They just have different rules - Thailand (with some photos)

Everything...no rules! Actually they only seem to have guide books

One arrives to Thailand and soon starts to spot the differences. How hot…in December! It was snowing back home. Everything is so cheap, you can eat with a dollar…with that money I can't even get a coffee where I come from. And finally the most surprising of them all: everything that is forbidden where we come from is allowed here, or at least tolerated. In the worst case scenario you can buy it with a bribe.
You can purchase pirated DVDs and software in broad daylight. Fake driving licenses, university degrees and membership cards of various type. Imitation jeans, shirts and bags. You can display the sign of an illegal business and nobody says anything about it. You can spot four people without helmets and a dog riding a motorbike, and the police is fine with that. Twenty kids in the back of a pick up truck, instead of hiding, are all laughing and singing. After 2am bars cannot sell alcoholic drinks but if your beer is poured in a paper cup or a coffee mug then it's alright. Nightclubs are competing for who pays the biggest bribe to the police, so that they can stay open until late and the competitors are forced to close early. And then sex, orgies, viagra, cialis, kamagra, women…young, old, fantastic, horrible, shameless or chaste women. Yeah, here you can even find chaste hookers. And then homosexuals, bisexuals, transexuals. Even asexual ones.
Hey, I can do anything I want here - the newcomer inspired by promises of freedom and impunity will be thinking - this is great! Hooray! And his holiday soon turns into a sequence of troubles.

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.

Disappointment

Are you looking at that girl?
Yeah...wow!
Do you like her?
Well, of course!
Do you wanna know something more about her?
Sure! Why not?
All right, her vagina...
Oh come on man...don't be rude...
Hold on...let me finish...her vagina, if she has one, is many years younger than she is...
Huh? How...what...but...oh shit...what the fuck...

Photo of a ladyboy bar beer in Chiang Mai by .the guarded eye. (CC)

Unexpected implications - Pattaya, Thailand

Hard to believe as it may seem I think that it has actually already happened: the average daily number of Russian tourists in Pattaya might have exceeded that of local hookers, or so it seems, at least in the high season. And apparently the figures are only bound to increase. I mean, in Pattaya...of all places!

The city tourism has been based on the cheap and easy offer of sex for decades, since the Vietnam war times, when the American GIs used to come here for rest, distraction and leisure.