I had no idea how accurate I was when I made reference to bar girls in my first novel, It All Started in Mandalay, . In the novel I talked about the "farang lottery" where a girl from Issan met and married a foreigner from a western country and was well taken care of for the rest of her life.
How true this is I found out yesterday when I went for a hair cut. My barber said she had a friend she was going to see in Patong who had just come from her same village who was going to work in a bar, and not any bar but the bar where everyone comes to work from this village. Apparently this bar is frequented by a lot of Australians and there are many tales of marriages where the ladies end up going to live in Australia after they buy their parents a house back in their village.
Apparently there are all kinds of stories in this town of women who have come to Phuket, hit the farang lottery and llived happily ever after in Australia ( after getting a house built for their parents in Issan).
When one of my friends lived in Pattaya he used to go to a bar where the women were following instructions from a book on writing to their boyfriends with the introduction page telling them to say how much they missed them, then the next page writing about what to write a few weeks later if the men wrote back and so on. It is just like any other business, I guess.
Kind of takes the magic out of dating..doesn't it? But these are the things you learn about as a foreign teacher.
How true this is I found out yesterday when I went for a hair cut. My barber said she had a friend she was going to see in Patong who had just come from her same village who was going to work in a bar, and not any bar but the bar where everyone comes to work from this village. Apparently this bar is frequented by a lot of Australians and there are many tales of marriages where the ladies end up going to live in Australia after they buy their parents a house back in their village.
Apparently there are all kinds of stories in this town of women who have come to Phuket, hit the farang lottery and llived happily ever after in Australia ( after getting a house built for their parents in Issan).
When one of my friends lived in Pattaya he used to go to a bar where the women were following instructions from a book on writing to their boyfriends with the introduction page telling them to say how much they missed them, then the next page writing about what to write a few weeks later if the men wrote back and so on. It is just like any other business, I guess.
Kind of takes the magic out of dating..doesn't it? But these are the things you learn about as a foreign teacher.
As well as learning how to surf!!!
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