strangely it felt good to be back in Bangkok, it was familiar, and they had a Mcdonalds and a Burger King (who, by the way, do delivery, amazing). We found a cheap guest house. There was a place a bit further out that charged 200 bt (just over £3) for a single room with fan, but a shared bathroom, but we went for a place that was 290 bt (about £4), which had your own bathroom (cold shower) and there was a pool on the roof. So it was probably worth it.
After checking in we hit McDonalds, then burger king. Honestly these dutch lads put their food away somewhere, with Matt it's quite obvious where it goes, but these two are all skin, bone, hair and teeth. Still they were only 19 and I took great delight in telling them that “when you get to my age.......”, they didn't seem to care though, the ignorance of youth.
after a quick power nap and a cold shower, I went up to the pool. Only Joey made it as everyone else was still asleep. Me and Joey had a good conversation about great dutch footballers of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. I waited for everyone to come round and went to the internet to check my emails. I'd sent a message to natalie the Canadian girl I'd met on my first night here, just seeing if she was around in Bangkok as she'd been to the islands for a while and maybe coming through this way. I got a message back from her saying that she'd got in that morning and was on her own, so we arranged to meet up for a drink. i was quite excited to see her again, even though we'd only met once before and that was about 3 weeks ago (not that long in real time, but an age when you're traveling), yet another example of bonding with people really quickly.
Met Natalie, and we all went out for drinks. The dutch lads and Matt hit Mcdonalds for the third time in one day, I decided to give it a miss, I don't need supersizing thanks very much. Natalie was keen to go to a ping pong show, as was Matt and Nicky. Joey wasn't too sure but I told him he couldn't leave Thailand without seeing one. Jesse had seen on and was adamant that there was no way he would go. I couldn't leave Natalie with complete strangers so I went along as well. These things don't get any better on second viewing!
everyone was a little let down with the quality of the 'show', I had tried to warn them but they wanted to go in anyway. removing all images of.....people removing things, it was time to break out the guitar, bongo and keyboard and hit the streets. It was still quite early so the music was thumping out of the bars so we just kept drinking instead. we went to a bar that had a live band, who were terrible, when ever the singer came to a point that he couldn't hit the right notes he would encourage the audience to join in. He murdered about half of our set, so we left in disgust.
Natalie went back to her room to get more money, it seems drinking with us costs more than she realised. We were stood on the street looking for a place to go, I said why not this place behind us, as I turned round, I saw a familiar face.
“Mandy?”. Now I went to 6th Form with Mandy, and hadn't seen her in about 10 years, despite her living in london, we only got back in touch about 6 months ago thanks to Facebook, and never managed to get our acts togther and meet up. at one point she was in Camden and I was in Belsize park (about 2 tube stops, which would have taken about 5 minutes), but due to a hangover I couldn't make it. So that made it weird that we would meet up in Bangkok. i knew she was traveling around SE Asia, but had no idea she would be in Bangkok. we chatted about back home and the good old school days, and both decided that life was a lot better these days and that school wasn't actually very good.
The bar closed and it was time for the gig. Natalie made some sort of excuse that she was tired and went to bed, mandy and her boyfriend went for somee food and never came back, and god knows where Matt went. Nicky had gone home an hour or so before, so the only people there for the gig were, the band. Still we played on anyway. We rattled out a couple of numbers and got some attention from passing people, but not enough so we moved up the road to outside the 7-11. The 'man' didn't like our brand of youthful pop rock, and felt threatened and moved us down the street, it was just like what they did to Jim man! we tried to play in a bar but got told if they had music then the police would know they were serving after hours. The police station was about 50 yards away, and it was an open ended bar with about 100 people milling around, but the guitar would have given it away apparently.
deflated we called it a night. The band was no more. But it had been fun while it lasted. I hung up my bongo playing hat, and turned my back on music. As Les McQueen said; It's a shit business.
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