Italians in Thailand/7: the human sewage keeps flowing down

It looks like sewage but it actually is a stream

And it keeps flowing precisely from here...

Story 3) A third whoremonger was loafing around the dolphin square with a fancy new videocamera. A pretty girl approached him. After a brief conversation the two of them left together. His whore-monging colleagues looked at each other, amazed by what they had just seen. How come such a knockout left with a loser like him? (a personal note: I was not expecting that, but it seems that even to pick up a hooker you need to be cool and attractive) None of them saw him for a whole day. When he didn't show up for another night they suddenly remembered about the videocamera, put together the pieces of that puzzle, got worried and set out to look for him. Finding him was not such a difficult feat: he had been sedated and was still noisily snoring in one of the rooms where they all had been so often, with other women of the same kind. For a few days (!) they took care of him. As he was always half asleep they continuously tried to keep him awake, dragging him to take a breath of fresh air at regular intervals. Neither the victim nor anyone of his wretched friends had (or wanted to spend) money for a hospital. Besides his videocamera that moonlighter (whore and anesthetist) robbed him of all the money he had on him. Without needing to take even her shoes off. We can accuse her of a lot of wickednesses but not of been someone who sells her body for a song.

Story 4) Even S was drugged by a whore once (or maybe more).

Italians in Thailand/6: the escalating squalor

Squalor

As I've already explained you, even though I left Pattaya a few months ago I am not done telling you all the anecdotes I've learned when I was staying there. 

These are the latest stories S told me (we first met S here). I hope they also happen to be the last ones, as the escalation of their squalor doesn't seem to subside.
I jotted them down immediately after I listened to them, careful not to forget anything, using low level tone and terminology, sticking to what I had just heard. I meant to polish them all later on but then I thought that this kind of trash deserves expressive tools of a comparable quality. "Prostitutes" are therefore called "whores", "having a sexual intercourse" is "fucking" and...etcetera etcetera, we don't really need to open a vocabulary section here. If you cannot digest this hodgepodge (content and style) I really am sorry about it, I hope you can find other posts in this blog that you like better than this one. I had to write this one exactly the way I did though. Under certain circumstances you need to have an armored soul even to try to be politically correct. At the time of writing, mine is like a soap bubble that wavers and gets deformed while it glides downwards, bound to explode if it gets hit by just a gust of dusty air.

Story 1)
Mr. Gallina (a made up name that means "Hen" in Italian. Actually it's a different bird, but he's still Italian) got married with a whore and then bought a house where they went to live together.

Italians in Thailand/5: a very bizarre prostitution story - Pattaya, Thailand

A picture I saw at a guest house in Hua Hin

I've recently happened to hear a really bizarre prostitution story. Just when I was about to leave Pattaya, the biggest mine of tales of this type, that in the various months spent there has revealed to me so many, so diverse and so colorful an anecdote that I came to think it would be nearly impossible to surprise me again. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I'd never heard a story like this before.

One day the anonymous protagonist of this story, an elderly Italian whoremonger that we'll call AW - the initials of Anonymous Whoremonger - gets out of his hotel to look for what the tourists of the category he belongs to often go out to look for when they are in places like this. It's not a peaceful quest though, as most of us might think. It's not just a matter of setting out for a short walk, bump into the first of the thousands of opportunities offered by the city and getting over with it. Nothing of the sort: AP is tortured by doubts, he's doing his utmost to get a totally satisfying idea. Going to talk with one of the mama-sans that he is acquainted with? Tedious procedures, useless rituals to go through, elaborate supply chain, numerous wheels to grease, negotiations to weave, all of it very expensive and complicated. The Beach Road free-lance hookers? No way, so many creepy stories about them! Too risky. The Soi Honey erotic massage parlors? Hmmm, lousy massages in dingy hovels that end up in hurried intercourses with bored women. That solution won't do either. He needs to do something original He has to improvise, making good use of the current situation and context, adding a bit of imagination and, why not, boldness. A bunny girl pulled out of the magician's hat, so to speak.

Italians in Thailand/4: the shady guys

Good old S just came back to Pattaya, where he's gonna stay for the next six months. His girlfriend is pregnant and he wants to stay close to her. I meet him at the Big Buddha hill trail, where I go jogging in the evenings. He's got another one of his bombs in store for me.
A few months ago, still in Pattaya, he met another Italian, one of those wretches who scrape through life in a not-so-clear way. Apparently he seemed to be a nice, easy-going, honest guy. Just apparently. We - who are endowed with hindsight powers - won't call him the honest guy, but the shady one. One day the shady guy wants to walk S to his hotel. S hasn't got any particular reason to say no. Once in S's room the shady guy looks carefully around, then he remembers that he doesn't have any money on him and asks S if he can borrow a few baht. S agrees, after all it's just a little sum. The shady guy insistently looks at him when he goes to fetch his moneybox. Just in case, a little thoughtlessly though, S decided to carry a big amount of money with him, a few thousands euros, cash. The shady guy drops a sequence of funny comments, such as: "Why so furtive?" and "Oh Jesus, I see, look at that stack of banknotes!"

Lingua franca - Zurich, Switzerland

Even though my brother has been living in Zurich for years, he's never been able to learn German the proper way. He can say a few things, ask questions, tackle some basic conversation, little more than that. There are many reasons for this: he's often abroad and, even when he's in Switzerland, he only speaks English with his colleagues. Secondly, in Switzerland they don't speak "official" German but some sort of "mountain" dialect, not too easy to understand. There is also another reason why he never really studied the local language thoroughly, and it's a surprising one: anywhere he goes, a restaurant, a shop, a public office or even on the street, the probability that he meets someone who can speak Italian is very high indeed. And we're not talking about those coming from Ticino, the Italian speaking part of the country, 100% Swiss from many generations, proud of their origins and in some cases not too fond of the Italians. These are real Zurichers, people who come from the German part of Switzerland. One has to remember that most of the Italian immigration to Switzerland took place between 1945 and 1975, mostly from the north until 1960 and from the south later on. Nowadays in Zurich those who will address you in Italian are the children or grandchildren of people who came from Italy, or sometimes there won't even be a drop of Italian blood flowing in their veins: they just learned the language at school, from their friends, on holiday or out of interest.
When my brother first told me these things I couldn't realize what the magnitude of the phenomenon was. I have met quite a few Argentines, Brazilians, Americas or Australians whose ancestors came from Sicily, Veneto or Marche. They have an Italian surname, maybe an Italian passport as well, but they can only speak a dozen words in Italian. When I got to Switzerland I soon realized that the situation in that country was very different indeed.

Italians in Thailand/3: more on the seafront clique - Pattaya

Continued from here

And then there are non sex-related scams as well.

- "What did you say? Your visa is about to expire? No problem at all, we can arrange a return trip to the Cambodian border. It won't take more than two, three days at most. You pay us and we'll take care of everything...great, isn't it?" And then it's all a sequence of inflated prices: transportation, accommodation, immigration procedures, duty free, casino, meals, revelries, imitation Viagra and, if one cannot stay away from them even for a couple of nights, more hookers, just to have a taste of Khmer culture as well, besides the Thai one, because after all you don't get to know the world just by listening to what other people say, looking at it from behind a car window or reading a few pages of a travel guide: you need first hand experience, meeting the locals...that's the secret!

"Give me two more boxes of that generic Viagra then..."

I suppose that the whole trip will cost him no less than 10000 to 15000 baht (about 300-500 USD), but it might be much more depending on the vices the dupe will indulge on. If he only knew that various agencies in town organize visa runs by minivan, leaving at 6am and returning at about 3 pm on the same day, for a total of just 2000 baht (70 USD), including the Cambodian visa. They would only need to know ten English words. Or the help of an honest Italian, of course...

Italians in Thailand/2: the seafront clique - Pattaya

If you haven't done it yet you can read this propaedeutic post before you proceed.

"They are wretches, living hand to mouth. They loaf around the dolphins statue and are often arguing over one baht (equivalent to 1/30 of a dollar, or 3.3 cents, Fabio's note)"

That's how S' story starts. Not because this is the first thing he told me but as this is the most accurate and to the point description that he managed to give me of those scoundrels. Few key words with heavy implications: wretches, hand to mouth, loaf around, arguing, one baht.

Among the waves of the rough sea of faults that I've always tried to fight back, one of the few qualities I know I can count on is that of making people who have a story to tell trust me. Perhaps it's because I have never turned anybody down and people can feel that I don't have any intention to use their words against them: vibrations that reach their hearts, brains, souls - or whatever the element is where these sensors are hidden - and reassure them. Because S has got a whole sack of manure to empty: he has carried it around on his shoulder for too long but he doesn't want to unload it in front of someone who will use it to throw excrement at him. I only intend to take a look at it, maybe a little sniff so that I can tell you about it, but I definitely don't wanna handle it and hurl it at his face. That's why for the whole length of the story S will simply be called S. Which is not the initial of his name but of the word someone, just someone. And I will be very careful not to disclose any information that might lead to his identification, even though he did provide lots of details about himself and his past, some of them rather embarrassing. This post only wants to tell a (nasty) series of stories that in five or six years happened not only to S but to other Italians he met, and who knows to how many other people. And hopefully to forewarn those who might fall into the same traps. That's all. Here are the stories then...

Neglected promenade - Pattaya, Thailand

Pattaya's promenade could really be a nice place. Its wide walkway where one can stroll, jog or sit down and watch the bay, its palm trees and the colorful multi-ethnic turmoil behind. Even the scant depth of the beach, only a few meters, from this point of view can become an enriching element in the composition of the picture: those looking at the sea will enjoy the deceptive impression of a single-phase horizontal plane that, although veined and streaked with ripples and shades, within the macro-element framework (water, sky, headlands and hills) appears pretty much like a uniform body, with hues that depending on the hour and the weather conditions can vary from dirty sleet to rhino armor, passing through the various standard gradations of flask glass and summer alpine sky.

It could be a nice place, indeed. But it turns out to be one of the most decadent (if not even degraded) areas of Pattaya, which in turn is one of the most decadent cities in South East Asia. One should wonder why the authorities have decided to loosen their grip on it to such an extent, to ignore it altogether in a way, when there already are lots of red light districts in town, catering to vice lovers of various kind, and this area could be the perfect haven for the innocent side of the city tourism.

Italians in Thailand/1: the restaurateurs

Brain drain, one of the various plagues that have hit Italy in the last few years. Actually I think that it only hit the Italian media world, as scientists, economists, physicians, engineers, architects, artists and professionals in any sector have been leaving Italy to seek their fortune elsewhere for decades, maybe centuries. Not all of them, of course, but not just a few either.

I'm definitely not one of them. Maybe my brain did leave indeed, not Italy though, if it really left some place...that was my skull! At least that's what many people who know me affectionately thought after some of my reckless decisions.

Anyway, these waves of gray matter, unlike the oceanic ones of the 2004 tsunami, haven't hit the coasts of Thailand yet. Instead of highly gifted brains Italy sends over here swifts legs, delicate hands, sensitive fingers and extra fine taste buds: chefs, restaurant owners and managers, these are the professions that offer career opportunities for those Italians who want to move to Bangkok, Pattaya, Koh Samui and Phuket.

We're definitely not talking about a uniform host of good food professionals here. Personally I have identified four macro categories, probably still subdivisible into smaller groups, sometimes overlapping, with blurred edges and fluid definitions. Here they are: