SuperFreakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I’ve already talked about the first book of the series (Freakonomics) a few months back. In this new non fiction work the authors keep analyzing situations that apparently don’t have anything to do with economics, by using tools that are normally handled by economists.
The theme is still the same, only this time it is expanded, explained more in detail and displayed with new examples: human beings behave in response to incentives (positive or negative). Basically when we do or say something we are always trying to get some gain or avoid some loss, not necessarily tangible ones.

Angels my ass - Angeles, Philipines

If you ever happen to land at Angeles, Pampanga province, Luzon island, Philipines, don't let the name mislead you. You might think you've arrived to some garden in Paradise, but it actually is a rat hole full of prostitutes. I got the first hints when, asking about the rooms fares, at every hotel I was asked back: 'one or three hours, Sir?'
Angels my ass...

Yet another cynical post: the Thai prostitution myth

Penis rock and vagina rick at sunset, how romantic! (Koh Samui, Thailand)

This is the cynical post that I promised here.

Next time I see one of those cheese TV reports on prostitution in Thailand I swear I am going to puke. Of course the majority of western journalists are good professionals and I wouldn't dare say anything about them or their work. There are some, though, who should have their pens, laptops and tablets confiscated. A bunch of low level word-workers who rely on trite myths and stereotypes to justify the salaries their editors give them.
Those that for years have told us the story of the poor Thai girls taken advantage of or even enslaved by old and slimy sexual tourists are among the most sly.
It's hard for me to believe that they have really been in Thailand, collected evidence, looked around, tried to understand and finally got it all wrong that way. It must somehow be intentional. They must have based what they wrote on hearsay, relying on some urban legend or isolated tear-jerking case in order to achieve some sensationalist effect and exploit the overwhelming Western hypocrisy. Reading Michel Houllebecq could provide some inspiring ideas on the subject. On the other hand it is quite unlikely that over the years I've only come across exceptional cases. I got to an apparently arrogant yet unequivocal conclusion: I just know more than them about this subject.

How to fuck up a nice place - Koh Samui, Thailand

Beach party

My fingertips are itching. I need to write a couple of cynical posts, and the first one is going to be about the Thai island of Koh Samui: the perfect example of a heavenly place that have been fucked up in just a few years. 
I've been coming to Chaweng beach for about ten years. I remember well the impression I got the first time I got here: a beautiful bay with white sand, clear water and tropical vegetation. Lively at night: a few pubs with live music and screens for sport events, a couple of discos where you could spot a certain number of hookers but also a lot of "normal" customers, including Thais, and a few bars. The general atmosphere was still very simple, in line with the rural origins of the country: a lot of street food stalls, mototaxis that could take you anywhere for a small fee, songthaews - something in between a taxi and a bus - authentic local markets, nice people, some funny odd ones, smiles, coziness. I liked it a lot. I'm neither the no-electricity-faraway-island type of tourist nor the luxury resort one. Koh Samui was just the right mix. 

Unexpected hostility against the pedestrians - Hong Kong

A fisherman at Hong Kong harbor and the hazy skyline in the background

It's Sunday night and Lan Kwai Fong is not very lively. To be honest I'm not very fond of the place. In the weekends it gets crowded with assholes all dressed up, driving their fathers' expensive cars and, stamped on their bulldog faces, an arrogant expression that seems to say: "I have all this because I deserve it. Because I am what I am and you are a heap of shit!" And the bouncers - poor bastards who get paid nothing and treated badly, maybe with their work permit hanging from that lousy job - who back them up, always watching whether your shoes are shining, your shirt is freshly ironed and starched, if you smell like misery or have a misfit look, a wanker one or, even worse, both of them. On workdays they can't afford to be too picky though; they invite you to go in, and if you're wearing flip flops and undershirt they will still try to humiliate you, but in a more pathetic way: "Hey, that's not good..." they'll say as they spitefully pinch your shirt with two fingertips "...next time you dress better, OK?" Yeah, sure, next time I'll spray a couple of drops of Eau de Manure on the redneck shirt I'll be wearing. Get out of my way...you asshole, minion and pitiful loser.

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.

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.

A minor (and kind of grotesque) version of Pattaya, - Angeles, Philippines

Same as Pattaya, worse than Pattaya

Dingy hotels whose customers get back drunk at night hanging from the boobs of some hooker, short-time rooms smelling like various types of body waste, fake viagra and cialis dealers, mignon beggars, midgets or kids, with hands constantly outstretched, their half-hidden wives or mums watching and poking them, soul-cannibals driving creative taxis, the local version of Walking Street announced by a giant banner at the entrance, bar-beers and bar-ladies (almost all of them single mothers), go-go bars where naked girls with flat, shrunk or operated breast pole-dance on a imitation marble counter, and then a sequence of indefinable places, in an unstable balance on the edge of too many categories, cops who pretend they are keeping order in the middle of absolute chaos, bald whore-mongers, swollen with steroids, wearing leather jackets, chains and tattoos, old disabled guys to whom the prostitutes are more caretakers than sex partners. 
The same humanity adrift, putrescent soul scum along the perimeter of a floating social dump, that same last-stop-before-the-psycho-spiritual-terminal feeling. Even the word "decadence", here, cannot be used as an explanation, but has to be explained itself.

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.

Adieu Pattaya!

The luminous sign on the hill overlooking Walking Street

It's time to leave Pattaya. The Italian friend of mine who works here and who often had me as a guest at his place this year has been transferred to the Chinese branch of his company. The relocation activities are almost over, we just have to complete some immigration paperwork for his dog and then we'll be done. He will fly to Shanghai, I will switch back to my beloved semi-nomadic mode. I can foresee lots of traveling, when I won't have to teach my courses. Mostly overland, the only way to enjoy what's in between places A and B, besides A and B themselves.
I cannot complain too much about this city. My friend was very hospitable and his house is fantastic. The pace of life, distances, traffic and even landscape are more on a human scale than, let's say, Bangkok, which is just 2 hours away. The beach and the sea water are not that good, actually they are rather bad but, hey, it's still the sea. The type of tourism and nightlife, invasive prostitution, corruption, rampant materialism and the heavily sleazy atmosphere will soon turn it into an unbearable place though. 
I'm fuckin' outta here. As some guys who are more interested in the model of bandanna or tank top they wear, the visibility of a tattoo or of their pectorals, their dreadlocks or the right tilt of their caps than the quality of the stuff that comes out of their mouths like to say. 
Goodbye Pattaya! Bizarre and often indecent anecdotes...you've told me a lot, and a lover of stories as I am can only be grateful for that. One thing is sure though: I don't think I will miss you, for a while at least.

PS I won't hear any new creepy Pattaya stories for a while, but that doesn't mean that I've already written every one I know. There will be other posts-humous on the subject. 

Passage-brothels in Brickfields - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Photo of a passage-brothel, taken hurriedly and on the sly

Brickfields is a neighborhood close to Kuala Lumpur central station (KL Sentral, yes, with "S"). Unlike other areas of the center it has remained rather untouched by the waves of modernity that altered large parts of the city, even though the imposing lines of skyscrapers and infrastructures besiege it assiduously. The district is home to a picturesque Little India, budget hotels, little multi-ethnic restaurants, street stalls and places of worship, including numerous Christian churches. 
The most bizarre joints, though, are a series of long and narrow passages facing the sidewalks. The entrance half-hidden by a rag used as a curtain, a pale pink light coming out of the clear sides, from which it is possible to peep at a sequence of run-down doors, each one watched over by a scantily-clad lady leaning on a doorpost or seated on a plastic stool. A pimp with the typical attitude of a human-spider (I was about to write spiderman, but I've read comics and watched cartoons and I know what the difference between good and evil is) is sitting or standing just outside. The customers enter and leave the places quite hurriedly, perhaps to comply with their embarrassment. Other people, with countenances ranging from the shady to the cutthroat, loaf around yelling, laughing, jeering at or shoving each other. A summary of urban social dreariness.
Family-run tiny brothels: in some of them you can even catch a glimpse of a kitchen and, in the back, as in every respectable Chinese house, a small and colorful Buddhist shrine. There are dozens of them, shameless, dismal, dirty, undisturbed. 
The pimps invite the passersby to take a look at the offers of the day. I often walk past some of them and am systematically ignored. I might cherish the fond hope that I am different from those other men, that I don't have the whoremonger's demeanor, but I know better than to fool myself like that. The shares of sexy man! and handsome guy! - all of them strictly fake -, that over the years the Thai bar-ladies have yelled at me too, wouldn't allow me to do that. 

Soi Country Club, the right place for adultery - Pattaya, Thailand

The name is misleading: Soi Country Club. Soi in Thai means alley, but this is a road, long and crowded, lined up with shops, restaurants, resorts, a golf and a polo club, a riding school, the Pattaya Utd stadium and a lake - the Mabprachan - where people come for a short trip, sometimes even at night. Yes, at night. Along the southern shore, in fact, there is a line of bars with nice ladies who won't resist like a sieged medieval fort if a man approaches them, and then beer, music, pool tables, even ladyboys, just like the red-light districts downtown. That's the interesting part: who would want to come here, from downtown? Who is going to drive ten kilometers just to enjoy a lousy and limited version of what can be found a few hundred meters from home? 

The answer is not a secret for those who've been living here for years: it's those men, engaged or married, who need a safe place to surrender to the pleasures of adultery without feeling paranoid. The area also offers short-time motels and sauna/massage centers where the hands - and maybe something else - of other obliging ladies will take care of each single spot of their customers' bodies. 

Two kilometers ahead the motorbike noise is partially muffled by the cries of some school children. Not only the bike is slowing down here: progress also downshifts and starts creep driving. It's not so much a matter of technology or fashion, as of details and atmosphere. Red dust, flip-flops, corrugated roofs, slanting bamboo poles, the conflict between those old shacks and the surrounding vegetation that still seems it might end either way. It smells like Cambodia, Laos, maybe even Burma, right here in old Siam!

Then a truck puffs black smoke and raises a cloud of dust. In a matter of seconds the road becomes a swollen torrent of motorbikes, cars, traffic lights, with whirlpools of horns, whistles and concrete, that flows all foamy into the six-lane basin of Sukhumvit, with its megamalls, supermarkets, interchanges, crossroads and service areas. 

We're back to the beginning…it's already the end. 

The end of the month - Pattaya, Thailand

Sometimes circumstances can generate some problems. Within the scope of these problems a new saying is born, a thought that captures, even with a little irony, a photo of an era. In Italy these times of crisis have given birth to the expression non arrivare a fine mese. It is a metaphor, a play on words, in fact its literal translation in English - "not being able to reach the end of the month" - makes little sense. Everybody, unless they die, can reach the end of the month. What people who use that sentence actually mean is that their salary will not last until the end of the month, as due to the high cost of living they will have spent it all before that. However, is that really so?

I am under the impression that - leaving a number of extreme, real and tragic cases aside - most of those who say that are indulging in one of Italy's favorite pastimes: dramatization of events.

On one hand it is true that due to the effects of the economic crisis and price increase the spending power of an average salary tends to decrease, on the other hand it must be noticed that many people don't easily give up their satellite TV subscription, touchscreen phone, expensive car, classy scooter, drinks at expensive bars, dinners, nice shoes, trendy jeans. Quitting a few of these habits would allow them to reach the end of the month with no need to hold their breath. 

R - an Italian guy who came to Thailand to spend his holidays - met T at the fruit stall where she works. They soon started dating: she often goes to see him at his hotel and he also had a chance to visit her place. A studio apartment in a condominium, or I'd better call it a mini-studio apartment, as it's just a four by three meter cubicle.

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.

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.

Vulture-like place - Bangkok, Thailand

Photo by adaptorplug (CC)

One can say that every bad place is bad in its own way and when it comes to bad places Bangkok offer is one of the widest worldwide. Take the movie The Hangover part II for instance, which is based here: even though it's filled with unlikely situations it still provides a very realistic - often real - panorama of decadent joints.
Although I have been regularly coming to Bangkok for ten years I still need the assistance of M. - a friend of mine who is just a tourist, an occasional visitor - to find one that can still surprise me. I'ts not only about the bars with the theme dressed up girls, the ping pong show joints, the ladyboy cabarets, the go-go bars, the erotic massage parlors, the disco-pubs and the after-hour clubs with the free lance hookers. Not only Patpong, Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy then...in Bangkok you can also find stuff like this.
As soon as I get in I shudder as one does when coming across something that charms us just as it revolts us. In a way it could fit into the last of the categories listed above, as the girls don't work for the owner of the bar, or maybe they do it but just indirectly, without getting a wage or instructions and orders. However, some of the peculiar features of the place and the dynamics of the social relations suggest to create a dedicated category in order to classify it.
Some details - the table, the movements and the sober appearance of the waiters - remind of some Bavarian taverns. The counter could be the one of a town festival, with a drink list hanging from the wall behind the panting and vaguely improvised bartenders. The widespread use of wood, tiles, neon lights and cheesy pictures of famous sites (the leaning tower of Pisa, the Coleseum, the Arc de Triomphe) bring back to mind some Italian bars of the '60s and the '70s. The ingredient that interrupts this journey of the imagination through comparisons with faraway places is obviously the presence of dozens of women. Some of them have already lived all the days of their splendor but the number of pretty and young ones - according to M. - has increased since the last time he was here.
The air is leaden with a slightly dismal atmosphere, like a cattle market in lean times. "It's a vulture-like place", is M.'s comment, and even if you are not familiar with the expression as soon as you set a foot in here you understand its meaning straight away.
Most of the ladies are arranged in a semicircle, shoulder to shoulder, leaning against the walls or the furniture of the half of the room that faces the entrance. They are wearing office or evening dresses, they have nice hairstyles and are soberly made up, no vulgar or pornographic details, the hottest ones are hot in a rather discreet way. Only few of them sit at the tables scattered around or at the huge counter that curves at the center of the hall. This is where the majority of the customers are, many of them visibly bored, almost disinterested, sipping beer, chatting with friends or looking around, not necessarily at the women.
What a difference between this place and the traditional venues of the Thai sex industry! Decadence here is a matter of design more than of ethics. The indecent element is missing and the libido as well, disappeared with the exaggerated theatricality, the vulgar colors, the blinding lights and the deafening sounds. Now and then an invisible DJ plays some songs but for interminable minutes the only soundtrack of this grotesque movie is the hum, the clincking of glasses, the squeaking of stools, the background noise of a nigthclub at closing time, when the lights are switched on and the last song fades away while the patrons still linger inside.
The ladies keep trying to make eye contact. Most of the time the customers give a hint of a smile and then look away. Or they look away without even the lenitive effect of the faint smile. Probably this is only something that I feel for them though: the girls seem to be already accustomed to this kind of reaction.
Once in a while a man calls one of them. A little startled she - and sometimes also the one that stands next to her - answers: "Who, me?". And then she walks the five or six meters that separate her from what turns out to be more than a customer: he's a firefighter in a building ablaze, a Saint Bernard at the site of an avalanche, a lifeguard in the rough sea. In short, he's some kind of savior. With this pace, though, only 5% of them will be saved: they are too many and too little seems to be the attention they manage to attract. The remaining 95% will have to go back home and hold on to their poor little daily job, if they have one. As we will learn later on through a friend of M.'s, in fact, most of these part-time employees of the sex industry have very common occupations and the younger ones often turn out to be students.
The Japanese customers seem to know something that the others don't: when they call a girl, she comes over and starts to talk their language. A very enterprising approach indeed.
Once we've finished our beers, before leaving we go to the toilet, a filthy hole in the basement in line with the style of the place. A rusty gutter along the tiled wall serves as a urinar. Next to it there are two of those disgusting Asian cubbyholes for the ladies. The customers have to pay five baht per entry but with twenty baht you have unlimited access for the whole night. In order for the investment to be profitable one needs to go to the lavatory more than four times: who can resist in here for so long? Another tip will also disclose the secret that shrouds those couples that instead of walking down to the underworld of the pig pens climb the stairs in the opposite direction: upstairs there is a cheap by-the-hour hotel where more or less obscene transactions are carried out.
We leave the place and as soon as we're outside Bangkok slaps us with a blow of heat, humidity, smells and noise which suddenly delivers us from that weird torpor that had mantled us. It's as if the vulture-like place had narcotized us. Perhaps we were just stunned but it is also possible that it was another spell of a city endowed with mysterious powers.
After all they call it City of Angels: the metaphysic ingredient must be hidden somewhere.

The survivors - Bangkok, Thailand

The survivors. I owe the naming to someone else, but I've known who they are for many years. I've seen people who strive for a living in China, or who vegetate among garbage on the streets in India, poor in Cambodia, criminals in Brazil, but most of the survivors survive in Thailand. They live on the edge, walking with elegance on a line that runs high between luxury and poverty. They don't have a job yet they do almost everything, they escape every category borrowing something from each one. They are proud and dignified, they think high of themselves, they have a reputation and won't do silly things. Everything is calculated, profitable, respectable. Sometime they might extort some money from man, but even if they sleep with a guy they don't like, both the target and the venue are chosen with care. You can't call them whores, it wouldn't be fair, as you don't do it with girls who do the same thing elsewhere. They help a businessman finding his clients, or assist an agent in closing a deal, they help their friends when the workload is huge. You stare at them and you're amazed: they look so strong, with a purpose, a straight mind. They know what they want and how to get it, they dress with style and that look in their eyes...

But you must remember that they are only girls, sometimes they screw up, they make a mistake and all of a sudden they look so fragile. Don't be surprised if they are looking for you. They can read people and they've done it with you. They are not after your money, you're not the right type. They are confident, sociable, the world revolves around them, but deep down inside sometimes they feel lonely and they need someone like you to stand by their side. I said someone like you, yes, just like you.

Photo "Woman's curls" by Nishan, from Allposters.com

Soundless emotions - Phuket, Thailand

The mini-van driver enters the lobby, takes a quick look and shouts: "Airport! Airport!". I grab my backpack and follow him. When I'm out of the hotel I hear some cries, I turn around but there's nothing wrong. Suddenly the driver starts to run, holding a bag in his right hand. Half a minute later he's already back and he places that bag in the trunk of the van. He's noticed the confusion in his passengers' looks and tries to explain what that was about: "He...no talk. He...look lady..."

He looks disappointed by our blank stares, drops further explanations and shuts the door. A few seconds later a foreigner with bleached hair walks in our direction at a quick pace: he slides the door with excessive strength and chooses the seat right in front of me. Then he turns around, stares at something behind us, stretches an arm, points an accusing finger and with escalating anger starts to give out some sounds: "Ngh! Hmn! Ngh!" We all turn to watch but there is nothing to see. We are all overcome by a sense of embarrassment and we start to pretend that we're doing other things.

The best hour of the day - Patong beach, Thailand

Patong doesn't have the reputation of an atoll, but sometimes at 5 it has a burst of pride. A quiver runs over the profile of the beach. After having put up with the heat for a day, fended off touts and standed the kids, the majority of the beach-goers pack up and leave.

Young Thai men, with dark skin and tattoos, close the umbrellas and pile up the lounge chairs. There are people who like to go for a swim, those who moor their boats to a tree and others with earphones who jog on the shore. The gay colleagues of the Bangla Road hookers start to play volleyball with their yesterday's clients.

At last everyone has some space for himself. I open my book and lie down on the sand. Some minutes later I finish a chapter, I bookmark the page and look at the gulf. The sun is setting as if it was solid and falls like an egg yolk on the foamy clouds. Steel and flames are slicing the sky, moving in parallel with the faded horizon. After the retreat of the high-season horde, the sand and the plants have reappeared in the picture. A golden cloud has shrouded us: the magic of the tropics, their atmosphere is back.