back on my floor the guy from the room next to me (we'll call him 514) was yelling himself into a fit. I got the Thai girl dressed and we went downstairs to go back to the bar that she was ordered from to hopefully get 514's money back. Out on the street the Thai girl ran away and 514 followed her with a piece of lumber in his hands from the construction that morning. Unable to catch her he rounded back on me, saying that I now owed him the money he had paid to screw this Thai girl. I ran to a 24-hour bar and made a huge scene out of it so that at least people would see and I wouldn't be completely up the creek with no paddle. 514 decided he was going to shoot me and went off to find a gun. Luckily there were some very nice guys from Singapore in the bar who calmed me down and offered to escort me back to my room to grab my stuff and safely get out my hotel room, but before we left 514 came back. To my surprise he was beaten down with pool cues by the bar staff and crawled away. When the guys from Singapore and I finally got my bag from my room 514 was being questioned and later escorted away by the Thai police. It turned out that the Thai girl had ran down the street to the police station and gotten help. Thank God everyone was alright and she was safe. I spent the night sleeping on the cold tile floor of Lees hotel room inadvertently crying into a flip flop I was using as a pillow. I can't believe people can treat each other like this. When you want to have sex with someone and they say no and you still keep trying to force it on them that's called attempted rape, and last time I checked it was illegal and immoral and reserved for the most disgusting of creatures that I'm ashamed to say share the same species as me and all of the other wonderful people in the world. I desperately wanted Andrew around. He always kept me safe and made sure everything was OK, but who was going to keep me safe in Bangkok? I'm an opinionated, fiery girl unafraid to open my mouth when I think somethings not right, but afraid of the consequences. Maybe I'm not meant to travel. I hope not though, because this reality check is a nice wakeup from the naive lifestyle I used to lead where I thought every person was basically good but some people slip up and do bad things. Life is not good and bad or black and white, we're all scales of gray some are just darker shades than others.
The next day Lee and I escaped the chaos of Koh San Road and caught a taxi to the MBK with a woman from Jakarta. We spent the entire day checking out all of the great deals we would surely be missing once we returned to Canada. Lee got a professional haircut and massage for $8 and I got a pair of designer jeans for $18 (I was told I would need warm clothes for the freezing flight to Melbourne). Lee decided that when he comes back to Bangkok to catch his flight home he's going to go on a shopping spree and buy about a thousand dollars worth of stuff. I figure with a thousand dollars you could probably buy everything in the whole shopping complex. I ate one last fantastic Thai meal and then it was off to the airport to head to Australia. After a little trouble with immigration (remember my passport was soaked) I was on my way on a cold plane ride to a warm welcome in Oz.

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Comments

[Colin]

Man, you've had some zany encounters... Reminds me when I was kid staying in a hotel on a family vacation in Spokane and all of a sudden there were cop cars everywhere because some guy had hired a prostitute to babysit his kids or something. Whatever it was, it was strange.