The Week in Review: Last Edition

Alternative titles I considered for this entry include: “Sex and Violence”, “Shop ‘till You’re Incapacitated”, “Engineering in the New Getting Wasted”, and “Sex and the City”. However, I’ve elected to go with the far less interesting moniker at the top of this page, mostly because it allows me to combine the narratives of all recent events together into one glorious amalgam of a blog entry.

For starters, last Friday. It was my last Friday in the city, and I hadn’t had a chance to go yet, so we hopped in a taxi and said, “Patpong”, at which point the driver just laughed. For those without access to Wikipedia (and oh what a terrible life that would be), Patpong is probably the most notorious red-light district in the world. After the craziness of the strip in Pattaya, I had high expectations for the vast expanse of crudely rendered neon signs. I have to say that I was disappointed. For all the hype, Patpong was nowhere near as nuts as Pattaya. We did, however, still get to gawk at our fair share of older overweight nerdy white guys trying to impress Thai girls half their age. Desperate losers=hilarious.

The next day, Joey and I decided to take in another very Thai tradition that we’d yet to experience: Muay Thai fights. When we got out of the cab, we were immediately assaulted by a large motherly looking figure who asked us in perfect English if we wanted to watch Thai boxing. She had credentials around her neck, so we figured she was pretty legit, plus she was engaging us in this whole transaction in plain view of the ticket sellers and security guards at the stadium. We let her talk us into ringside seats, which we paid for before she put a sticker on each of our shirts, gave us a receipt, and told us to come back in 2 hours. Giving money to sweet talking strangers is always a little dicey, especially when she gives you stickers that are clearly not in Thai, but in Japanese.

We wandered around for a while to kill some time while we both hoped to ourselves that we hadn’t just been taken for a ride. Fortunately, it didn’t turn out to be a scam, though it was a precisely run plan aimed squarely at tourists. Our seats were great, front row right behind the one of the judges, but I’m pretty sure there was not a single Thai person sitting in the section with us. The fights were great though, much more entertaining then any boxing I’ve seen on TV (not much). Muay Thai is much more dynamic, since you’re allowed to strike with your fists, feet, elbows, and knees. Part of me was really looking for the Rocky theme to start blaring when one guy landed the old “flying elbow to the top of the head” maneuver on his opponent who had previously been kicking the krap out of him.

With regards to the title about shopping, I still can’t get over the size of the malls here. On Sunday, and again on Monday, I went to two such establishments, and managed to get thoroughly lost in both of them. I can not for the life of me figure out how all these stores selling essentially the same products don’t drive each other our of business. I could very easily picture a conversation involving a mall worker going like this:

“I work at McDonald’s at MBK”
“Oh really? The one on the 7th floor or the one on the 4th floor?”
“No, the one in the basement”.

Humanity has reached a new low in the realm of fast food, where mall owners don’t want to impose on their shopper by making them go downstairs to the Mickey D’s. Instead, they just build another one on the upper floor.

Lastly, my favorite event of the week happened last night, when two professors and an assortment of grad students decided to have a party in honor of my departure, complete with traditional Thai food staples including pizza, KFC, and prodigious quantities of Singha. I won’t get into the gory details of this event, though I will mention the best line of the evening was when Nai got up to pee by announcing, “I am NOT at steady state!”. For my part, I opened beer bottles with a mallet we had lying around before leading the assembled masses (including my professor) in a rousing rendition of “Boots the Cat”.* Best. Night. Ever.

*I am not making this up.