I had to get my hair cut. It’s been driving me nuts for weeks. You know when you get to the point that you ‘can’t do a thing with it’? I’d been there for a while.
After breakfast I took a cab over to Siam Square with Jeff. He went to ‘the office’. Searching around Siam Square I was looking for a hairdressers who looked a little Westernized. I figured that was my best bet for success without something disastrous happening. Jeff had mentioned he had been to before. He couldn’t remember the name but it was on a corner and had glass and chrome. I found one that was glass and chrome and went in.
The entire process took about 2 hours and cost 1500 baht, about $37. In the US I used to pay way more than that. $37 I can live with, especially since they did an ok job, were very pleasant and fed me lots of water and tea and I came out feeling and looking a lot better.
After that I headed off to visit Jim Thompson’s House. Jim Thompson is credited with opening up the Thai silk trade with the rest of the world. He’s also famous for the traditional Thai house, or houses, he had brought from all over Thailand and setup in Bangkok. There are 5 different houses all set in a traditional Thai manner and serviced by a traditional Thai boat house to the side of the property.
The main house where Jim Thompson lived is very lovely and you can see that he cared deeply about Thai culture and Thailand. I found it interesting and loved the ceramics, furniture and tapestries he had decorated it with, but it’s also extremely commercial and I wouldn’t revisit it.
I headed back to meet Jeff at ‘the office’ and then we went over to MBK to the Food Hall for dinner. The Food hall works on a coupon basis, none of the counters serving food takes money so you have to go to the Coupon booth and buy coupons for the amount you think you’ll need. You hand the coupons to the server when you get your food and if you have Coupons left over you go to the coupon Refund counter.
As we had time to kill before going to the Asia Hotel where the Calypso Cabaret is playing we stopped off in a little bar called Heaven Restaurant and Bar. We had tried to stop in another bar just before it but some weird guy sidled up to Jeff and whispered in his ear that bear wsas $100 baht then ran off down an alleyway. Jeff found out that the bar actually was out of beer. Weird.
On the way I stopped to take some pictures of the spirit house in front of the MBK center when another pair of tourists asked us to take their pictures. We happily did that, and found out that he was from Glasnevin in Dublin and they were on day 2 of their vacation. Their white skins had already told me that :-)
Once there the waitress had little or no English, which is a little unusual. But we managed to order drinks, Singha beer for Jeff and Sangsom for me. She brought the drinks on a tray with an ice-bucket full of ice and proceeded to put ice in our glasses and pour our drinks for us. She added so much soda to the Sangsom I couldn’t taste it. When our glasses were nearing empty she filled them again for us. She sat at the table behind us watching until she saw we needed a refill and immediately got up to top up our glasses. Talk about service. This was unexpected and a little disconcerting.
We were paying our bill and getting ready to head out to the Calypso Cabaret when I spotted an elephant walking down the opposite side of the street with it’s mahout trainer. Finally, I had really landed in Bangkok. Until you’ve seen an elephant in the streets of Bangkok you’ve not seen Thailand. But behind the sight of an elephant in the streets is an unnatural and very hard life for both the elephant and the mahout. They’re not supposed to roam the streets of Bangkok, but they don’t have many alternatives in some cases. Roaming the streets and allowing tourists to pay to feed them is their only line of business and survival.
We wern’t sure how far the Asia Hotel was from the bar we just left so we caught a cab and it turned out that it was only about 5 blocks away. The lobby of the hotel was full of tourists waiting to go in. A lot were Japanese and European. Inside the theater the seating area was in a semi-circule around the stage. We were place to the right and about 2/3rds of the way back from the stage, which was just about perfect. Not too close, not too far. The show itself is inexplicable. It rivals the Beach Blanket Babylon cabaret in San Francisco, but it’s completely different.
I still can’t believe how beautiful the boys looked. If I had seen the cabaret in Las Vegas I would have thought they were girls for the most part. One or two of course were too tall or gangly in their movements, but overall it was near to impossible to tell from our seat. Up close may have been a different matter as I’m sure the stage make up and lights and our seating made a bit difference to how well they looked.
There were spectactular short scenes about Hawaii, Las Vegas Show Girls, Egypt. There was a Thai play about love and loss, explored through scenes that showed a marriage of a playboy and a good Thai girl, The good Thai girl wasn’t enough for him, so he took to show girls. Yet the good Thai girl underneath had a bad girl waiting. At one point taking off the white wedding dress of the good Thai girl, she appeared as a gorgeous woman of the night, fighting off the other night ladies her husband preferred. In the end it appeared that it was perhaps just a dream as she redonned her white wedding dress, the good Thai girl look.
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