where cider meets condensed milk: Leaving Las Phuket Vegas

where cider meets condensed milk

Monday, January 22, 2007

Leaving Las Phuket Vegas

Annabelle's Asia Tour 2006 brought you by... Woodinville Starbucks, where the macchiatos are perfect and the faux-homeless men congregate. This Thai tour now finishes in... Patong Beach Starbucks, where the lattes taste burned and the Thai rent-a-girlfriends congregate and glare at their ill-mannered European "boyfriends".

We spent very little time in Phuket: long enough to eat last-chance pizza, to drink mediocre Starbucks, to get a mani-pedi, to glance at the masses on the beach, and to fly out as fast as we could. The "massage" parlors are quasi-legit, in that you can get an actual massage in most of them, and it's standard in any type of beauty parlor. Some is completely legit, some of it is dirty, and usually it's all going on in the same place. I didn't get any massages because I don't like strangers touching me, but I'd be unsure about things if I were a guy. If you are in a place such as Phuket or Pattaya, chances are much higher that more of the business is of the non-innocent kind. You can make guesses based on how seductive and aggressive the girls are that work there are acting, but who really knows.

The nail parlor where we went was very clean and nice and they all had certifications on the wall. Per usual, they also offer massages. A lady came in for a massage, and disappeared upstairs with one of the girls. Her boyfriend sat beside us for a foot massage in the main area. After that 2 dirty old Japanese men came in and started hassling for their "massage." It was so creepy to be in the room and realize that they were buying sex, while I was sitting in a chair watching ER and having my toenails made pretty. Only one of them spoke some broken English, and they were both clearly drunk in the middle of the afternoon. They told the woman they were from Korea, but I could understand a lot of what they were saying. The older woman in charge brought them a separate price menu, which was about 5x what the most expensive listed massage was. She was arguing with them a bit, and one of the younger girls came in to be inspected, but they dismissed her, one saying to the other "She isn't cute!". They kept asking for discounts and gesturing lewdly and snickering. Oh, those cheap bastards... you know they'll get off the plane in Japan and pay $200 for a train home, but they're hassling and haggling over $40 to exploit some poor Thai girl. As soon as they were taken to a room by an angrier and sufficiently cute masseuse, the woman just looked really pissed off. We told her that they were speaking Japanese (not Korean), and she just shook her head and seemed really defeated. It was probably the most depressing moment of the day. My toenails were a beautiful shade of red, if tinged a bit with shame.

Flying high on the AirAsia discount skies! I flew straight home from Bangkok, got back to my aparto the next morning, and was at my desk at school by lunchtime, looking and feeling like hell. Annabelle flew to Japan a few days later. The morning she arrived, I was awoken by a call from Kansai Airport security, asking for my address and phone number on her behalf. I was worried they hadn't granted her a visa, or that customs had discovered the orphan in her carry-on. ("Welcome to Kansai airport, gaikoku scum... drug-sniffing dogs are now being released into the luggage area...") Nope, they just stopped her at quarantine for no reason, and then let her pass on through once I had vouched for her. Hahahah... little do they know about the intestinal party she picked up while volunteering at the Mother Teresa home in India. Suckers! Wait... that's my name on the form if she really is carrying the plague...

posted by Raychaa @ 5:48 PM

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