Yes, I started teaching at the school this week; it's not too bad. It came as a bit of a shock to the system after several weeks of doing pretty much whatever I pleased, and I was almost ready to quit after only two days there - "I could do it somewhere else!", I would tell Edie, "Like London! Somewhere where I don't end up panting like a dog just from the thirty-second stroll from staff room to classroom. We could spend this time just hanging out, exploring, living it up! Doesn't that sound nice?". Edie looked at me sadly and replied with something like, "Grow some balls, loser", which was fair and accurate and exactly what I needed to hear. So now I'm sticking it out.
And we have an apartment! Right on Sukhumvit Rd, the road that acts as the elongated spine of the city, from which all the cool little districts and laneways branch off. Next to all the big shopping malls - all connected by walkways 50ft above the ground, such that you can walk all the way around our neighbourhood without ever touching your feet to street level - and right in the middle of all the transport, where we can catch the skytrain up to brain-melting Chatuchak markets or down to sex-crazed Silom, or east out to Lumphini Park, where everybody picnics and does tai-chi and sculpts their tiny Thai bodies in the outdoor gym.
Fifty metres from our door there's a pier in the little canal from which you can catch a riverboat through the putrid, stinking black water to the disgustingly touristy, vaguely arty suburb of Banglamphu, where we began our travels a month ago. Opposite us is the National Stadium, where there's a swimming pool and squash courts and where breakdancers and beatboxers practice their moves til the break-a break-a dawn.
This weekend we've been trawling the city's bars and alleyways til the early morning, drinking in bars with names like Kill Time, scoffing the Mint Slices and Tim Tams that my parents sent me for my birthday last wednesday (thanks mum and dad!), and sleeping in til afternoon. Met Edie's friend Jack, from the ABC, who's great fun. We went out to the markets at Chatuchak yesterday, and found stalls where one can purchase snakes and tortoises and squirrels and albino hedgehogs and fucking lemurs! LEMURS! So we're weighing up the option of buying ourselves a lemur and then training it to do our bidding. Yet to find a monkey or elephant for sale but there's still plenty of time.
So of course I knew all the stuff about eating fried insects in Asia; grasshoppers and crickets and grubs and so on, even spiders (though I've got to say that even with preparation, the sight of someone chowing down on a bird spider bigger than your hand is pretty rough). I mean, I've eaten Bogong moths - they taste like nuts - so I've no problem with any of those things - except the giant madagascan cockroaches. Everywhere sells these fried giant madagascan cockroaches that look like the worst nightmare you've ever had, and everytime I see them I shudder deeply. Can you imagine that thing crunching between your teeth? Oh, god, I think I just threw up inside my mouth a little bit...
And so: on Friday Aaron took us out, with a couple of other friends visiting from lands beyond: Carly, a surfer from France (they have those?) and her professional-violinist boyfriend Franc, with whom every single conversation goes something like this:
"Oh, did I tell you I recieved a prestigious artist's residency in Silom this week? It's very prestigious. Only one in every ten thousand applicants gets it. Very prestigious. I feel great that my gift is being recognized in this way."
or:
"Oh, did I tell you about the concert I'm playing in Prague next year? It's a very prestigious honour. David Bowie himself is going to make an appearance. Can you imagine? David Bowie! Very prestigious. I feel great that I'm being given an opportunity to share my gift with the world in this way."
Blech. Totally nausea-inducing. But anyway, Aaron took us out to - surprise, surprise - another sex district, this one with the slightly inappropriate name of 'Nana' (fortunately they pronounce the name 'nah-nah' here, since the phrase "I'm heading down to Nana's for a bit of sex" has a distinctly Mount Druitt kind of ring to it).
And we wandered through the legions of scantily-clad girls (though a good proportion were probably scantily-clad boys, actually, if anyone had cared to check) upstairs to a little hidden bar. It was a strip club, yes - just like every other bar in Nana - but in the centre of the floor was some big shadowy object around which people were clustering to get a better look.
And that was how, two days after my birthday, I ended up perched on top of a mechanical bull in a strip-club in Bangkok, being tossed around like a rag doll while a half-naked girl screamed and whipped both me and the bull with a twelve-inch black rubber dildo while middle-aged white men in bad suits clapped and cheered at me from the sidelines. And as I got thrown over the bull's horns only twenty-two seconds later, sailing through the air toward the red rubber mats below, while the strippers did a badly-choreographed lesbian-shower scene on the stage nearby, I could hear only the words of the great Tom Waits drifting through my head:
'Everything you can think of is true'
It's been an interesting twenty-five years.
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: Lopburi! Monkeys! All work! No play! Makes Jack a dull boy!
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