The Newest Musing:
Brief Thailand Observations
Part 5 Alone
1. We finally depart from the maternal embrace of the Collette Travel group. Gone are preapproved, grade-A, hotel rooms complete with massive buffet gorging. Some enjoyable features of the new rooms include: Air conditioners that vibrate like an old ford engine and provide ferine nightmares of hot and cold. Carpet or tile stained and certainly unclean, functions as a fungus induced playground. If fortunate to have TV at all most of them play only Thai shows which border on the insane, crazy super happy play power game shows, King powered news programs, futbol (thankfully), and the occasional movie that is in English but dubbed in Thai (The Matrix, Babe, Anaconda, too name a few), and finally the Disney channel which can't make up it's mind whether it is Thai or English.
The final wonder is the bathroom, they have managed to fuse the toilet with the shower, which is wonderful because as you shower you get to clean the toilet and the rest of the room, this is complete with a drain in the middle of the floor, often time there is no towel rack so caution is exercised to keep from getting your clothes and towel wet. I guess you would call it a 3/4 bath. The big bonus, only 500b which is roughly 15USD a night (33b to 1USD). This is the key element.
We leave the Radisson around 10 in the morning making sure to get a last breakfast in. From there it is a cab. Most cabs in Bangkok are a nice neon pink, as it turns out the Thai have an obsession with 80 retro-style neon colors. From the cabs to the countries uniforms (bright yellow on Friday, I think, for the kings birthday, neon blue on Tuesday for the queen) they are in love with the 80's neon, soon I expect to see neon socks. The cabs are very cheap and you can get around the town for about 2USD one way, and indeed we do. We travel for 3.5 hours and reach Pattaya.
Pattaya
2. Entering Pattaya is like reaching the beach. There is a major frontage road running along the beach, about 40 Soi (street) blocks long, and then a secondary main road away from the beach which acts as the city street. The beach has various beer bars and the other street is a front for malls and expensive storefronts. This place is serious, gone is the politeness of the local people, there is no bowing or respect movements, instead the city is a bit more corrupt and infused with tourist (frange) of all sorts and countries, mostly white.
Will continue