Nightlife
The main drag of South Pattaya is "Walking street". This doesn't mean there are no cars on it, but
they travel a bit slower than the main two streets, which pen tourists into a strip of hotels and bars. The main
street is so busy that on the rare occasions that traffic stopped, I crossed the road on general principle! Walking
street is in the process of being paved, with those concrete tiles that breed in pedestrian precincts. Hopefully
this will put more distance between me and the sewers. The street and the district is a riot of neon lights, but
strangely I could not find any postcards of the sin district (in complete contrast to Amsterdam, which treats it
as a tourist attraction). Perhaps there is a movement to turn Pattaya into a family holiday destination, and this
would not be seen as helping.
The sky was nowhere near as clear as in New Zealand, with only first magnitude stars visible - worse even than
London! I am not sure if this was due to the neon glow of the city or a tropical haze.
The street was home to many stray cats, streetsellers with electricity siphoned precariously off power poles,
amputees begging (more than I remember) and young children selling lighters.
You can get in the back of a "taxi" pickup-trunk for B10 if you bargain well (B20 otherwise), and
I found this generally acceptable, although I was once begged for B10 in the back of one. The city definitately
needs more footpaths, and it might help to help pedestrian corssings that made it the whole way accross the street
instead of stopping halfway :-)
There were a lot of Russian bars and restaurants that were not there eight years ago - obviously some New Russians
like visiting the place as well as the more traditional Germans and Scandinavians. Every tourist generating nationality
had a bar with its flag up, and many bars were showing English football matches. The amount of kids wearing Manchester
United shirts would confirm many people's suspicions about how many of its fans live anywhere near Old Trafford.
The cabaret (Alcazar, Tiffany's, Simon's) are Pattaya institutions, and I found them entertaining, popular and
reasonably affordable. Going to Alcazar, I was in a minority of a couple of dozen westerners who had bought independant
tickets. The rest of the vast auditorium was filled with coachloads of Chinese and Korean tourists. The coach park
outside would put many cities' central bus stations to shame. I was grateful that the multi-lingual program included
so many English numbers, as going by audience numbers we would have only rated one non-chinese song. The songs
were in English, Chinese, Korean and Thai. A concession to the coachloads was the chinese compere who turned up
halfway through the performance and gave an obviously humourous monologue and a live song. The rest of the program
was lip-sync.
The show had gorgeous sets, amazing costumes, beautiful faces and lithe bodies (apart from the "ugly sister"
who usually gets more tips than anyone else) but asyncopated dancing in the chorus. The stars are good however,
and pose for photos arfter the show. The seats and sound system at the show were also good, but the drinks were
no great thing.
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