My Wild Three Days in Bangkok: Food, Nightlife and One Very Unexpected Ending
Bangkok Ruined My Three Day Vacation in the Best Possible Way
I came to Bangkok for three days.
Three days sounded responsible.
Long enough to eat some Thai food, see a few temples, walk around the malls, have a massage, drink a beer somewhere interesting and go home with a few photographs.
That was the plan.
By lunchtime on the first day, Bangkok had already murdered the plan.
Day One: I Nearly Died on a Motorbike and Immediately Wanted Another Ride
The first thing Bangkok gave me was heat.
Not ordinary heat.
The kind of heat that makes you wonder why humans bothered inventing shirts.
I dropped my bag at the hotel, walked outside and within five minutes realized that my carefully researched walking itinerary had been created by an idiot.
Me.
Traffic barely moved.
So I climbed onto the back of a Bangkok motorbike taxi.
There are moments in life when you suddenly become aware that your continued existence depends entirely on a stranger wearing a numbered orange vest.
This was one of them.
We squeezed between buses, taxis, delivery trucks and objects I could not identify. At one point my knee seemed approximately four centimeters from becoming a permanent decoration on a Toyota.
And yet, somehow, it was fantastic.
Bangkok traffic from inside a taxi is irritating.
Bangkok traffic from the back of a motorbike is an amusement park ride with potential legal consequences.
Ten minutes later I climbed off grinning.
I had been in Bangkok for less than two hours and already understood something important.
This city rewards bad ideas surprisingly often.
Then Bangkok Fed Me
My next mistake was eating lunch at a tiny restaurant where I could barely understand the menu.
I pointed.
The waitress nodded.
Something arrived.
It was spicy enough to temporarily remove my ability to hear.
It was also magnificent.
That became my Bangkok food strategy.
Stop trying to understand everything.
Look for somewhere busy. Point at something. Eat it.
Over the next three days I consumed grilled pork from a street cart, mango sticky rice that had absolutely no business tasting that good, noodles at midnight, chicken I bought because it smelled fantastic and several things whose identities remain classified.
Then I walked into Terminal 21 and experienced another Bangkok contradiction.
Twenty minutes earlier I had been sweating beside a food cart on a chaotic pavement.
Now I was standing inside an enormous air conditioned shopping mall so polished that I suddenly felt underdressed.
That transition happens constantly in Bangkok.
Luxury hotel.
Street cart.
Ferrari.
Motorbike taxi.
Designer boutique.
Woman selling fruit from a plastic table.
All within the same hundred meters.
Bangkok does not seem interested in deciding what kind of city it wants to be.
That is probably why it is so much fun.
My Quiet First Evening Lasted Approximately Seven Minutes
I genuinely intended to have an early night.
Then somebody mentioned Nana Plaza.
I had heard about Bangkok gogo bars before arriving, obviously.
But hearing about Nana Plaza and walking into Nana Plaza are completely different experiences.
The entrance alone feels like Bangkok making a formal announcement:
You are no longer having a normal evening.
Inside was a three level adult playground of neon, music, bars, dancers, tourists, expats and men walking around with facial expressions suggesting that several deeply held beliefs were currently being reconsidered.
I walked around first.
That turned out to be the smart move because every staircase revealed another layer of madness.
One bar looked relatively calm.
The next looked like someone had given Las Vegas a hormone injection.
Then I entered a gogo bar.
I had expected attractive women dancing.
Correct.
What I had not expected was the sheer casualness of everything.
Nobody was acting as though anything remarkable was happening.
Women were dancing.
Customers were drinking.
A waitress wanted to know what beer I wanted.
Meanwhile my brain was standing in the corner screaming:
ARE WE ALL JUST GOING TO PRETEND THIS IS COMPLETELY NORMAL?
Apparently we were.
After twenty minutes, something even stranger happened.
I relaxed.
The shock disappeared and Nana Plaza became less like forbidden territory and more like an exceptionally strange neighborhood pub.
I had another beer.
This was becoming dangerous.
Not financially.
Philosophically.
Day Two: I Discovered That Massage Can Involve Almost No Massage
The following afternoon I decided to try something Bangkok is increasingly famous for.
I chose Kokoro Massage around Sukhumvit.
Until then, massage meant somebody attacking my shoulders while asking whether the pressure was okay.
Nuru turned out to be a completely different branch of human creativity.
There was warm gel.
There was an enormous amount of slippery body contact.
There were moments when I could not determine which direction either of us was moving.
At one point I nearly laughed because the entire thing felt physically impossible.
This was supposedly a massage.
Technically, I suppose it was.
But calling nuru massage a massage is a little like calling Formula One a pleasant Sunday drive.
The remarkable part was not even the erotic element.
It was how completely ridiculous and relaxing the experience was at the same time.
For an hour, there was no phone.
No email.
No news.
No problems.
No pretending to be productive.
Just warm gel, human contact and the sudden realization that somewhere in history somebody apparently asked:
What if massage were much, much more slippery?
And humanity answered.
Afterward I walked back onto Sukhumvit feeling approximately twelve kilograms lighter.
Bangkok had now fed me, terrified me on a motorcycle, shown me several hundred dancing women and covered me in enough massage gel to lubricate a small submarine.
It was only day two.
Then I Found the Strangest Cafe I Have Ever Visited
That night I discovered Thermae Cafe.
Calling Thermae a cafe is one of Bangkok’s great jokes.
You do not go there because you desperately need a cappuccino.
Hidden below the Ruamchitt Plaza Hotel on Sukhumvit Road is a place that feels like somebody preserved an old Bangkok secret and forgot to tell the rest of the city.
I walked downstairs.
There were drinks.
There were men.
And there were a great many women standing around apparently waiting for something.
Then I understood.
Freelancers.
No dancers.
No stage.
No elaborate gogo bar production.
No complicated ceremony.
Just men and women looking at one another across a room.
It was strangely fascinating.
Thermae felt less like nightlife and more like anthropology after dark.
Everyone was assessing everyone else.
A glance lasted half a second too long.
Somebody smiled.
Somebody walked over.
Two people talked.
Ten minutes later they disappeared together.
The entire human mating ritual had somehow been compressed into a basement on Sukhumvit Road.
Then a woman started talking to me.
She was attractive, funny and surprisingly direct.
Within approximately three minutes we had discussed where I came from, how long I was staying, whether I had a girlfriend and what she wanted for spending some time together.
This was considerably more efficient than Tinder.
I bought her a drink.
We talked.
And then something unexpected happened.
I didn’t leave with her.
Not because she wasn’t attractive.
I simply enjoyed the conversation.
That may have been the strangest surprise of Thermae.
You arrive expecting sex and occasionally discover another human being instead.
Day Three: I Finally Abandoned Any Remaining Attempt to Behave Normally
By my third morning, Bangkok had changed my internal clock.
Breakfast happened around noon.
Dinner happened whenever something smelled good.
Sleep had become an administrative inconvenience.
I spent the afternoon doing something almost respectable.
I went shopping.
Bangkok malls are dangerous because they allow a man to feel financially responsible while purchasing things he absolutely does not need.
I walked through EmQuartier and Emporium, drank excellent coffee and briefly enjoyed the strange sensation of behaving like an ordinary tourist again.
Then I stepped outside.
A motorbike driver shouted at me.
Five minutes later I was flying through Sukhumvit traffic again.
Normality had lasted less than an hour.
That evening I ate ridiculously good Thai food, walked through streets packed with people, stopped for a drink and began thinking about the flight I had to catch the following day.
That should have made me sensible.
Instead it produced the opposite reaction.
I had one night left.
And suddenly the most dangerous sentence in the English language entered my head.
Life is short.
Then I Met a Ladyboy
I had seen ladyboys throughout Bangkok.
Some were so feminine that I would never have known unless somebody told me.
Others made no attempt to hide what they were.
Until that night, curiosity had remained curiosity.
Then I met one who was extremely attractive.
More importantly, she was hilarious.
We started talking.
I knew immediately.
She knew that I knew.
There was no dramatic revelation.
No movie scene.
No moral crisis.
Just two adults having a drink.
Then she asked me something very simple.
Was I curious?
Yes.
That was unfortunately the correct question.
Because the truthful answer was absolutely yes.
My brain immediately produced approximately forty reasons why this was a terrible idea.
My Bangkok brain produced one.
You are leaving tomorrow.
The Bangkok brain won.
What happened afterward does not need a technical description.
This is a travel story, not an instruction manual.
But I will say this.
I had spent most of my life drawing imaginary lines around experiences.
Things I would do.
Things I wouldn’t do.
Things other people did.
Bangkok had spent three days quietly erasing those lines.
So I stopped analyzing everything.
I stopped worrying about what the experience was supposed to mean.
I stopped wondering whether I would ever do it again.
For one night, curiosity beat embarrassment.
And the world did not end.
In fact, I went back to my hotel laughing.
The Weirdest Thing About My Three Days in Bangkok
The strange part is that when I think about that trip, no single experience wins.
Not Nana Plaza.
Not the nuru massage.
Not Thermae.
Not the ladyboy.
Not even the food.
What I remember is how alive I felt.
Bangkok kept interrupting me.
Every time I thought I understood the day, something else happened.
A five minute taxi ride became a motorbike adventure.
Lunch became a culinary revelation.
A massage became something I certainly could not explain to my grandmother.
A cafe turned out not to be a cafe.
A quiet drink became a conversation with a stranger.
And the final evening turned into an experience I had spent my entire life assuming belonged to somebody else’s story.
That is Bangkok.
It does not require you to become a different person.
It simply keeps offering doors.
Most cities politely wait for you to decide what you want.
Bangkok puts twelve possibilities in front of you simultaneously and asks why the hell you are still standing there.
I Arrived With an Itinerary. I Left With Stories.
Three days earlier, I had landed with a list.
Eat Thai food.
See Bangkok.
Get a massage.
Visit some nightlife.
Relax.
Technically, I accomplished everything.
But the list tells you almost nothing about what actually happened.
It doesn’t mention gripping the back of a motorbike while reconsidering my relationship with mortality.
It doesn’t mention staring at Nana Plaza and wondering how something this outrageous could operate with the organizational efficiency of a shopping center.
It doesn’t mention discovering that nuru massage apparently requires enough gel to violate several laws of physics.
It doesn’t mention Thermae Cafe, where people can walk in alone and walk out twenty minutes later with someone whose name they did not know twenty minutes earlier.
And it certainly doesn’t mention my final night.
That was not on the itinerary.
Thank God.
Because maybe the best vacations are not the ones where everything goes according to plan.
Maybe they are the ones where the plan quietly dies on the first afternoon.
I came to Bangkok for three days looking for a break.
Instead Bangkok grabbed me by the collar, fed me, frightened me, massaged me, surprised me, embarrassed me, entertained me and sent me home wondering what the hell had just happened.
It was one of the best vacations of my life.
And three days was completely ridiculous.
Next time, I am staying longer.
