Thai Go Go Girls

November was my slowest month of blogging in over a year. I managed to write only 24 posts during the month. I wrote more posts while I was on vacation. How did that happen?

It just goes to show how busy I was last month, catching up with all that time off and then moving everything else I do forward.

Anyways, the blog has suffered. My number of posts are down. My traffic is down. My Yahoo ad revenue is down.

I need to do something to boost traffic and interest in my blog.

With that said, here are 15 pictures of Thai Go Go Girls, taken while I was in Bangkok and Phuket:

These girls weren't strippers. They were just dancers.

...but I had the feeling that they'd go home with you for the right price.

So what should I do next? Girls in bikinis?

Happy Birthday, EJ!

I asked a Filipino band in Bangkok to sing Happy Birthday to Saipan's #1 Korean Pary Girl, aka my girlfriend, aka EJ, in Saipan.

See you in a few days!

Visiting with Kathy and Planning the Next Trip

I met up with Kathy at the Bangkok JW Marriott this morning. We had coffee in the lobby and then we went for a walk.

Ian joined us about an hour later and we went to a Chinese restaurant that Kathy and her family have been going to since she was a little girl. We had dim sum, noodle soup, and duck. After lunch we ended up going to a large shopping mall...a shopping mall that had this tasty delight:

There was a Mos Burger near my apartment in Takaoka. It brought me back. We had just eaten, so I couldn't eat right away. I got a Mos Burger To Go as we were leaving the mall.

EJ will be happy to know that I got my haircut. It cost 300 Baht, plus a 40 Baht tip to the stylist and a 30 Baht tip to the shampoo girl.

So what do you think? Fat but handsome?

******

Ian was an hour late because he was finishing up the booking of our next adventure. Thanks for the suggestions to go to Samui, but the tour guide said that Samui is flooded right now and that it is not a good time to go.

We decided to go to Phuket and Phi Phi. We leave for Phuket tomorrow, spend the night in Phuket, then the next day we take a ferry to Phi Phi (where the Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed), spend three days there, then go back to Phuket on the ferry, spend one more night in Phuket, then back to Bangkok for a night, and then we finally leave for home early the next morning.

Intrepid No More

I'm not sure what the best part of our trip has been, but Angkor Wat is in the top 5. Here I am standing atop the second level, with one of the five central stupas behind me:

We're back in the Bangkok.

If you ever have the opportunity to ride the bus from Siem Reap, Cambodia to Bangkok, Thailand, my suggestion is don't. Fly. Trust me.

Our tour is unofficially over. We are going out to dinner as a group one more time and then we are through. We've been joking that we'll go see a ping pong show tonight, but I think that we're all so tired that we'll go straight to bed after dinner.

I called my college girlfriend, who lives in Bangkok, when I got into the hotel. Kathy grew up here, but has lived in Kentucky since graduating in 2001. She just moved back to Thailand last Monday with her 11 month old daughter.

We've got a lunch date tomorrow at 11 AM. We have only seen each other once in the last 7 years, so it will be nice to catch up.

So that's it. The Intrepid trip is over.

Here is the only group picture I took during our 28 day trip:

Intrepid group (from left to right): Ben from Germany, Olivia from Ireland, Terry our tour leader, Me, David, Cloe, and Ian.

We took this photo while watching the sunrise in Angkor Wat. If you haven't had the chance to do that yet, I suggest you get out to Cambodia before you die.

It is worth every penny.

Yankees are Cursed

We just swept the Rockies, a team that never should have been in the World Series, Joe Torre got canned, and A-Rod just opted out of the final years of his undeserving, underperforming $251 million contract. I predict that the Yankees are about to enter a period of mediocrity unseen since Don Mattingly donned his mullet in the 1980's.

Life as a Red Sox fan is good.

I watched game 4 from the comfort of my hotel room in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Angkor Wat and the other ancient Khmer temples are right up the street. How cool is that? I skipped this morning's activity, a visit to a nature preserve, to watch the game.

******

I took over 200 pictures at yesterday's visit to Angkor Wat. We were literally the first people inside the temple to watch the sun rise. It was pouring rain at 4 AM when we got up to leave, but by the time the sun came up the clouds had cleared away.

They stayed away all day. All of my pictures of the 1000 year old temples have a bright blue sky in them. I'm looking forward to posting them. It has been cloudy and raining on all but a few days on this trip. We were extremely blessed to get sun and blue skies yesterday.

Today is pretty much the last day of our Intrepid tour. Tomorrow morning we take a bus into Thailand and Bangkok, then we spend one more night in Bangkok before the tour officially ends. We've promised Olivia that we'll take her to a ping pong show back in Bangkok. We'll part ways on the 31st.

David's college buddy has invited us to dinner on the night of the 31st. He is taking us to a place on the 78th floor (or something like that) of a building overlooking the whole city of Bangkok. I'm going to wear the new gecko shirt I had specially made in Hoi An, Vietnam.

******

Last night, Ian, Olivia, and I went to a crazy bar called Sok San. Sok San advertises itself as a night club with karaoke and massages. Yeah, sketchy, I know, but it looked like fun. The three of us went in thinking it was a "lady bar."

The inside didn't appear like a lady bar. There was a "girl" dancing on stage. "She" looked like a stripper, but she didn't have a pole and never took her clothes off. It looked like a regular night club.

I say "she" because we suspected them and most of the women in the bar of being men, although I have no proof other than Adam's apples and big feet. We sat there drinking our beers, soaking in the whole experience, when suddenly we were subjected to a Khmer cultural show...in drag.

WTF?

After we finished our beers and before leaving we decided to check out the massage rooms, not to have massages, just to check to see if we were really in a girly bar. We were led into a large room with a glass wall. Behind the wall, sitting on some bleachers and wearing lots of makeup, were several girls with numbers pinned to their chests, like cattle at an auction.

We were told that all the massage rooms were full and that we'd have to wait. The cost for a "massage," was $5. We told them we didn't really want a massage, we were just checking the price.

I did not expect to see a bar like this in Siem Reap.

Good times.

Chiang Mai

We left Bangkok on a sleeper train last night at around 6 PM and arrived in Chiang Mai this morning around 7 AM. I fell asleep on the top bunk of the sleeper around 9 PM and got up at around 5 AM. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, thinking that it was morning already. The lights stayed on in the train all night and it was difficult to keep track of the real time. When it finally started getting light out, we found ourselves surrounded by tree covered hillsides.

Cool.

After we got off the train we went for a quick breakfast at a restaurant facing the ancient city wall. Then it was off to our hotel, where we had about an hour to get ready for our bicycle tour of Chiang Mai.

Our four hour long bicycle tour of Chiang Mai.

We started off by our hotel and, taking our lives in our hands, cycled through the busy streets until we got out to the countryside, which didn't take too long. We stopped at a small local Buddhist temple, a traditional crematorium, and a leper village before stopping for lunch at a roadside food stand.

I put just a little too much hot pepper on my pad thai and had to drink three cokes with my meal.

On the way back to the hotel we rode through an area of Chiang Mai with about 30 Buddhist temple ruins. They were ruined in a flood a few hundred years ago and have only been excavated recently (I think).

I took several pictures, but the computer I am typing this on was made circa 1987. I'll post when I find a computer with a faster speed.

We are spending the night in Chiang Mai tonight. In about 50 minutes we are going to climb up a mountain with a temple on the top, then later tonight we are going to a bazaar to find some merriment and good times to celebrate my 29th birthday.

My father was 29 when he had me (gulp).

Tomorrow we are heading to the Laos border. We're spending one more night on the Thai side, then it is off to Laos and the Mekong River!

Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes on this blog, myspace, facebook, and email. I'd respond, but I'm paying for Internet access by the minute.

My pants are broken

The largest reclining Buddha in Thailand is in Bangkok in a temple called Wat Pho. I think it is about 15 m tall and 46 m long. Don't you think it would look nice in my living room?

After our boat tour of a canal and Wat Pho, Ian, David, Cloe, and I had lunch at a small restaurant across from the Grand Palace. Having seen enough of shiny gold temples, David and Cloe decided to take a boat taxi back to the hotel, while Ian and I opted to tour the Grand Palace.

We knew before coming that we would have to wear shirts with sleeves and pants below the knee. I only brought one pair of jeans. They are the only jeans I own, so if you've seen me wearing jeans in the last year and a half, you know which ones they are. They have exactly three holes in them.

Can you guess where this is leading?

As we entered the Grand Palace grounds I noticed a group of Europeans wearing what looked like long traditional Thai skirts and some Thai pants. I told Ian that if I ever bought pants like that he needed to shoot me. What? Do these people think they look Thai?

About 10 steps later a uniformed security guard came up to me and announced that my pants were broken. He pointed at the fashionably placed holes.

Damn it.

He sent me back to the entrance where I traded my CNMI driver's license for a pair of the previously mentioned Thai pants.

Don't I look sexy?

******

We are off to Chiang Mai in about an hour. We are taking an overnight train and should be there at about 7 AM. From this point on I don't know what the Internet access will be like.

I may update; I may not.

Either way, Happy Birthday to me! I'll be 29 tomorrow.

Bangkok Pictures

Golden Mound from below:

Inside of Wat Suthat, the second temple we visited on our trip:


Wat Suthat from one of the other Wats:

There are more pictures to come. Stay tuned.

Which way to the ping pong show?

To say that I have sensory overload might be to say that the Yankees are a bunch of overpaid crybabies. What I've seen and done in the last two days could fill a novel...and the tour doesn't officially start for another three hours.

On Tuesday night, after walking around the older area of Bangkok and shopping (and eating!) in a big department store called Central for several hours, the four of us met up with one of David's old college buddies, Pooh, for dinner at the Oriental Hotel. The Oriental Hotel is where Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness.

I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but it was next to the spa, which is across the river. That's right. After having a round of drinks in the hotel, we took a ferry across the river.

Dinner was accompanied by a Thai dinner show. The food was great.

We ran out before the show ended to meet up with my friend Raj from my University of Richmond days. Raj grew up in Bangkok and moved back here after college.

We met up with him and his beautiful wife of three years, Rupa, at our Hotel and then we went out to a club called Bed Supperclub, which has to be the swankiest club in Bangkok. We were about to pay the 1000 Baht entrance fee (about $33), but Raj negotiated a better deal for us. He got us in the club for free...we just had to buy a bottle of whiskey. A whole bottle of whiskey.

They took us up to the reserved "bed" section, hooked us up with our bottle of booze, and we proceeded to have a great time.

When we finally went home, I crashed on the bed and passed out with my clothes still on. Yet somehow, I managed to put in my retainer.

Dental care is very important.

I woke up the next morning, not hung over, but with the distinct feeling that I had been very drunk the last time I was conscious. Yes, I know. I am a role model for the children.

We had a leisurely Wednesday morning. We woke up, took showers, and watched some TV. After a long breakfast at a neighborhood cafe, we checked out of our hotel and took a taxi cross town to go to our new hotel, the one where our tour started.

We checked into our new room and before heading out in search of food and adventure, took the elevator up to the roof on the 24th floor for a look around. Our hotel is one of the tallest buildings in this part of Bangkok, so we could see the whole city.

Wow. That's a lot of traffic.

It turned out we had a great afternoon. A Thai man named Peter came up to us on the street and offered to show us around town. He even showed us his official tour guide badge. He didn't start negotiating at first, but we eventually agreed that he would take us around town for 400 Baht (about $12).

I'm going to have to go through a tour guide to double check all the names, but we went to three temples (maybe four, I'm not sure if one place counted as one or two), a park that used to be an old prison, and we had our first taste of street food.

Oh, and we drank a few beers. What can I say? It was hot!

Bumps in the Road

We got to Bangkok no problem. I managed to throw back four beers before boarding the plane and was asleep before the plane took off. I only woke up 30 minutes before we landed.

We picked up our baggage and got a taxi to our hotel for about 800 Baht, which was about half the price of the taxis they were trying to push on us as soon as we walked out of Customs. So if you ever come to Bangkok, ignore the people trying to get you to rent a taxi inside the terminal. Just go outside and find a public taxi.

When we got to the hotel I plugged in my battery charger...and destroyed it. A minute after I plugged it in we heard a pop, like someone had opened a bottle of champagne, and turned to the outlet to see it smoking. Damn it!

Then I looked through my bag for my journal. I couldn't find it. I don't know what happened to it, but if I had to guess, I probably left it next to the public computer in the Narita airport. Oh well. I only lost a few phone numbers and everybody's mailing addresses.

Then Ian and I went out to explore the area around our hotel...and saw somebody walking an elephant down the street! In the middle of downtown! How cool is that?

We got back to the room at about 3 AM...and Bangkok was still bumping. There was a wall of traffic and an endless stream of people walking down the street.

I'll try to post pictures tomorrow night.