Dinner in a Brothel anyone??

Liddy

We are four days in and getting into the swing of things. Mike and I are adjusting to each other's way of doing things; I have an unfortunate tendency dating back to my travelling youth of being a total skinflint ('30p for a taxi, you have to be kidding me, I'll not pay a penny over 25 p'.......followed by hot trek across town on foot due to stubborn reluctance to pay what is probably frankly due) whilst Mike has more profligate tendecies ('Liddy, I'm on holiday, WHY can't I spend 80 pounds on a new pair of flip flops, stop being so tight'). So we are meeting in the middle and in an attempt to find a mutually satisfactory dinner venue last night, we stopped at a promising looking small restaurant; small so probably not wildly expensive, but still not a pavement shack. So, we sat down, ordered dinner and sat back to enjoy the ambience.

It soon became clear that the ambience was a little strange.

First, the restaurant was pretty much all single men apart from us. Unusual but not necessarily that unusual.
Second, the women enticing us into the restaurant were, on reflection, dressed rather more scantily than is normal.
Third, having attracted the Pleasants crew (probably rather unwillingly) the scantily dressed women disappeared back to the front and we were served by a very stoned, very manky looking woman who clearly was not used to taking dinner orders and got everything wrong.
Fourth, when the wrong dishes duly started to arrive, one of the women from out front came over and in a voice that was pure Ray Winstone, asked 'What's the Matter'.

Top Tip; when you are a woman standing about 5ft 11 high and you meet a Thai woman the same height, she is not a Thai woman.

So, the local lady boy investigates what is wrong. We soon work out that the establishment is not, strictly speaking, a restaurant and as soon as the kids finish their spaghetti bolognese (they are loving this Asian food thing) we scarper.

Back to our hotel where we all try to sleep. Meg and Sam succeed. Mike and I do not. Thumping dance beats from the bar right under our room keep us up till three. I decided to sit in the corridor for an hour from one till two; I listened to our neighbours have a screaming match in Dutch for twenty minutes, which was bearable, but when they started on the make up nookie I retreated back to our room to listen to 'We are the Champions' being belted out by the bar next door to the dance club. Fun Fun Fun. Clearly there is all manner of fun to be had in Bangkok!!

Still, apart from this, having a lovely time. We've been to Bangkok Zoo (brilliant, lots of animals that the kids loved apart from the poor little mouse that had clearly been fed into the snake cage and was running around trying to find shelter......didn't fancy his chances much......), taken lots of tuk-tuks, buzzed around in the slick Sky Train to state of the art shopping centres, hopped on local ferries to small wats (wat = temple.....cue lots of 'what wat' jokes......oh the laughs we have......!), tried to get the kids to eat rice and noodles, given up and taken them for pasta, wandered along small residential streets, taken more tuk-tuks etc etc.

We are departing for Ayuthaya, ancient Thai capital, tomorrow, still without our bikes for a couple of days. Then hopefully pick up our Myanmar (Burmese) visas on Monday and fly into Rangoon on Tuesday to start cycling.
We are all champing at the bit to get on the bikes (Sam, earlier on this evening; 'Mummy, if we are on a cycling holiday, why haven't we gone cycling yet?') but it is such a palava packing everything away into boxes, that we decided it wasn't worth it before the flight to Burma. Still, we can't wait. Not long to go now.