first of all: i'm certain the SMS was sent by some guy besotted by the Ant who grabbed her phone while she was in the shower or something. she probably did not know about it (i assume he deleted it after he sent it) or she would have mentioned it...unless she was just too ashamed or embarrassed. if she did find about it of course she knew who it was...but whoever it was literally just came and went. it cd have been a prank, but it had a nasty edge to it.
she was always working at a strip club, so it was just-some-guy. at the time there were rumors that you could hire a hitman in LOS for a few thousand
baht, of course the mainstream media loves this type of skank, but at that time u ran into this "bargain-priced-assassin" urban legend everywhere. so the SMS-guy was just triangulating the most base Bangkok info and figured it'd terrify me. i just waited until she called me...it was an ordeal biding my time, u know, of course there's only
ONE available woman in Bangkok, and if i even thought about her magic bullets would riddle my body! eeek!
and i wrote it down, along with some other SMSs. have a little file of verbatim missives...while the big stuff does stick in my consciousness, can't take credit for the details.
@ p310: you've NEVER BEEN to Cobra Swamp? it's been the international airport for Bangkok since its opening in 2006. took awhile: "as early as 1968, critics were already charging that the project was "five to seven years" behind the main schedule"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suvarnabhumi_Airport
these two paragraphs speak volumes about Thailand:
"The airport was due to open in late 2005, but a series of budget overruns, construction flaws, and allegations of corruption plagued the project.
A further problem was the belief that the airport was haunted by spirits, and sightings of ghosts by superstitious construction workers, so that on 23 September 2005, the Thai airports authority held a ceremony with 99 Buddhist monks chanting prayers to calm these spirits."
then again, so do these two:
"Petty thieves and confidence men, the majority of them illegal taxi drivers or tour guides, are known to prey on tourists in the arrival hall. They belong to politically-well connected criminal groups: Kamnan Samruay, Boonruang Srisang, Sak Pakphanang, the Pattaya Mafia and Phuyai Daeng. Evicting them has proved difficult as they allegedly are well connected (the head of the Pirap gang is supposedly related to an AoT executive, while the Phuyai Daeng has ties to influential civil servants in Samut Prakan).
On October 1, 2010, two hundred armed men occupied the airport's parking area for an hour, blocking the building's entrances and seizing ticket booths to collect fares from motorists. Airport security personnel failed to respond, reportedly because an internal dispute within the Parking Management Co., the firm contracted to run the parking facilities." welcome to Thailand.
corruption is endemic in Asia, of course you have to pay a bit of "black money" sometimes or things will never happen. can it be there's corruption OUTSIDE of Asia? shocker!!
the prob with Thai corruption: it's not only slipshod, but admired. it's so entrenched that Thais figure if u have influence, you SHOULD wield it for financial gain. it cd be argued that this attitude helps create the environment where ripping off
farang is not only OK, but admired. it's not so fundamentally different from winning big on a stock-sale, or at the racetrack, which are "OK" by Western standards.
but, u slip an envelope of red Maos into the right pocket, a project gets
done. much Thai strong-arming HINDERS their efforts to improve the country, or even screws up already-built properties. like when they built that elevated-highway inthe early 90s--the day before it was scheduled to open, Thai interests declared they'd changed their minds and would be charging a different toll than agreed upon in the contract. their partners refused, so for nine months it sat empty, baking in the sun, while below, ordinary Thais waited for hours in traffic jams. there are other examples: the Hopewell train project, for example. self-foot-bullet-inflection seems built into the system, cuz it sure happens a lot. let's occupy the airport for 8 days, whee! dingbat party! oh gosh, Uncle Somchai's tourist business just failed!! why?
since you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing Asia's 5th busiest airport, p310, here's a(nother) taste:
"In 2009, Ireland warned its citizens to be on guard while browsing in the airport's shops. "We have received reports that innocent shoppers have been the subject of allegations of suspected theft and threatened that their cases will not be heard for several months unless they plead guilty and pay substantial fines," the Irish government wrote in a travel advisory, which also advised shoppers to retain all receipts to "avoid great distress."
Britain and Denmark also posted online advisories about hard-to-detect demarcation lines between shops in Suvarnabhumi's sprawling duty-free zone and warned shoppers to be alert about carrying unpaid merchandise across the lines."
"sprawling duty-free zone." heh. be sure to allow enough time to get to your departure gate (where NOTHING is for sale). it's curious how Thais can be so xenophobic and simultaneously worship "luxury" branded shite from Europe and elsewhere. think about that as yr hauling yr luggage past hundreds of meters of Ferragagucci shops with 5-6 employees in each, standing around chatting because there's nothing else to do.
JtB
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Last edited by JackTheBat at 23-4-2011 12:16 ]
