We all have to fulfill our destinies!!!

Thailand, Pattaya,
17 Jan. 2011.

The rice is boiling in a wok inside a a smoking  wok placed over on the top of an earthenware pot filled with burning charcoal, hungry young Isan women just having returned from the boulevard, are squating around it, some of them eating Som Yam from plastic plates, other waiting patiently for the rice to be ready, pigeons hop around anxiously, picking at some grains of rice...

The bar across the road from my habitual place outside the New Star Guesthouse, is housing some fat Germans morosely staring down there pints of Heineken, the cylindrical wooden cups next to their beer bottles and half filled glasses, are stuffed with bills, some slips of myriad show me they have had the courtesy of paying some ladies' drinks though it ain't evening yet..most of them already into their pension allowed age with thin gray hair and protruding well groomed beer bellies, bar girls swarming around them, willing to please European lone males on wintering in the Male Kingdom called Pattaya...

Hard to believe some of these young ladies, hardly past their adolescence years, were only mere months ago planting and harvesting the rice crops under a harsh Isan sun, maybe involved in the intence work of pounding fruit together to create natuarl dyes for the Thai cotton industry, maybe working the construction sites in Bangkok carrying bricks up the wooden scaffolding...

Now they are giggling and laughing at stupid elderly men's yokes who are semi drunk already and will probably be well intoxicated by nightfall, ignorant of the bills piling up in these wooden cups...

I am in the company of Miss Jiff, an old friend from the "scene", who has just returned from a family trip to Korat and has played the game of Cupid and Stupid for well over 20 years..with her skinny frame, serious overbite and roundish monkey face she never had the luck of finding herself a Farang sugar daddy, returning each and every year and sending her some sort of monthy allowance each month, a walking sort of ATM machine and so much looked after by these undereducated, impoveriched and superstitious ladies of the night...

She is waiting for me to have my afternoon power nap so she can watch her beloved Star Trek episode of the day on the SYFY channel, maybe have a much needed shower and convince me sleeping on the beach really isn't her cup of Thai tea...

I guess we all have to fulfill our destinies!!!