Gully and Elise's Travel Blog: The Big Bangkok Theory

That bar (above) was just calling our names!! There are five days left of our eleven-month-long vacation. I can’t believe it’s all coming to an end in less than a week! In the little time we have left, Elise and I have been trying to take full advantage of all the great things Thailand has to offer – NO, I’m not talking about ladyboys and ping-pong ball shows, but rather the more classic elements of Thai culture like cooking and massages (umm…legitimate massages, that is). We spent a few days in the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand cooking curry by day and getting stretched and pummelled by Thai masseuses at night. I never knew it, but making curry paste from scratch can be so physically demanding that you NEED a massage afterwards (what with all the grinding with the pestle and mortar). And when the going rate for an hour long, spa-quality couple’s massage is about $5, it’s hard to justify NOT getting one everyday anyway.

For some reason the Thais love country music. Oh don’t worry, Justin Bieber still owns the airways over here, but I swear John Denver’s “Country Roads” is still on Thailand’s top 10 chart. Perhaps its popularity is maintained by all the hickish old North American men who come over here for sex tourism. On more than one occasion in Bangkok, Elise and I have found ourselves at a restaurant awkwardly surrounded on all sides by so-called sexpats (that is, a sixty-something-year-old western man with a twenty-something-year-old Thai girl – who may or may not even speak English).

And how’s this for irony: as we all know, westerners generally like to (arrogantly) consider themselves the most civilized people on Earth. At the same time (and much to our surprise), Thailand is an exceedingly civilized and developed country – in our opinion much more so than many countries in Eastern Europe and South America. Despite this, Thailand is notorious for being a place where people can go to engage in exceedingly, let’s say, uncivilized activities, and some of the most uncivilized behaviour in all of Thailand takes place on Khao San Road, aka ground zero for western tourism in Bangkok!!

-G