the ladyboys of thailand

When I told my hairstylist in Ottawa, a lovely woman originally from Vietnam, that my partner and I were going to Southeast Asia for our honeymoon, she emphatically insisted that we go to "Geisho" when we got to Thailand.

"Is that a place?" I asked confusedly.
"You know, Geisho!" she said again. "But don't sit your man at front. They do things to man in front."

I realized that she was referring to a "gay show".

The Thai concept of kathoey, or what is popularly termed as ladyboy in English, does not exactly have a direct Western translation. Some kathoey explain it as being of a third gender or a women of a second kind. Sometimes it refers to an effeminate gay man. Sometimes it refers to a person born as a biological man who has undergone a full surgery or is taking hormonal therapy. Some dress as men during the day at work, and dress as women at night.

We hadn't really planned on seeing a ladyboy show in Thailand, but I really wanted to learn more about kathoey while I was in Thailand. Although I am a cisgender woman, I find it fascinating to learn about different concepts of gender identity in other cultures. I just wanted to tap the kathoey clerk at our Bangkok hotel on her shoulder and ask her all sorts of questions about her life. That would be intrusive, of course, and I am a polite Canadian, so I did not. Instead, I bought a book on the subject and read it by the hotel pool.

Contrary to popular Western belief, ladyboys are not always readily accepted in Thai society, even though the term kathoey has for a long time and often ladyboys begin to self-identify at a very young age, as early as eight. Ladyboys often face public ridicule; sometimes they are kicked out of the house for bringing shame on the family. The ones that leave home early are denied an education, and cannot get well-paying office jobs. Even if they do have an education, many employers do not want to hire a ladyboy. This is why ladyboys disproportionately work as prostitutes or performers.  Even after going through a full gender reassignment surgery, the Thai government does not recognize them as women, and forces them to don the "Mr" title on their passports.  Meanwhile, the police often arrest ladyboys on the streets while propositioning to them at the same time.

By the time we got to Ko Samui, I decided it would be fun to hit up a ladyboy cabaret. Our guide assured us that the ladyboy cabarets were magnificent spectacles, with no affiliation whatsoever with the go-go bars in Patpong, and while I was worried about the idea of paying ladyboys to dance and pose in front of us like zoo animals, I did see that a lot of families brought their kids to the ladyboy cabarets and having a lot of fun. So we headed over to Stars Cabaret in Chaweng.

It's free to get into the show at Stars Cabaret, but there is a one drink minimum, and as you might guess, the drinks are way overpriced. Still the show was quite entertaining, as the performers came on stage in fabulous costumes and fun dance sequences. It's obvious that they spend a lot of time rehearsing and that they enjoy showing off their talents to the tourists. Between the ladyboys shaking their peacock feather-adorned booties to Lady Marmalade, and the showboys dancing around in high heels, mascara, tight black pants, and no shirts, there more going on than my eyes could keep up with.

also featuring showboys

I was impressed not only by kathoey's ability to transcend gender, but also, apparently race. The Thai performers were imitating white and black singers convincingly, without resorting to offensive caricatures (ie, no blackface). They were clearly the masters of makeup. I was tempted to run backstage and beg them to give me lessons in eyeliner.

One of my favourite acts involved a single performer dressed as a man on one side and as a woman on the other side, singing the famous duet "One Man Woman" (you can see another similar performance here). During the female vocals, the performer presented the female side, and during the male vocals, the performer presented the male side. It was fun to watch, if not at the least because it allowed you to see the performer both in drag and not in drag at the same time...not to mention also a white woman and an Asian man at the same time.

there's her...

there's him...

there's them!

There was, as my hairstylist warned, a lot of audience participation, sometimes involuntary: "Toni Braxton" convinced one of the male audience members to give her a kiss on the cheek, while another performer teased a shy Korean tourist who was trying to hide behind his iPad. It was definitely an entertaining night.

diana ross

toni braxton

beyonce

britney spears

whitney houston

in praise of thai food

Management invited us and some of the other guests to a cocktail party by the resort's seaside pool. There, while munching on various yummy fried appetizers, we met Martin, one of the staff members. We told him how we were enjoying the food culture here in Koh Samui, although we were always keeping an eye out for the cheaper street food that Thailand is good for.

"Why not eat where the Thais eat, for a change?" Martin suggested. "Away from where the tourists stay."

Martin suggested a local favorite that might interest us. It was located on the other side of the fork in the road that we always passed. (Side note: The island of Samui pretty much has, like, one major road that circles around the whole island). On that road less travelled, giant trucks obnoxiously blasted the Rocky soundtrack to advertise tonight's muay Thai game passed less frequently, and less Indian tailors tried to engage you in conversations to sell you suits, and less beggars limped along the sidewalk. Instead, there were rows of vegetable markets, kabab stands, and the occasional sleazy massage bars where girls in tight dresses waited for their white princes to come and fill their pockets.

The restaurant, Mitra, was an open air stop, displaying seafood on ice at the front, like the huge warm water lobsters mysteriously lacking in claws, and what looked to me like a shark. The restaurant  ran until two in the morning, and seemed to be the place where Thai workers grabbed a bite after their shifts. The walls are covered with photos of the restaurant's dishes, photos of people eating them, and, oddly enough, photos of kittens. A flame grill at the back cooked the giant fish, filling part of the restaurant with smoke. Mangosteen pieces littered the ground. Everything smelled delicious.

They sat the farangs like us at the back of the restaurant. At the table next to us where bored Thai teens, watching soap operas on their iPhones and eating spaghetti.

We ordered the phad kea mao, a red chili curry with coconut milk.

"Make not spicy," the server told us, more than asking us. It's because I'm with my white "no spice" husband. She doesn't know I'm from Korea, That Other Part Of Asia That Loves Spice. But it's okay. The dish will come not spicy, and I'll just add the chili powder they leave at all the tables, which is another custom I really like.

A lot of the restaurants in Thailand offer the usual Thai dishes, massaman, green curry, paenang, but also "western" dishes like spaghetti or chicken nuggets. I suppose it's for the tourists who, after weeks on the road, grow tired of Asian food and miss "regular" food.  If there's one thing my trip here has taught me so far, it's that I apparently cannot get tired of Asian food, which I just see as food.  I love Thai food. I have been eating Thai food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and continue to crave more. No matter whether we're eating at an upsale dining restaurant or a food stand on the street, I have loved every meal I've eaten here.  I'll be sad when I leave this country and its amazing food...although maybe once I leave, my weight will go back to normal.

a really big Buddha: The Grand Palace and Wat Pho

the city pillar shrine
It was nice of President Obama to join us on our honeymoon in Thailand. According to reports, he really enjoyed visiting the Grand Palace and Wat Pho, where the enormous Reclining Buddha is housed. It's one of the main tourist attractions in Bangkok, so it's always really busy and crowded, but we enjoyed it too.

We got to the grounds by taking the Chao Praya Express, which despite its name, is not actually a train but a ferry boat that Thai people take across the choppy waters of the river to get to work. The trip was chaotic, with no staff to regulate the capacity of the boat (not that a maximum capacity was posted anywhere, even if someone did care), just a ticket collector making her way through the crowd. The ferry was jerky, often slamming unceremoniously into the dock as long-tailed speedboats whipped past us, carrying waving tourists who were willing to pay more than the fifty cents that the Chao Praya Express charged for a ride. I suspect Obama didn't take the ferry.

Despite the large number of peddlers trying to sell us silk and con artists trying to convince us that the sites were closed, we made it to the Grand Palace without too much incident.

The entrance to the Grand Palace was closely guarded by the Clothes Police, making sure that nobody was entering the grounds immodestly dressed: clothing down to elbows and knees, no open-toed or open-heeled footwear. On one hand, I've been finding the Buddhist temple dress codes somewhat inconvenient - sometimes it just feels too hot to be wearing sweaters and jeans in hot Bangkok. On the other hand, I'm always a bit surprised at what some other tourists consider to be appropriate wardrobe for a visit to a religious site. Really? A belly top and hot pants?

After touring the Grand Palace, we stopped to eat some mangos. Every tourist that passed us viewed our fruit with envy.

the ministry of defence: lots of guns

The Reclining Buddha of Wat Pho was really big. In our view, anyway. Apparently President Obama thought so too. Great minds think alike. It was too big to actually fit in one camera shot, no matter how hard I tried.

 

  

Buddha's feet

  

Buddha's back 

it was interesting to see so many statues of Buddha here, especially after seeing Angkor Wat, where many of the statues of Buddha in the temples had been deliberately destroyed

fierce temple guards

fierce temple kitties

i met lil sebastien!

Khao San Road

Don't go to Khao San Road. I mean, chances are if you're visiting Bangkok you'll probably visit it, just like the way tourists will visit Dundas Square on Yonge Street in Toronto, Rue St Catherine in Montreal, Rideau Street in Ottawa, the red light district in Amsterdam. But don't stay there long, because you are not experiencing Bangkok.

"Lots of foreigners," says my husband's aunt disdainfully, who is Thai and lives in Bangkok. "That's where all the foreigners go, and that's all they see when they come to Bangkok and that's how Bangkok gets its reputation."

Khao San Road is the Disney version of Bangkok, an adult's artificial fantasy view of a ridiculous land where everyone speaks English, virtually nobody is Thai, drinks are overpriced, and foreigner's bad manners are overlooked because they all want your money. A street vendor sells customized fake driver's licenses and university degrees. A woman pushes a cart full of sedated puppies, claiming she is collecting money for an animal shelter. A vendor sells fried grasshoppers and larvae, charging 10 both for each photo you take of it, leading me to suspect the food's not really for eating but for gawking. A bar called "We Don't Check ID" advertises strong cocktails.

A man asks me if I want a tuktuk taxi ride. I say no. In a much lower voice, he asks my husband if he wants to see a ping pong show. My husband says no.

As you can tell from my travel blog, I love traveling, but I have mixed feelings toward backpacker culture. It's not so much the bad manners, colonialist ignorance, or patchouli smell that I occasionally find; I'm more concerned about how the habits of backpackers affects and transforms the local environment. The most obvious example for me is the presence of henna tattoo and dreadlocking stands, no matter what country I go to. Henna and dreadlock traditions come from specific countries. I certainly don't think Asian hair traditionally required dreadlocking. Yet they've both become a part of backpacker culture; every city's backpacking tourist trap offers these services. Local people's livelihoods then depend on offering these services of an artificial culture that does not exist anywhere except in the ubiquitous backpacking culture. It annoys me, maybe particularly because I dislike hippies.

We liked Roof, though. It was a tourist bar on Khao San Road with overpriced drinks like any other joint, but I liked it for the view it offered. Several stories high, you can sit on the balcony by a cool fan and watch the crowd on the street below.

I liked watching one Indian tailor in particular. There are a lot of Indian tailors here, making a living on the fact that custom-made suits are so cheap here in Asia. He's got to get clients first, so I watch him work the crowd, stopping men and sometimes women that he perceives as potential suit-buyers. He hold up a poster of models wearing Armani suits, trying different pickup lines. One after another, the passersby turn him down or ignore him. The tourists want to eat some pad thai or get a foot massage, not buy a suit. Still, the Indian tailor has to keep trying, otherwise he won't get paid. I watch him go from person to person, with a friendly smile that is only dropped when he thinks nobody is looking. I imagine him waiting for people to get drunk enough to say something to their drinking buddies like, "Hey, after this beer, let's go get some cheap suits, dude." He dreams about one day tailoring real Armani suits in New York for real celebrities like Christian Bale, and not these drunk dreadlocked henna tattooed kids finding themselves by traveling on the family trust fund. He takes a break and drinks some water. I wonder who else can see how tired he is.

Roof has an in-house musician singing songs and taking requests, but only if it's within his repertoire, which seems to be mostly Jack Johnson, the Beatles, and Eric Clapton. The bar is filled with a few Asian tourists, and some old white men with young Thai girlfriends.

Meanwhile, back on the streets below, cops are sweeping through the stands and vendors, the ones without permits i assume, are scrambling to make themselves scarce. A bunch of tacky t-shirt stands magically disappear; the Indian tailors are gone; and I certainly can't see the people selling fake college diplomas anymore. A police officer on a motorcycle stops at one of the stands that are remaining. He walks into the store and walks out with a big bag of stuff. He's doing some of his own shopping. Soon enough, Khao San Road returns back to its normal bustling self.

Last night, we went for dinner with some of Rob's relatives who live in Bangkok. They took us to a lovely restaurant called the Greyhound Cafe, located near the trendy upscale avenue of Soi 55 in Sukhumvit, a large property of land that Rob's aunt's family used to own before it was sold to become a dazzling array of fashion boutiques, flashy restaurants, and fancy nightclubs. The restaurant's logo seems to be suspiciously similar to another greyhound company, but the menu read like a good novel. Usually I'm suspicious of fusion places, but if there's one place that should be able to pull off Thai fusion, it's Thailand. The food selection was a creative play on Asian and western classics, like corned beef spaghetti (with chili), or tender braised beef with rice noodle soup (with chili), or turkey pita pizza (with chili), or make your own noodle-lettuce-beef combo (with chili) or sandwich bits on a soup bowl. My husband's uncle noted that Thais take food seriously here. They don't treat meals as just something to fill themselves up, but an art, a social opportunity, one of the special parts of life. This is the part of Bangkok that I like.

River Kwai: Remembering the prisoners of war of the Death Railway

Our guide Tan was surprised that we wanted to visit the Death Railway in Kanchanaburi, some hundred kilometres out of Bangkok, in the direction of the Thai-Burmese border. Most tourists visiting the prisoner of war camp were elderly people, he told us, people who wanted to visit the graves where their fathers or colleagues had died. These trips tended to be very emotional for them, Tan told us, as the site brings back very painful memories for some.

It may have seemed odd for a young couple to be visiting a former prisoner of war camp during our honeymoon, but we both love learning about history, and we felt that it would be appropriate given that Remembrance Day was coming up. Also, Rob had really enjoyed the movie Bridge on the River Kwai.

During World War II, the Japanese army forced thousands of British, American, Dutch, and Australian prisoners of war to construct a railway connecting Thailand and Burma. Although professional engineers assessed the project should take five years to complete, the Japanese army forced the POWs to finish it in sixteen months. As a result, massive numbers (over 16000) of war prisoners died due to the harsh conditions. They say for every single track laid down in the railway, a prisoner died.

The driver and guide we hired first took us to the war ceremony, a few hours out of Bangkok, where these soldiers were buried, mostly British, Dutch, and Australian (the Americans had shipped their dead home). Many of these soldiers were died quite young, as early as 20.

It was interesting to hear all about the war on the Southeast Asian front. As Canadians, we spend a lot of time learning about the war in Europe, but we do have to remember that countries all around the world were involved, and the fighting was happening here in the jungles of Southeast Asia, just as it was in France and Germany.

The cemetery was quite well-maintained, although it was hard to believe that so many of these Allied soldier had been buried so far away from home.

Afterwards, we drove to the war museum which contained photos and records of life at the prisoner of war camp. As you can imagine, some of the images were quite shocking. What struck me the most was the series of paintings done by a former prisoner, depicting life at the camp. I imagined it must have been his way of coping with these memories, of dealing with all of the horrible things he saw. I was also impressed by the story of one of the Japanese interpreters who worked for the Japanese at the camp. Afterwards, he was so filled with regret at what had happened at the camp that he became a monk and devoted the rest of his life to help people and give back to society.

After the museum, we took a brightly colored long tail speed boat down the River Kwai to see the Death Railway itself. Along the way we passed all sorts of floating restaurants and bars on the river, and even a floating discotheque.

The bridge on the River Kwai itself that forms part of the Death Railway has been bombed and destroyed by the Allied forces. It has since been rebuilt, and you can actually ride a train along the railway that serves both as a tourist attraction and as a commuter option for local Thais.

We rode the train, sharing a compartment with a tour group of excited noisy Japanese tourists. The open air train was not air conditioned, and despite the ceiling fans, it was still quite hot with the noon sun beating in. The energetic, talkative Japanese tourists didn't seem to realize that with this heat, the more you move, the hotter you get. The trick is to sit still and calm your heart to a slow beat. I drank out of a coconut to stay cool.

The train took us through the Thai jungles and the countryside full of monkeys and tapioca fields. Vendors walked through the train selling tapioca snacks, as well as yogurt drinks, beer, and pancakes.

The train broke down in what felt like the hottest, sunniest field without a sliver of a shade. The chattering Japanese tourists kept on chatting. The heat rose. I thought about what it must have been like for the Allied soldiers, working on this railway, used to British cold but forced to work in this sweltering heat in the middle of a foreign jungle far away from home and everything they knew. I was glad that the Japanese were excited but I wished they would shut up and stop moving around, bumping their sweaty hot bodies into my sweaty hot body. I wished the train would move again.

Eventually a woman mechanic rode up to the train on a motorcycle with a wrench in her hand, and she saved the day. The train lurched forward, and we all waved to her from our window.

We approached a wooden bridge, the most difficult part of the railway to build. The train teetered perilously over the cliffs. I tried to imagine how the prisoners of war would have struggled to build this dangerous part of the railway, the tracks clinging tightly to the side of the mountain.

We got off the train at Wang Pho, about a hundred kilometres from the Burmese border. For lunch we stopped at a middle of nowhere restaurant called Phimohaya, run by Burmese owners. It was an open air restaurant with a thatched roof and caged birds that screeched at you as you passed. They served pad Thai and spaghetti that was underwhelming, but the fried banana was delicious.

It had been a long hot day, so the drive back to Bangkok was quiet. It was a long journey to take, but I was glad that we had this chance to see a bit of World War II history. Both of Rob's grandparents fought in World War II and were fortunate enough to make it back alive. My great-grandfather was a fighter for underground resistance against the Japanese occupiers, and one day disappeared without a sign, presumably killed by the forces. It's interesting to see how these major events affect people all around the world, and I'm glad I had a chance to pay my respects to veterans in a different country on the other side of the world.

shopping in Bangkok

Bangkok has been, quite frankly, a second injection of culture shock to our system since we've begun our honeymoon. Going from Siem Reap to Bangkok feels to me like all the times I went from Windhoek to Johannesburg. Bangkok is a proper metropolis of some 14 million people, a never-ending cityline full of secrets that you will never have the time to discover, no matter how long you spend here. Things here are more crowded, more expensive, more smoggy, more polluted, more exciting, more everything. The sidewalks are crowded with street vendors selling everything from fake Lacoste shirts to postcards to sex toys to fruit. The delicious smell of street food mixes with the less delicious smell of garbage and sewer. There are more motorcycles on the streets than I've ever seen in my life. My sophisticated hotel tv greets me with a "Welcome Ms Gloriameerang" (that's what the hotels and airports here think my name is. I guess it sounds more southeast Asian than just the short Gloria.)

We've arrived in Bangkok with no agenda. We plan to stay for a week. On our first day, we decided to try our hand at shopping. We've been told that Bangkok is shopping heaven, both for brand names and brand name knock-offs.

We were given the advice to window shop at the mall Terminal 21 first and then actually shop at MBK afterwards. Terminal 21 is the really nice mall with like hundreds of boutiques and many floors. The bathrooms each have bidets. Each floor has a different theme based on an international city: Rome, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo...no Vancouver yet, but maybe the mall will expand. Lots of gorgeous fashion forward dress styles that I'm sure will make their way to North America in five years or so. I didn't buy anything. I was afraid that if I bought one thing, the barrier would be broken and I wouldn't be able to help myself from the shopping spree deluge that would follow.

tokyo

paris

MBK is pretty much the original Pac Mall. Picture a huge building with many floors and hundreds of little stands on each floor. It's the cheapest place anywhere to buy a mobile phone. It's the place to go to be buy Gucci sunglasses. It's the place to go to buy phone numbers and license plates with the lucky number 9. It's the place to go to buy illegal copies of software. It's the place to go to get permanent makeup tattooed on your face. It's the place to go to sharpen your bargaining skills with people who do not speak any languages that you do, which is, in itself, quite the experience.

It is also, according to the Lonely Planet, the place to go to eat. The food court is the awesome Asian style that I wish would become more popular in North America, where you get a special credit card as you enter, and then you go nuts at all of the international stands inside the court. One day, I'm going to eat one too many fried noodle dishes, and the people of Siam will forever refer to the Great Noodle Explosion of Gloriameerang.

Like the tourist I am, I bought more Thai silk that you can shake a Thai stick at, and tried on a bunch of ridiculously pretty ridiculously cheap dresses. I bought some clothes that are more appropriate to wear here. In a country where modesty is important but the weather is oppressively humid, my spaghetti strap tank tops don't work, but neither do my thick skinny jeans. In Asia, by the way, I am no longer a size small.
In the evening, we stopped for cheap drinks ($2 beers) at the aptly named Cheap Charlie's, a bar randomly located in a dark alley surprisingly popular with ex-pats. It was a bit odd to be standing in an alley drinking Tiger beer as more and more young white guys in business suits showed up to crowd the alley, but it was a quirky atmosphere. After our Asian aperitifs we headed for the trendy lounge Zanzibar next door, for green curry, chicken satay and fried calamari, where a young long-haired Thai man crooned Elvis songs on the piano exactly like Elvis. It was freaking awesome. They say you haven't experienced Bangkok until you hear a Thai cover of the Eagle's Hotel California at a hotel bar. I eagerly await this experience.

muay thai boxing in bangkok

Captain, the interestingly named agent who had sold us our muay thai boxing tickets, waved us down frantically as soon as he saw us entering the hotel lobby.

“The stadium just informed me that the price of the tickets have gone up,” he told us. “There is going to be a very special fight tonight.”

I wondered if we were being hosed, but figured why not pay the extra price. Watching a muay thai boxing match in what is essentially the world mecca of muay thai boxing was one of the top things I wanted to do while in Bangkok, and it would be all the more exciting if famous boxers were going to go at it tonight.

We took a cab to the Lumpanee Stadium, a ride that managed to be hectic and slow at the same time, as we were caught in the heavy stop-and-go traffic that is Bangkok’s permanent rush hour. A few times, our cab driver lay his head down in the middle of the seat to close his eyes and rest, knowing we weren’t going to get anywhere soon.

As soon as we got out of the cab, the stadium staff recognized our VIP tickets and pushed us through the crowd to escort us to our ringside seats. Captain had insisted on selling us the most expensive tickets, assuring us that it was best for foreigners not to be caught in the crowd. Again, I think it was a sell, but why not take the best view of the fight that had already started?

I ‘ve taken up muay thai boxing back in Ottawa this year, after a mixed martial arts expert told me that muay thai boxing is pretty much the most useful one to know in a street brawl. I don’t actually have any intention of being in a street brawl, but I was fascinated with the idea of learning a skill that involves every aspect of your body. It also seems to involve killing all the nerves in your body so you don’t feel pain. One of the boxing gyms that I work out at (I go to two) is led by an instructor who looks a lot like Micheal Cera in short shorts, who had me practicing my kicks on the punching bag. I’ve heard that professional Muay Thai get up early in the morning to kick banana trees in order to kill all the nerves in their shins. Kicking hurts my legs, because the nerves in my shins are not dead. Eventually I got to the point where I would wind myself up for a kick, start to go for it, and then recoil back like a wimp in fear of the pain that would follow.

Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a French Canadian girl sparring with a guy much taller than her. She was still kicking his butt. I was fascinated by this display. Afterwards, Micheal Cera in short shorts had me practicing with her. She showed no mercy. I was just supposed to be practicing my jabs and crosses, but every time I accidentally dropped my gloves to expose my neck, she’d reach out and slap me on the face with her gloves. It was terrifying, painful, and exhilarating.

It was all the more amazing to watch professionals duke it out in the ring in the country where the sport was invented. Because, after all, nothing says romantic honeymoon like watching two trained men beat the living daylights out of each other. Boxing is Thailand’s favourite sport, and the stands were packed with shouting Thai men who were all trying to secretly place bets (gambling is illegal here). I couldn’t take my eyes off the fight. All but 2 of the rounds involved boxers that weighed less than me, averaging about 113 pounds. That’s a lot of very light, very small guys who are nonetheless very muscular and very fierce. Many of them were also quite young, looking not a day over fifteen years old. They began each fight by entering the ring wearing Buddhist flower garlands, and performing elaborate rituals to pay tribute to their trainers and prepare themselves. Vendors sold ramen noodle and Chang beer to the crowds.

Each fight was accompanied by musicians providing live traditional Thai music that really added to the feeling that I had been transported inside a Mortal Kombat video game. Unlike Mortal Kombat, however, the fighters were careful and calculating in their brutality. Usually I just mash all the buttons at once.

My favourite fight involved two men who both weighed 115 pounds. Rob was betting on red. I was betting on blue. We were betting kisses, because this was, after all, our honeymoon. Red had smoked Blue in the face quite hard and Blue was bleeding all over himself and Red. I thought it was going to be over. But Blue was clearly angry, and despite the blood that was flowing down his brow, by his eyes, and all over his chest, he attacked Red with the fury of an animal. Push kick. Push kick. Knee. Red put up a good fight, but he’d gotten too cocky too early at the sight of drawing blood. Blue never gave up, and never grew tired, while Red steadily lost his energy. He was also, I admit, taking a lot of hits. There was a pivotal moment where Blue was just giving out kick after kick to Red’s rib. With every hit, the Thai crowd shouted. Side note: Ever notice how the sound of a punch or a kick sounds nothing like the POW that you hear in the movies? Nope. The thunderous sound that you might expect to hear, however, was echoed in the crowd. Kick. Kick. Kick. Red wavered, and then suddenly collapsed. He couldn’t take anymore. Blue stood and waved at the crowd, blood all over his face. Blue had won. What a fight.