From Durga Temple to Sin CIty

It has been three weeks since I landed in Bangkok and although I know this is one of the hub for prostitution centers, I had not come across one yet.

Yesterday, I finally decided to get together with a friend from Wellesley College whom I met about a year and half ago at a CGI U conference. She is in Bangkok for 10 weeks for a research. It is such coincidence that we both came to BKK around same time. I called her from my office after lunch and asked her what kind of food she would want for dinner. She said that she was craving for Indian food (not surprising at all since she is from India). It was fine with me because I love Indian food, to be more precise, my hometown is 10 minute walk from the India/Nepal border so I can qualify as an Indian. Many vendors often come to me and start greeting me in Hindi, thinking I am Indian. After speaking with her, I went and asked my couple other friends at office who are also here for internships what they wanted for dinner. My Chinese friend said that she was okay with anything and my South Indian friend said that she was craving for South Indian food. Since Indian is common in both Indian and South Indian phrases, I decided that we should go for South Indian. We looked online and found that Silom area had a lot of them.

My Chinese friend got a bad headache after lunch so I headed to Silom with my South Indian friend. We took the boat and the sky train and waited for my Wellesley friend at the BTS. After her arrival, we all got together and found a nice pure vegetarian Indian/South Indian restaurant called Sagar. We ordered all kinds of Dosa, Idli, Sambar, Curd Rice, etc. It is true that I am not an expert on South Indian food and hence my friends got to make fun of me when I mentioned I had never had Idli and Sambar before. Also, the food was pretty hot for me so I did not qualify as an Indian although I look like one with my brown skin. After dinner, we came across a South Indian temple, where I hardly recognized Goddess Durga because she was not riding a tiger. My South Indian friend was delighted to speak in Tamil with the priests. In the mean time, my Wellesley friend was talking about her MIT friends who were also in BKK in her research program and that she wanted to introduce them to us one day.

After our temple journey, we wanted to check out the shops that were across the road and hence we crossed it. There were lines of tshirts, jeans, hand bags and purses from fake designers such as Paul Smith, Prada, Gucci, and so on. My Wellesley friend wanted to buy a wallet and so we stopped at a shop. The vendor lady said the price to be 400 Baht ($13). But she wanted to pay $7 so we were busy bargaining. A creepy hoarse whisper came to her ears, "Ping Pong Show." Thank God I had some background information on that from my friends or else I might have been interested. We looked around and found ourselves standing at the center of bars and clubs with half naked women and creative bikinis. We quickly bought the purse and rushed passed the market with at least ten people offering us deals for the show on our way. We quickly took a right turn and found ourselves in the middle of red light area. My friends wanted to drink and one of them suggested a road side building but before we could enter, we saw a lady with a flyer in her hand that had at least 20 girls picture on them, all kinds, from Asian to European. A woman approached me with a flyer and I scowled at her thinking, "Do I look like I am attracted to women?" only to find that she was holding a flyer with food selections. HAHA. We also found an area that said hot male, dream boys, etc. As soon as we exited the road, we bumped in my Wellesley friend's MIT friends that she had been talking about all this time. It was strange connecting faces to their stories.

It was a fun night with so many adventures and our journey from a South Indian temple to the Red Light Area.