What a man!

It was quite the day yesterday and that big experience of meeting Olivia for the first time was magnified a few times by the tiredness and jetlag. Upon coming home we hit the pool and had a nap but then we wanted to get some extra stuff for Olivia that we had not brought with us, like nappies (diapers) and the like. Rikke was not feeling up to it so I hit the streets of Pattaya by myself. 

On father-in-law Erling's advice I caught a local Baht Bus (basically a pickup truck with a bench seat in the back) into town. It was already about 8 pm by this time but the reception assured me that the shops were open until 10 pm. The Pattaya night life is famous for its.. open-mindedness... but things seemed pretty tame as I made my way through the streets to the Mike Shopping Mall.

A true retail mecca, the Mike is equal parts department store and bazaar, but after after a good hour and a half of searching around I was able to secure a couple of of baby bottles, a pair of (hopefully) Olivia-sized sandles, a ring for the pool and some other "necessities".

With my newly-acquired trappings of parenthood I was feeling very "Dad" as I left the store, only to be greeted by a street scene entirely transformed from what it had been when I went in. The streets were now a throng of activity, color and driving beats. As I made my way through the crowd to where the buses go back to Jomtien, I took a short cut through one of the backstreets. Here the bars that lined the streets had not yet filled with the evening's punters and the keen eyes of young ladies standing out the front insightfully identified that with all this tropical heat I could indeed have used some refreshment, but on reflection I think they had something else in mind. 

"You want a beer?" "Woohooo!" "Hello" "Welcome!" "WHAT A MAN!!!"

 

A word of advice for men seeking  to quietly go about their business in Pattaya: forget about it!

I like to think that I have been around in my life and seen a thing or two, but the experience of walking for two minutes along a street and continually being heckled and cat-called as the sole focus of attention for groups of up to ten ladies at a time will remain with me for some time to come.

I grasped my package of Duplo Lego blocks tightly to my chest and forged on into the night...