Back in Thailand now after more than two weeks of travel in Cambodia and China. There is much to tell about those trips but first-

I want to tell the honest story of my time in South-East Asia. So it wouldn't be complete without a story of the sex show that I saw in Pattaya a few weeks ago. But I will preface it with some background on the sex industry in Thailand.

After living Pattaya I am extremely critical of the prostitution industry. It feels predatory, like all these gross old men are using their wealth to take advantage of young women. I also feel uncomfortable around such blatant objectification. Sex and obscenity are paraded around Walking Street and Beach Road in a numbing profusion.

But I have learned something about the Thai perspective since I arrived, after talking to some former bargirls who work at Languagecorps and also doing some reading on my own. Many of the girls move to Pattaya from the north-eastern provinces, an area known as Esarn and comparable to rural Appalachia in the US. At as young as 15 they can quickly make huge sums of money, most of which they mail home to support their family. They come and live above a bar with the other dancers in a strange sorority. They learn rudimentary English, how to smoke a cigarette, and the art wrapping men around their finger. What they are really looking for is someone who will support them for the rest of their life. Ideally the bargirl will find a farang who falls in love with her, someone who even after he leaves Thailand will continue to send checks. Some men never really believe the girl is a prostitute; they just pay for her apartment and food and for her family's tractor repairs.

Sex is not given such a sacred treatment as it is in Western culture. I have heard it compared to scratching an itch. From the Thai point of view the girls are the ones doing the exploitation. It is they who are taking advantage of the weak-willed, wealthy farangs for their own gain. There is a legend of the "Swedish village" in eastern Thailand where several enterprising bargirls built themselves mansions for themselves and their families, all funded by a group of Swedish sex tourists.

This doesn't make what happens acceptable to me, for it can still be dangerous and traumatic business and one that a 16 year old should never even know about. However, I feel humbled to have my cultural assumptions put into perspective.

So our randy Languagecorps teacher took us out to a sex show, claiming it was a part of Pattaya that we couldn't miss out on. It was on the second floor of a bar on Walking Street, somewhat calmer than the frenzied beer bars that border the street.

The first thing I noticed was that the crowd was not all men, but largely couples and mixed-gender groups. The crowd felt more like an audience than a pack of wolves. The show was as raunchy as I had expected, but I was surprised by its gaudy glamor. In between acts like Popping Balloons with Darts Shot from Vagina a team of ladyboys pranced out and did lipsynch to 80s hits. There were five of them, bedecked with rhinestones and animal print thongs and I could just picture them up late practicing their choreography while one of them worked a sewing machine, adding ruffles to their matching skirts.

The show had the low-budget charm of a travelling vaudeville act or a Wild West burlesque hour. The same few girls came out over and over in different costumes and inserted and popped and squeezed a veritable buffet of food and drink with their vaginas. If it had been printed on a piece of broadsheet with exciting fonts about 100 years ago, this is how I imagine some of the acts would have been described.

Smoking Cigarette with Vagina!
Opening Coke Bottle with Vagina!
Blowing Out Birthday Candles with Vagina!
Putting Egg in Vagina, Slamming Body to Floor, Removing Unbroken Egg!

The crowd gasped and shouted encouragement at the right times. They ate and drank in their seats and yelled at the girls and the girls yelled right back. Props failed and costumes got caught in fans, but that was all part of the low-budget nature of the show. It was like a body tricks talent night with a focus on the crotch. It tied together for me a lot of the stunning inconsistencies I see sometimes in Thai culture- the effortless blend of high and low culture, of seriousness and hilarity, and of sexuality and everyday occurance.

Chiang Mai

Languagecorps took a trip this weekend up to Chiang Mai, via overnight train. I liked the experience of travelling under the cover of darkness, sleeping in a tiny room with three strangers. It felt equal parts Some Like it Hot and Murder on the Orient Express.

I was relieved to see that not all of Thailand is as seedy as Pattaya. Prices there were a shade more expensive, which I imagine go hand in hand with the streets not smelling like feces. The Thais were a little less aggressive and a little more self-confident. I sensed that this was because they were living lives that depended less directly on the tourist dollar. I ate lunch at a place where I had a hard time communicating my wants and ended up with liver soup. But given the choice I'd rather eat at a place where I'm ignored than where my every need is catered to hungrily. I felt a little more independent there, as if my trip was less defined by stereotypical tourist traps. There were of course hundreds of tourists in the city but the farang-Thai experience seems a little more casual, more human. I am thinking seriously of moving up there in mid-December to look for work. There several universities in the city and several libraries and museums too, so I would not be starved for culture.

My favorite part of the trip was a night excursion that we made almost on a whim. We had been told by someone in Pattaya to look into the Royal Flower Celebration while we were up in Chiang Mai. We asked around and discovered that the celebration was 8 km outside of the city. Confused, we hired a songtauw to bring us out there. The celebration was larger than I could possibly have imagined. The space took up many acres, like the size of an amusement park, all in celebration of this, the King's 60th year on the throne. And the entire thing was for flowers. Great sculpted fields of flowers planted so as to spell out Chiang Mai, or Long Live the King. Some thirty countries entered the show with pavillions celebrating their agricultural heritage. As many corporations had exhibits on the future of farming, bioengineering and food. All together it looked something like an agricultural World's Fair. In the center of the park was a giant temple and a massive photo of the king, wearing his signature coke-bottle glasses.

The thing that boggled my mind about it was the number of people there. In my estimation there might have been as many as 50,000 people and possibly many more. And more surprising, almost every single one was Thai. The popular clothing this year is a yellow polo shirt with the king's insignia on the breast pocket. A good two thirds of the crowd was wearing these lucky shirts.

Becky and I went wandering around the park, and got lost in the back near the rubber tree farm. There were few lights, but we heard music. I thought it was live music, because after all this park had restaurants, an art gallery, and a theater. Why not. So we pushed through the trees and stumbled on the park's daycare center. Only it was 8 PM and about 8 of the park employees had taken it over for an impromptu karaoke session. They had set up the monitor on the train set and the singer was dancing around a pile of building blocks. They called us over and before we knew it we were singing the Eagles with them. I beat out a rhythm on a toy xylophone while another guy drummed on a dollhouse. They glanced around occassionally and I imagined that if their boss had found them they might have been in some trouble. On the other hand karaoke is such an obsession here their boss was probably the one shoving the microphone in my face, telling me to sing backup for him on Hotel California.

The Art of Traffic

Known to foreigners as baht buses, songtauw serve as Pattaya’s primary means of public transportation. These modified pick-up trucks run a proscribed route through the city, and you can flag any one down and ride it through all the major streets.

The name songtauw refers to the two benches running lengthwise in the bed of the pickup. Passengers sit on the benches covered by a metal awning that is wired with several doorbells. When you are ready to get off you simply push the button and a bell rings in the cabin of the truck. The driver pulls over to the side of the street and you put 10 baht into his hand- about 30 cents.

I go to my practice teaching job at Pattaya Memorial Hospital at 3:30 in the afternoon. The baht buses that come by are going downtown filled with uniformed kids just out of school, hookers just woken up and still adjusting their makeup, and sweaty old expats heading down to the beach for an early happy hour. I do my best to flag down one that is almost full but not quite. If you pick the right one, all the seats will be taken. The only option then is to cling to the back, standing on the metal bar that old women use to step up into the truck. And if the ride is meant to be a truly great one, the songtauw will have a metal rail that wraps around its sides and back. Then you can lean against it and feel like the traffic is all around you.

There is an art to pretending that the Brownian motion of Pattaya traffic does not promise a collision at each blink. I am learning this composure from a girl who rides sidesaddle on the back of a moped, holding a cell phone to her boyfriend’s ear while he drives. And I discovered from the street vendors who run back and forth across the busiest streets, pick your line and hold to it, and traffic will work around you.

So when I’m leaning off the back of the baht bus, watching the pavement under my shoes and the roiling wake of mopeds behind me, I can now lean back against the railing, canted against the movement of the truck, and rest my hands behind my head in a picture of calm. I’m not in the full lotus position but I think of Buddha anyway, the standout example of composure around these parts.

Cultural Literacy

Last weekend was Loy Krathong, a traditional Thai festival where they weave rafts out of banana leaves and float them out to sea in the evening. The krathong (raft) is covered in flowers and garnished with a candle and a few baht coins. As it floats away you are meant to let go of the bad things from the past year and think good thoughts for the future.

I came back to Languagecorps the day of Loy Krathong to find some of the girls who work at the bar making their own krathongs. I managed to communicate my curiosity and they invited me to make my own, a "farang krathong" if you will. I and another Languagecorps student Joe sat down to create our masterpiece together. It came out rather lopsided, with a layer of folded banana leaves, a layer of flowers, and then a second tier of folded leaves with the candle and some insense. I thought it had a certain naive panache. Joe described it as "when you hit a grand slam on your first at-bat." We were very proud of it, but the girls kept laughing at us when we tried to talk to them. They finally took a picture of us with our krathong, and Joe the surfer flashed the hang-loose thumb and pinky wave. This made the girls laugh even harder.

We went to beach and floated it away, which would have been peaceful if there hadn't been several thousand tourists doing it at the same time, and setting firecrackers off in the process. It felt like a warzone. Some kind of kratongs are actually plastic bags tied to sterno cans that lifted off the ground like hot air balloons. Those were particularly dangerous when they caught fire several hundred feet in the air and then began to descend into the street.

Anyway, the next day in Thai class our teacher Jam taught us, at our request, some Thai slang and some words about Loy Krathong. To my great embarassment I discovered that the word for banana (gluay) is just a tone mark away from the word for the male member. All the time while making my krathong I had asked for more banana leaves and the girls had giggled uncontrollably. Bow I suspected why. Also, I discovered, I had been using the word for transvestite- kathoey- and krathong interchangeably. And to top it all off, Joe's hang-loose hand in the girl's photo in Thai signaled water buffalo horns- extreme stupidity. Not the smooth assimilation into Thai culture that we imagined it to be.

The karaoke bar behind my apartment burned down the other night. At around 11:30 I heard singing and laughing from my room, which all of a sudden got louder. I assumed the party was just picking up steam until I heard shouts and screams. I went to the window and saw flames. I didn't know how much trust to put in the Pattaya Fire Department. If the fire got bigger, I thought, it could easily jump from the tree over the bar to the tree behind the Language Corps building. So I filled my backpack with irreplaceables and went up to the roof to watch. Eventually the firemen came and put out the fire. One of the bargirls on my street told me the next morning that the fire had started when a lantern was knocked loose and spilled on a wall. The flames quickly reached a propane tank, which exploded. Amazingly, nobody was hurt.