Talk eleven.
The Phuket Island, 04th December
- How do you feel as a qualified chef of the Thai cuisine?
- It’s a pity we don’t have time to find a job for me in one of the restaurants here. I’ve invested four hours of my time in the training!
- No kidding! Would you like to work for the Russians?
- I forgot that the majority of the businesses on the Phuket Island, and a hundred percent on the Patong coast, are in the Russian hands. The new Russians.
- Even the ads here are in Russian.
- So, The Russians for the Russians!
- Russian is the street language! It’s heard just everywhere.
- What doesn’t change the fact that the Patong Beach[1], despite being crowded, knocks down with its dimensions and beauty.
- The drinks have reasonable prices!
- Everything here is for humans. Especially for those who like a rave-up holidays, a lot of drinking, crowded promenades, loud music and frenzy nights.
- The name of the main street is Bangla, which in Polish has a direct connotation of partying![2]
- I reckon that in order to get to know Thailand really well, you can’t possibly ignore the phenomenon which is taking place in the city of Phuket. You may very well not like it, but it definitely is worth watching it and immerse yourself in that madness at least for a short time. Let me quote some sentences which I wrote in our travel blog.
„(…) The tsunami which was caused by a very powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004, destroyed to a great extend the tourist infrastructure on the island’s coast, causing death of hundreds of people including many tourists. (…)
I thought we were well prepared for visiting various places and seeing a variety of things, sometimes shocking, but here our surprise was complete. Thousands (or more) bars, restaurants, discos, places of all kinds of entertainment are placed in merely few streets, which make an unknown to us, atmosphere of some craziness. On the one hand there are thousands of tourists in pursuit of no one knows what, and on the other hand there are service people who try to attract those tourists to their businesses as if there were an acute shortage of customers.
Each bar, each restaurant (all of them in the open air protected from rain with something which barely reminds a roof), and each entertainment place crowd next to one another making huge noise which is supposed to attract attention of the tourists. Well, you can put up with all of this for one evening and watch it as a weird attraction but how is it possible to spend holidays here? (…)”
- Did you like the street with all the gay bars and clubs?
- Boring. Nothing cooking there.
- It was raining. You should’ve gone inside and watched the go-go boys.
- Everywhere the same. Young and girlish.
- Apparently, there’s a market request for that.
- Was there a market request for you in Sweden?
- Quite significant. I was offered more and more courses and I was becoming a more and more popular language teacher competing with all the native speakers from America, Australia, and Canada.
- I didn’t have this in mind.
- I know what you had in mind. And I’m telling you what kept me busy in Göteborg the most. I’d work many hours a day and I’d come back home late in the evening, wasted.
- Where did you have that home of yours?
- First in a student dormitory and then after four years, already as a divorced man, I was assigned a flat by the municipality. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because there was a long queue of those who were waiting for such accommodation as well. The flat wouldn’t obviously match expectations of a typical Swedish family, so after consecutive candidates would decline the offer, I became a happy tenant of a nice flat in the centre of town. Thus my dream of an own place to live came true…
- How often would you travel to Poland?
- Four times a year.
- For how long each time?
- I calculated that I would spend in Poland three to three and a half months each year altogether. For someone working abroad it’s quite a long time, isn’t it?
- Where would you be staying?
- You keep drilling me with those questions, don’t you? I had my family home. Don’t you remember?
- What about Andrzej?
- Well. Yes. We lived together in his flat. We also had a summer house close to Szczecin.
- Did Andrzej use to visit you in Göteborg?
- Very rarely. His job wouldn’t let him.
- He didn’t decide to move to Sweden for good, did he?
- That’s enough of the subject for today. What did you like the most in Phuket?
- I have to admit that the entertainment district is very different from what I’d seen up to now, so it impressed me. But it is far from a statement that I was feeling fine there. However, I don’t regret coming here. Sometimes it’s fun watching big cash flowing from hand to hand.
- What would you say about the theme park FantaSea[3]?
- Not much. For tourists with kids.
- But it’s so pretty and colourful. Such an Asian version of Disneyland.
- It’s called an entertainment park, but frankly, it’s a huge shopping mall which they themselves call „Shopping in Paradise”. Unfortunately, the prices are not heavenly (if there are prices in paradise at all).
- But this madness is taking place parallel to watching many park attractions and the culmination of the evening – a great historical show.
- Everything on the boarder of kitsch. But sometimes even kitsch looks beautiful.
- The show with history of Thailand in a dozen scenes was telling us about a dream kingdom with a happy society. Apart from the events on the stage, during the setting change, under the ceiling, eight girls, absolutely perfectly and simultaneously were doing acrobatic trapeze acts. The music was as beautiful.
- Besides the people on the stage there were 16 elephants, 2 horses, 3 buffaloes, 10 white roosters, 20 small goats and a hundred doves.
- All the animals were well trained and fun to watch. They were „working” without visible exhaustion.
- Moreover, there was magic: people turned into tigers, a disappearing tuk-tuk, a woman sawed in half, and eventually a disappearing elephant!
- Naturally, photography was not allowed. So the only souvenir we have is a colourful flyer.
- The audience – tourists (must have been about two thousands of them) were leaving the theatre enchanted. So were we. A little bit.
- Seth really cared that we liked it.
- I said I did.
[1] Patong Beach
[2] Bangla street Phuket
[3] Fantasea Phuket
