RAWBangkok

This blog has no central theme… just a few ideas all squished together.

Closing out the weekend with My Goodbye Girl

My Goodbye Girl (GG) spent three days with me, leaving my room at 9:30 this morning, about 6 hours earlier than I’d anticipated.  I wrote earlier about our night out on Thursday; on Friday night we went to Isaan Tawandaeng.

GG is from Isaan, and I had expected her to love Isaan Tawandaeng.

Not so.

Her first disapproving comment came as we approached and she saw the plain exterior.  “This is it?” she asked.  I got the feeling that there was disapproval in her tone.

The next hint was when we had been inside for a few minutes and she commented on the high percentage of gay men and ladyboys in the place.  I looked around.  She was right… it looked like a YMCA convention.  There were so many flamers the building should have been on fire.

I’m not sure whether this has been the case on my other visits and I simply didn’t notice, or if it was a special night.  I think it’s more likely the former.

In any event, GG wasn’t impressed and her tone showed it.

The third strong tip came when she turned to me and said, “I thought they would be playing hip hop.”  This was so unexpected that I laughed out loud.  She grimaced.

Basically, Isaan Tawandaeng is a country-style club with live Isaan music, dancing and singing.  It is generally a raucous affair with customers on their feet singing and dancing.  There are usually about 8 dancers squeezed onto the medium sized stage in front of the live band.  The choreography is usually simple, and often not well executed, with costumes that tend to be on the sexy side of simple.

As a general thing I am usually fairly pleased with the musicians and unimpressed with the dancers.  IT was much the same on Friday night until around 11:45 when a dancer appeared onstage who was all grace and fluid movement.  She was also beautiful.  It was as if God called all the human engineers together and said, “Design me a girl who was born to dance”.  She was astonishingly talented.

Inexplicably she appeared for one or two songs, where she was featured front and center, then disappeared from the stage not to be seen again.

For me she was worth the effort to get to Khlong Tan from Sukhumvit.

But aside from that it was a fairly forgettable evening. We stayed about 2 1/2 hours, but at several points both of us (me and Goodbye Girl) were drifting off to sleep.

This was so different from the reaction of all the other Isaan girls that I’d ever taken here that I was a bit confused.  In any event I made the best of it by taking her home and having sex with her.  A vast improvement over my unconcious act of the night before.

Saturday morning she cooked me breakfast for the second day in a row and we went shopping in the afternoon.  I bought her some shoes, pants and sweaters in anticipation of her trip to Europe and as a ‘thank you’ for the weekend.  She rewarded me when we got back to the room by trying on the high heels naked.  I never knew a pair of shoes could look so good!

We chatted last night, and she told me she had to take off fairly early today.  I understood, so I made a special effort to make our last sex together a memorable experience for me.

MFGG and typing

My Favorite Go Go Dancer hasn’t gone to Europe yet; in fact her beau hasn’t yet arrived in Bangkok, but she is doing what he asked and not working anymore.

I’ve chatted with her on the phone a couple of times.

Today she is travelling back to Isaan to visit her parents before flying out of Thailand this month.  I sent her an SMS earlier to give her a bit of interesting information, and about 90 seconds later I got a three-sentence SMS in reply.

This was notable for only one reason: not a long time ago she borrowed my computer to check her email.  She had a message in her inbox from a Thai girl she knows who lives in France.  She wanted to type a reply, but asked me to help her.

Why is this worth mentioning?  Because both the message in her inbox and the one she wanted to write were in Thai language.  She struggled badly trying to peck out her reply, tying to find the Thai characters on my keyboard (though they are marked as large and clearly as the English).

I actually type in Thai better than she does.

So we have the curious situation where this girl gets tons of practice typing SMS messages in English on her phone so that she is fairly adept at it, but is nearly incapable of writing a sentence in her native language on the keyboard.  This is not to say she can’t read, write or spell… just that she doesn’t have any typing skills on a computer, though she’s pretty quick with the phone keys in English.

It’s a small thing, but somehow it seems the kind of small thing that says a lot about the lives of bar girls.

I’ve decided I’m not “fat”, I’m “stocky”

The precipitating event came in late June when I went trekking in the mountains of Chaing Mai.  I dragged my ass up and down the mountains in pure misery, dying with every step.

By the end, I had determined that I simply had to lose weight.  And I did.  I dropped 4 or 5 kilos almost immediately by going on a strict diet.  Upon my return to Bangkok in mid-July I walked into my favorite restaurant to shouts from all the people working there saying how slender I looked.

Wow.  That was good.

But I put the weight back on through a combination of too much beer and too much food here in Bangkok.  By mid-August I was the heaviest I’ve ever been at 125 kilos (275 pounds).  I started realizing that I was winded from walking up a flight of steps and that it was difficult to reach down and tie my shoelaces.  This was bad.

I began a diet plan built loosely around three concepts:

1. Stop drinking beer for most practical purposes.  Aim for mostly water.

2. Cut down my food intake.  Learn to enjoy the feeling of being ‘hungry’.

3. Increase the distances and frequency of my walking.

In the first ten days or so I shed 3 kilos easily.   Mostly beer weight I think.

Then I continued to drop steadily until I was down to 117 in early November.

And then the weight lost stopped. For a period of a month or more I hovered at 117.  My body had given up the easy kilos… now it was gonna hold on.

I didn’t panic… just stayed with the program.  Then, just after I returned from my holiday weekend in Kanchanaburi province the weight started dropping off again.  I shifted my diet to a bit more protien, which helped I think.  I started emptying my bowels three, even four, times per day.

Four days ago I was 115 kilos.  After a weekend with the Goodbye Girl I stepped on the scale today and weighed in at 113.6 kilos.

That’s what I weighed when I moved to Thailand four years ago, so it marks a threshold for me.  If I can knock off 1 more kilo, then I will be moving back into the territory where getting up the stairs and tying my shoelaces do not present any challenge at all.

I’ve decided that 113 kilos represents the threshold where I can change my self-description from “fat” to “stocky” (which means the same, but sounds slightly better).

When I lived in Australia I spent three sessions a week with a personal trainer, and I was fairly fit.  I miss those sessions, and it has a lot to do with my run to flabbiness over the past 40 months or so.

But my buddy Penfold, the gym junkie, is returning to Bangkok in about 5 weeks.  He has offered to get me into the gym and whip me into shape again.  At this point I have set a goal of reaching 110 kilos ahead of his arrival.

My following goal is to spend February, March, April and May doing the remedial work of getting fit again.  My target is to get to 104 kilos by the 1st  of June, and have enough strength and wind to do the Chiang Mai mountain trekking that defeated me so badly a year earlier.

I reckon dropping a total of 21 kilos (46 pounds) and doing enough cardiovascular exercise should get me to that goal.

I have photos of myself in 1994 when I was packing to move from the US to Australia.  I weighed 96 kilos then, and to my eye now I look sickly in the photos.  Ninety six kilos on my tall and big-boned frame seems just too frail.  104 feels like a good target, though I suspect that even 100 kilos would be okay.

So there you go; Werewolf is now aging, balding & “stocky” and about a dozen kilos away from considering himself reasonably fit.

What did that stupid tee shirt say?