Luck be a Ladyboy Tonight

Sunday, December 22, 2015

I woke up Monday morning with no voice. That is code for “I got drunk and screamed a lot” Sunday night. “Screamed a lot” is code for “I took shots and yelled WHOOOOOO SHOTS!’. A lot. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.  Here is a teaser pic:

Let’s start with zip lining. The crew and I were picked up around 9am and driven about an hour outside of the city for some zip lining. We arrived to a big group of people waiting around to zip. I was cringing on the inside, because a large group of people zip lining at one time can only mean one thing – extreme inefficiency. And it only gets worse if you have a wimp in your group who cries at every platform. Luckily, all of these people were doing “package A”, which is about 4 hours of zip lining. I can’t do anything for four hours save for laying in bed watching TV and eating Panda Express while nursing a hangover. So we opted for the 2 hours course. There was only one couple doing the short course with us. They were, of course, (1) late and (2) Chinese selfie-taking fiends. Homegirl was taking selfies while they were trying to harness her up. The guides hated her immediately. I love when other people hate the same people I do. It just makes me feel validated in my bitchiness.

So off we went on the zip lining course. It was nothing too exciting – none of the zip lines were crazy long. Just some good old harmless fun. I got some good videos on the go pro and some group selfies. You are probably wondering what is the difference between my selfie stick and Chinese tourist lady’s selfie stick, right? Well let me enlighten you. (1) Mine has a go pro at the end of it, which makes me instantly more cool and far superior than her and that cheap Samsung phone selfie stick. (2) Extreme narcism. This chick made her husband pay extra to have a professional photographer zip line with them so they would have pictures throughout the course. And she STILL used her selfie stick the entire time. Just in case the photog didn’t get enough shots of her making kissy faces at the camera. I however, use my go pro for the good of the group, and am essentially the group photographer. Sure I get a few selfies, but that’s just because if I didn’t you wouldn’t even know I was there. And (3) The sheer volume. If I had to guess, I’d say that girl walked away with about 300 shots on her phones, plus another 200 from her professional photographer. All of herself. Oh, and did I mention her husband had a go pro that we was also using to take pictures of her? I had about 100 of the entire group and I thought that was overdone. I get stressed out when my DVR gets over 30% full. I hate useless pictures and delete the crappy ones every night. Is there anything better than wifi-enabled cameras?

After our zip lining tour we had a shitty lunch at the “restaurant” and were taken back to the hotel, where we met up with Carly and Nicole. That’s right, new blog participants! Let’s do some quick introductions:

Carly
Likes: Eating like a rabbit, working out a lot, ensuring she gets her daily dose of fiber while traveling, becoming the definition of “turnt up” at Yacht Week.
Dislikes: Beer (what the fuck?), meat (more of these fucking hippies – where do I even find them?), carbs.
Favorite travel memory: She said she has “too many”. That’s code for not having traveling with Rory yet. Because I will ensure that at some point you almost die and then look upon the memory fondly once the scars have healed.

Nicole
Likes: Breaking shit – because she is literally the clumsiest bitch I have ever met – and this is coming from the girl who rolls her ankles getting out of bed. International sign language including, but not limited to, “peace signs” and the “shaka”, which I was just informed is what the “hang lose” hand gesture is called. She also loves to curse. So we’ll get along great.
Dislikes: Walking straight, places that require you to speak in low voices (from what I can tell).
Favorite travel memory: Arriving in Rio for the world cup to find herself checking into a 16-bed hostel dorm room with 15 boys. I’ll let everyone infer why that was her favorite….just kidding. I think.

Okay, so now we are rolling 7-deep in Chiang Mai. Finally, a posse large enough to rival the Chinese tour groups! It was Sunday night, so we all headed out to the famous Chiang Mai Sunday Night Market. From here on out, it will be known as the “infamous” Sunday Night Market, because that shit was absolutely insane. I’ve seen ants march up a hill with more tact that the people in this market. It was like Disneyland Main Street on crack. We skirted the perimeter and sampled some street food. I decided once and for all that street food is just not for me. We took a peek inside the gates to the old city and our anxiety levels skyrocketed. It was a mass of people converging on to one street – and all walking in one direction. I would have rather thrown myself into the running of the bulls at Pamplona. I half expected some creepy guy in a derby hat to whisper in my ear “people go in, but they never come out”. So we turned around and made a bee line back to our neighborhood. Which is where we stumbled into the liar of the ladboys…

This place was very similar to Yellow Bar from the other night. Just instead of gap year drunkards it was filled with ladyboys and old white guys who got picked on in high school and never got enough attention from real girls. It was a long row small bars, filled with trannies, and a big Muay Thai boxing ring at the end. Ladyboy Lane, complete with a surprise at the end, in true ladyboy fashion. We could not believe our luck. After perusing the options, we settled upon the “Marina Ladyboy Bar”. No Marina, but Ladyboys in spades. One out of two ain’t bad. We ordered a round of beers. At this point it was about 7pm and the Muay Thai fight didn’t start until 11pm. Kim, Katie, Steph and Carly decided ladyboys were not their thing and headed home, leaving myself, Brandon and Nicole to our bizarre bar crawl of questionable gender. And this is where the real fun begins.

We decided to try out another bar down the Lane and settled into some bar stools. It was like the Special Olympics of people watching. It took about 4 minutes for us to decide that we needed shots if we had any chance of making it out of Ladyboy Lane alive. We taught the bartender how to put the booze in a shaker so it’s chilled, and before we knew it, we had a group of new ladyboy friends. The way these bars work is that about 10 ladyboys work at each one, and the unloved white men come in and buy themselves a beer and then a round of shots for all the ladyboys. And then they all dance around him. And he finds this appealing. These white dudes obviously went through the “big D”…and I don’t mean Dallas. They are broken, shattered men looking for love in all the wrong places. One woman, who I think was actually a real woman, was about 40 years old and dancing around on anyone who would have her and some people who wouldn’t. She was obviously on some kind of drugs trying to turn a trick to satisfy her next hit of god knows what. Perhaps a hallucinogen that made her think she was Beyonce. I took it upon myself to teach the women and ladyboys at the bar how to “drop it like it’s hot”. It’s a lesson I teach often. You may remember the time I gave the entire Stray Bus a lesson in Raglan. Big mistake. Because once I revealed myself to be the Mr. Miagi of “getting low”, the old crazy trick proceeded to attempt to grind on me and feel me up. It got so bad that we had to leave the bar. We sought refuge back at good old Marina ladyboy bar. And this is where shit really gets weird. No, we are not at weird yet.

Oh, the Marina Ladyboy Bar sans the Marina. How we have missed you. Apparently if you sit at the actual bar, you can watch the fight without buying a ticket – what a deal! So we posted up at the bar, and the beers and shots started flowing. The next few hours consisted of us getting to know our new ladyboy friends a little too well. The HLIC (head ladyboy in charge) was a large (wo)man with huge fake tits and sky-high platform hooker heels. She looked like Lady Marmalade meets Jaba the Hut. Her voice sounded like Kermit the Fong with emphysema. She was awesome. We started buying rounds of shots for our Ladyboys and basically everything was uphill from there. The HLIC kept giving us a great deal – “you buy us 5, I buy you 3”. We were the Ladyboy Jameson fairy god mothers of that Muay Thai fight. Apparently shots make these ladies crazy, because Jaba the Hut kept pulling down her shirt to shake her giant fake boobs at everyone. Even when we begged her to stop. You would turn around and TITTIES IN YO FACE!. It’s hard to look at first, but you get used to it after a while. Kind of like an uncircumcised penis. I took it too far again, didn’t I?

The fight itself was pretty uneventful, especially the women’s matches. I’m all for equality, but there are some things men just do so much better. And beating the shit out of each other is definitely one of them. The chicks just dance around the ring trying to outsmart eachother. They overthink think it. Just punch a bitch! I’ve taken more drunken swings at girls on a Saturday night than these girls did in the ring. My favorite part was when they put four fighters in the ring and blindfolded them. They were swinging at eachother like pinatas on Cinco de Mayo. All in all, we considered the fight background noise. I think it’s pretty clear that they ladyboys were the main event.

I woke up to some pretty interesting pictures on my phone. But I’ve attempted to keep it PG-13 for the blog. Up next on the blog: elephants and motor bikes!