Last Days of Thailand

My last days in Thailand are quite a blur. This is probably a good thing given that I would like to forget a lot of what transpired.

All in all though, I will miss Thailand. I must say that I think I really hit my stride in the final weekend/week. I bought a basketball and balled with the local Bangkokians, finally feeling more at home and not just like some guest in a hotel. My Thai and game spitting ability to Thai girls who speak very little english peaked. I basically got to the point where Thai people believed I spoke Thai and that I was lying to them when I said I couldn't. I even went on a date with a Thai girl who didn't speak English and it was enjoyable. I still felt a little like I was hanging out with a crow but at least this crow could show me around her nest. Pun intended. If crows actually have nests...

I am still trying to piece together the final night in Bangkok. I will probably have to write a separate blog about it, since it is quite blogworthy. However, I will say now that it ended in me getting maybe 30 minutes of sleep and leaving for the airport very late for my flight...I spent the first half of my 10 hour flight to Helsinki in a drunken sleep. Then I woke up, ate, popped a xanzibar and spent the rest of the flight drooling on my shoulder. As luck would have it I sat directly next to a really hot Finnish girl who wanted nothing to do with me and the alcohol seeping out of my pores.

Anyway, I have arrived in Amsterdam and it is nothing like Bangkok. I feel like I'm living in the countryside. If the countryside had a faint smell of weed and a lot of extremely tall people riding bikes everywhere.

I live in an apartment on a street called Plantage Muidergracht. It is just down the street from the Artis Zoo and the Waterloopen. Just a stones throw away from Stadhouderskade and Utrechtsestraat. I hear it is really quite a lovely place to live. Much better than Spiegelkwartier.

PS - names of things here are hilarious.

Lazy Post

Good Links that I have come across recently:
http://help.com/post/124066-funny-metaphors-used-in-high-school

http://www.kottke.org/08/08/good-brendan-fraser-movies
Note: this is wildly inaccurate as neither Encino Man nor Airheads are mentioned

http://www.rooshv.com/2008/my-philosophy-on-life

http://withleather.uproxx.com/post.phtml?pk=6567

And my favorite:



PS get these albums if you don't already have them:
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

I am counting down the days to Amsterdam...

Thai Girl Names

Try to get excited saying these names in the bedroom:

Chuliporn
Suleeporn
Wanida
Poo
Poon
Picnic
Gun
Punch
Tanyarat
Fone
Nam
Lek
Toi

These are just names I remember off the top of my head. There are more. Luckily for them, Thai girls are much hotter than their names.

Oh yeah, I ran into the Thai girl version of Jay Leno the other night at the bar.

But seriously. Thai chicks and Asian girls in general are hot. I think I have a bad case of the yellow fever. I am convinced the only cure will be to visit my colleagues in Sweden next round.

Another Vacation

I need another vacation. I'm going to Ko Samui for my 4 day weekend of Buddhist Lent.

Ko Phan Ngan is a short boat ride away and there is a Full Moon Party on Saturday night. This should be interesting. Hopefully not in a "watch the dirty hippy backpackers and laugh at them" sort of way.

Cambodia - Night Post

A note upfront: I do not have any pictures of our night out as I was afraid to bring my camera out on the mean streets of Phnom Penh. All details of this story can be corroborated by clicking on the links below

After being sufficiently freaked out during the day by the general goings on in Cambodia for the past 40 odd years, my travel partner and I decided to hit the nightlife of Phnom Penh. First we went to grab dinner. We figured the best place to avoid mayhem would be to hit the Sisowath Quay riverfront area since we thought at the time that it was the "backpacker area".

This attempt at normalcy was thwarted within the first 5 minutes of sitting down out front of a restaurant. Little Cambodian street kids approached me first one by one, then two by two tapping my shoulder and giving their best English sales pitches to me on why I should buy their books/cds etc. These usually consisted of me saying "no" and them saying "why no?" I did what I usually do to people on the streets in Thailand which was fuck with them and try to make them laugh, however, these kids did not seem interested in any of this. Although I did play bloody knuckles with one little Camblette.*

This exchange melted my icy heart for a nano-second and I decided to do one thing nice by attempting to buy him an orange soda. When the waiter looked at me like I was bat-shit insane my heart iced over again and I told the kid to get lost.

After being bothered throughout dinner we decided to change venues and get hammered drunk. We went down the road and picked another place a block away from the river. This proved to be very dull with the only company outside of sex tourists to talk to being the many waitresses standing around doing nothing. We asked where "people like us" go - code word for vanilla face backpackers - but they kept saying "here". I guess we looked more like a couple of up-and-coming sex tourists.

We chilled there for a few more minutes while my travel partner sucked down a few Manhattans (see linked picture but gay it up by about 50%), then packed up and headed out to find another bar. Our luck turned at the next place where we met quite a few colorful characters. Of note was a guy who, no joke, when asked what he did, said "oh I'm just into some videos nowadays."

Given our choices, we continued on the theme of flirting with the only girls around - the excessive amount of bartenders and waitresses with nothing to do. At this place with pedophile Pete we met a nice Cambina** who was taken by our exotic white skin. Since there was no luck finding normal friends we decided to strike a deal with her to call her friend and take us out after her shift ended. We left the bar thinking this was a good backup plan if we found nothing else of interest.

At the next bar we got more of the same pattern. This one was particularly noteworthy though as sex tourists and vanilla face older guys came into the bar to play chess against the bar girls. After we ran our joke of being from the Philippines into the ground and the girls got busy with their sex tourist chess games, we decided the backup plan was the best way to go.

We went back to the bar with the Cambina who was able to get off early to take us out. Unfortunately her friend was not available so we rolled to the bar looking like a couple of backpacker sex tourists on a serious budget.

We arrived at the place the Cambina wanted to take us only to find it was closed. So we did the next logical thing and went to "street 51" where we found Phnom Penh's version of Spicy, called "Heart of Darkness." In true Cambodian style, this place was at least 10 times creepier than Spicy and Apocalypse Now. It was painted all red and black and was filled with "taxi ladies" (Cambodian hos) and large African immigrants. This is where I would like to insert a joke about AIDS, but as my friend told me after getting back from Phnom Penh, not even AIDS would go there. HIIOOOO.

So after arriving there as three we got some drinks and did some dancing. I did not get in any dance offs 1) because I would probably be put to shame by my superior darker skinned brothers, and 2) for fear of smudging a large man's Puma. While myself and the Cambina danced, my travel partner went off and experienced one of the oddest coincidences I have heard of in a while.

After about an hour of hard drinking and trying to discern if this Cambina was a taxi lady or not,*** I decided to figure it out once and for all. In conclusion I made a new friend who is not a taxi lady.

Cambodia was not so creepy after all.


* not actually short for a child from Cambodia
** not actually short for a girl from Cambodia
*** It is not recommended that vanilla face backpackers combine booze and judgment of who is, and who is not, a prostitute in SE Asia

Vacation Time

I'm going to Krabi this weekend. It's in the south of Thailand and it looks sweet. Check it and be jealous.

Part two of Cambodia will come after I rest.

Cambodia - Day Post

I arrived in Cambodia very early in the morning of the 5th of July. I am counting it as my 4th of July celebration since I did not sleep the night before...or the night of the 5th. But that is a different story (blog post).

Basically the best way I can describe Cambodia would be with phrase/title of Conrad's literary classic "The Heart of Darkness"...which coincidentally was the name of a bar we went to on our one night in Cambo. There is definitely an eerie feeling in the air and speaking as a vanilla face backpacker, I can say that I constantly felt like I was a mark for some scam...whether that is true or not I have no clue. I guess I'll find out in 9 months...just kidding.

After going through customs which charged $20 USD (or 1000 THB [$30 USD] in my case because I was too drunk from the night before to bother changing money to the "official" currency of USD...it's actually riel but almost no Asian country uses its own currency), I sat on a bench and waited for my buddy to arrive from Singapore.

We met up and walked out into the light of day of Phnom Penh. As is the case in all South East Asian countries, we immediately had 40 taxi drivers asking us where we were going. We finally settled on a taxi driver when we decided we weren't going to find a better deal and headed off into the wild city of Phnom Penh...

Or so we thought. Our taxi driver ended up speaking English and offered to take us on a tour and to the shooting range. It took us about 2 seconds to give in. So we headed off to the shooting range at 9:30AM...Keep in mind I was still feeling quite drunk at this point. On the way there our taxi driver told us that if we wanted we could shoot chickens or cows for a price. Apparently though, it is cheaper to go to the market and buy a chicken there. BYOC.

We got to the shooting range and chose to shoot the classic AK-47 from their exquisite gun menu seen below:It cost $50 for a magazine which had 30 bullets in it. Since we chose the automatic AK this took roughly 7 seconds to go through. For this 7 seconds we went into a shady ass building that looked straight out of some stage from 007 for N64 and proceeded to shoot a very loud gun. An aside: the guy in the video spoke very softly and bore an exact resemblance to the creepy Nam vet in The Simpsons. He kept asking us if we wanted to shoot a rocket launcher for $500...It was kind of tempting.

Instead we took some still shots as you can see above and dipped out. All in all it was cool but I felt a like I could have spent $50 better...or at least taken longer to spend it.

From there we went to the center of the city and found a place to stay. After throwing our stuff down we were ready to take Cambodeezy like a batch of crazy American devils...but we were not really sure what to do. So we did what all vanilla face backpackers do and caught a tuk tuk to "the killing fields."
We stopped at this gas station on the way to fill up. They had these on every corner.
The Killing Fields are where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge slaughtered a few million Cambodians. All of the divots in the ground in this picture are where mass graves were uncovered during the 80s and 90s.

For some reason Pol Pot and his band of geniuses, all obviously possessing Mensa-like intellect, decided that they didn't like the direction Cambodia was headed in. So they decided a good idea would be to start Cambodian society over again their way. They rounded up all intellectuals, foreigners, people with money, and basically all of those who were established, in charge, and smart (or some combination of those), and tortured and killed them. The aim apparently was to bring Cambodian society back to "year zero" and start it over as a peasant/farming society. Well played gentlemen.

Of course I don't have to tell you that this plan obviously worked to perfection and Cambodia is now taking the lead on the world stage nowadays...er shit...they are now, by my calculations, at year 25ish. So they have a few thousand years of catching up to do. It shows.

The result of the shitstorm that occurred in Cambodia is that there has been a lot of war and poverty since the Khmer Rouge. There actually might have been some of that shit before, but I doubt as bad.

Suspected land mine explosion area...or maybe a place where they removed one.
This is the tuk tuk we took...took...to the killing fields. That is probably inappropriate.
These are the baller ass tuk tuks taunting our poor choice of tuk tuk.

After the Killing Fields we hit up an old school that was turned into a prison during the reign of Pol Pot to torture victims before taking them to be slaughtered at the killing fields.

You can imagine that this put us in the right frame of mind have a great night out on the town...so we headed home and got ready for just that.