A non-official family affair.

Thailand, Bangkok,

Not yet 10.00 o' clock morning time and already the tropical heat is sweltering, 33 degrees the digital clock inside the Sangri-la Hotel tells me. I read my Bangkok Post - one of the English published newspapers in this big third world city with global aspirations.

The idea is simple, meet up with Joy and her Mum Nong, take the Rot Fai Faa, the sky train to Siam Square for our yearly dinner. Yeah, this crazy sky train that will offer us a magnificent airial view of bangkok and surely worth the 25 Baht for a single fare.

Though I feel quite nervous I have no doubts about the upcoming date - that is, if Nong will managed to get herself away from her Norwegian sugar daddy... the lobby is full with them leaving the hotel for breakfast or maybe a quick shopping spree, overweight elderly Farang males striding through the lobby dressed in ridiculous shorts and T-shirts that will get soaked by alcohol diluted Farang perpiration the moment they set foot out of the aircondicioned Sangri-La Hotel, the comfort of their expensive room left behind to get the short-skirted local Hot Momma of their choice happy on cheap clothes and high platform shoes...happily they followed their sugar daddies often twice their own age, holding small Asian hands in big sausage-like Farang claws that show signs of old age, scarlet red skin spots.

Siam Square is The Place to go for good food, locals and non-wandering Farangs are the main clientele here, the prime target for the countless food vendors, quality grub is the norm at bargain prices...needless to say our table is quickly covered with plates of steamy and healthy food, steamed fish straight out of the Chao Praya River, a Ta-Koh cup - coconut pudding in banana leaves - reminding me of the sweet tooth my non-official family has got, boiled rice aplenty and huge bottles of condensed Koloster beer - the most expensive but also most palatable beer in King Bumbhipol's Asian Realm...

A mobile bug vendor supplies us with sauteed silkworms, fried grasshoppers and barbequed crickets reminding me once more that anything that crawls or squirms is considered a delicacy among the Thais.

After dinner and the usual catching-up over the past year, we walk the buzy streets around Siam Square where shops spill out the their wares onto the sidewalks, the energy ruling this neighborhood is at the same time exhilarating as well as exhaustive to my gray Farang brain mass.

Within three hours after our meeting this non-official family gathering is over and done with with Nong back to her Norwegian sugar daddy and Joy back to her job on Rama 4 Road, a well paid job as a bank employee due to her excelent English, the private classes I paid for when she was a kid - leaving me behind realising once again that falling in love with a Thai Lady of the night will in the very end trun out to be a lonely affair.