THESE ARE THE SIGNS THAT I LOVE!!

Originally, i tried to avoid them, hoping for the more authentic taste of Thailand. But "authentic" has occasionally turned out to be not actually what i was going for... more resembling "sketch", if you know what i mean.

For instance, encountering my first Thai massage taught me that "Thai" -at least in this context- is actually code for "a lot of inappropriate touching especially since we're strangers". I believe when correctly translated that's actually what the massage is called.

So you see. Sometimes it's good to go the farang* way.

As I've discovered (or just wandered) so much by myself, I've discovered the art of laughing out loud to one's self, and inevitably, "the look" that closely follows. I call it the "crazy farang" look. I get it a lot. But who could blame me? There has been daily, hourly, sometimes even by the minute! moments that are so random and bizarre and unbelievable, sometimes, that it's comical. So I laugh. Then they do their look. It's like we're each playing our parts, it's so consistent.







*foreigner

Lord Have Mercy.

Last night I made my way to a bar much like this one on a street lit as far as i could see by the glow of red lights. I spent the evening with a lovely girl named Fa. She told me about her sisters who are married, her old boyfriend that used to treat her bad, and how she has to work to support her old thai-whiskey-drinking mother and her nephew that lives with them.


Apparently...
"In Thailand, when you talk about prostitution, you talk about Pattaya. Known around the world as Thailand's number one sun, sea and sex destination, it is home to approximately 20,000 male, female and child prostitutes. Although the registered population is just 70,000, every November to March, about one million visitors crowd Pattaya's over 700 bars and nightclubs, and that doesn't count massage parlors or steam baths."


Visit www.projlife.com and look for TAMAR CENTER if this stuff interests you. My exploring last night was with a few young ladies who live here as a part of TAMAR (affiliated with YWAM) and hang out in the clubs nightly, mostly inviting the bar girls to free english classes. They now run a hair salon, coffee shop, bakery, and card-making business by girls that have come out of prostitution. They are trained in any one of these areas and discipled to go back into the places they've come from and be ministers of Jesus...



It's painful to see so many couples like this... they line the street. Mostly older, usually overweight Western men are constantly flying past on rented motorbikes with gorgeous doe-eyed Thai beauties perched behind them. Most probably can't really even communicate much.