Chatuchak Market is a huge, sprawling place with just about anything and everything you might want to buy, from food to souvenirs to music to clothes to pets. There are also a lot of street performers and artists either busking for money or trying to sell their crafts.
We walked around the market for a while, watching American and European tourists trying to bargain down shopkeepers for their goods so they could save a big 50 cents or a buck. We bought several souvenirs for my nieces, little change purses with elephants on them, and Lisa bought a collection of black ceramic elephants for our shelf at home as well as a shirt with an elephant on it. You can sense the theme of the trip when it came to souvenirs.We pretty much always paid what the asking price was for everything because, well, it was already pretty damn cheap without having to try to haggle with the guy or woman running the stall. If we bought more than one thing at a stand they would always give you a break in the price. The whole bargaining thing would become much more of an issue later in our trip.
I also bought a silk tie, sans elephant image, for 100 THB (about 3 bucks), as my big purchase in Thailand.
We also saw another interesting and somewhat unexpected sight at the market. It seems that the creepy, old, white Western men don't just have sex with the young Thai girls while in the city. They also take them out during the day for sightseeing and shopping. It already seemed odd enough to me that one would travel halfway around the world just to pay for sex. But were they really also paying for a "girlfriend" for their stay?
After noticing it the first time we noticed it a bunch of times while walking around Bangkok, especially at the market. We managed to take a stealth picture of one of these creepy dudes with his two "dates" while I pretended to pose for a picture at a coffee stand.
Well after that we figured we'd seen all we wanted to see at the market, so we took off. We wanted to see Bangkok's Chinatown. We grabbed the SkyTrain again, transferred to the subway at Asok/Sukhumvit and headed to Hua Lamphong train station to walk over to Chinatown.
All in all, the Chinatown in Bangkok isn't a whole lot different than many cities' Chinatowns in the States. Crowded, lots of stands selling stuff, tons of smelly seafood and countless jewelry stores. Though the main drag was a pretty impressive sight.
After checking out Chinatown for a while we then headed over to the pier and caught the commuter boat back up to Phra Athit, in the Banglamphoo neighborhood. We wanted to get a look at Khao San Road, which is basically the backpacker district in Bangkok.
After seeing it I couldn't figure out why people would travel to Thailand to hang out at Khao San Road. I could see the one positive aspect, that it was closed to traffic. Very few places in Bangkok can you get away from the cars and motorbikes.
But the rest of it, what the hell? Pizza places, Irish pubs, music stores and clubs pumping out hip-hop or reggae, and places to get your hair done Rastafarian style. And hippies everywhere. American hippies mostly. So you come all the way from America to Thailand just to hang out with other American hippies and eat pizza and drink Guinness? It would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to go to San Francisco. There really wasn't a big difference between this and Haight-Ashbury, except for maybe the absence of a Ben & Jerry's. Hell, pick a neighborhood in just about any major American city. Williamsburg in New York, Little Five Points in Atlanta, North Halsted in Chicago, Capitol Hill in Seattle. You would pretty much get the same experience in any of these places as you would on Khao San Road.
Bangkok deserves better than to be turned into a nightclub for twenty-something Americans.
Even worse, there was a poster advertising a Linkin Park concert that night. Geeze, what mean thing did the Thai people ever do to us that they deserve this? They give us the wonderful Thai food and we pay them back by sending them our dirty old men to have sex with their young girls and our awful, awful poseur-punk/metal bands? How cruel can we be?
On behalf of my people, I'm sorry Bangkok.
After heading over to May Kaidee's for one more fantastic Thai vegetarian meal, we made our way to the dock to grab the boat home.
We got to the pier, walking down that alleyway with the bar in it. Now, a couple nights before when we got there around the same time the ticket counter was not manned and people just paid on the boat. This night there was a kid standing there. I walked up and told him two people and he said "twenty baht." I tried to give him a 100 THB note and he said "no change." This should have been my second red flag (the first being that the counter wasn't open the other night). Lisa had a twenty she gave him and he put two tickets on the counter. We waited on the pier and I was looking at the tickets and I noticed something. The tickets were already ripped. I showed this to Lisa and we were thinking about going up and saying something to the kid, but we didn't know what we would be getting into. I think we were also a little gun-shy after looking like a couple of American ass-holes at the Wat in Ayutthaya.
The kid sold a good game, putting on a life jacket at one point and telling the crowd that the boat was approaching soon, but disappeared before the boat actually docked.
Sure enough, several people were scammed by this kid. The tickets were used ones he had gathered up. At the moment we were on the boat he was probably enjoying some beers bought with money he had conned out of some tourists, including us. Very annoying to get taken like that. But all in all, getting scammed out of the equivalent of about 70 cents isn't anything to get too wound-up about.
Once getting off the Sky Train at Nana, we walked up Sukhumvit Road one last time looking at all the skeezy sex tourist and their companions. Stood behind a couple of them at a drugstore buying a single pack of a condom while we were getting some postcards.
Back at the hotel I bought a beer in the restaurant and went down to sit by the pool. Started a conversation with a French guy who had the same idea as me. We talked about the whole sex tourism thing in Bangkok and I came to an understanding about the whole thing. After seeing all these guys out and about with their "dates" during the day acting like a couple I suddenly understood the whole thing to a certain extent. The reason all these guys go to Bangkok for this isn't just because of "yellow fever" or the fact that the girls are young and pretty (thought that is surely part of it).
No, it's because they play the part better, as the Frenchman pointed out. You don't just get the sex. You also get a girlfriend who will hold your hand, visit the museums with you, let you buy her stuff and generally act like she is totally in to you. For whatever amount of time you pay for, you are in a relationship.
I then saw these guys not just as skeezy, but also sad and pathetic. I almost felt sorry for them. Almost.
Next - Cambodia!
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