Pattaya, city of sin and sleaze…

When the outside air temperature took a long nose at our body temperature in April of this year (after catching up to 4 degrees), my mother (73), my wife and I looked at each other and uttered the already winged words: “Let's get the fuck outta here…”

For hardened Bankokians is the nearest beach located near the good city of Pattaya, the illustrious Capital of Sleaze and Sin, put on the map some forty-five years ago by American GI Joe's, who were flown there for some well-deserved R&R, Rest and Recuperation, after being beaten to death by booby traps and Nacht und Nebel Vietcong ambushes. Little did many XNUMX-year-old American infantry soldiers know that other ambushes and booby traps awaited in Pattaya in the form of syphilus and the clam…

Pattaya has changed little in SE Asia since the American War, except that the GIs have taken on the guise of Western men who, in turn, have also been beaten down by multiple divorces, swelling beer bellies and ever-increasing heart disease, cholesterol levels and declining self-esteem.

You can see them walking on “Walking Street”, a kind of Kalverstraat “but different”, with girls on their arms, who could be their granddaughters; girls with hard, grim faces radiating the definition of ultimate boredom, while the beer bars and clubs crackle a maddening potpourri of house and techno up the narrow street in a volume that could destroy the earth.

"Let's sit there," Ning yelled, pointing to an almost empty terrace next to a club where 2 Russian ladies with haircuts "du H2O peroxide chic" had been hired to lure in the steady stream of wealthy, bearded Gulf State studs with sweet-voiced guttural and shivering. white meat.

"Good idea!!!" my mother yelled over the booming bass notes.

My mother has for centuries understood the art of knowing what is good for her.

A dwarf, dressed in an Egyptian pharaoh suit and decked out with a plastic faun tail, brought us the map and not much later we were sipping Saeng Som colas overlooking a Thai yellow-haired magician in a cowboy costume, making cigarettes and eggs disappear and reappear from the pockets and mouths of fascinated passers-by.

The peroxide girls had a whole battalion of Sikhs hanging on their lips and were gesticulating busily at an almost naked lady who was in high heels at the window on the second floor of the club in a profound entanglement with a chrome pole, the python who was bored around her neck, professionally ignoring.

My mother looked at it all approvingly.

Patthaya…never a dull moment.