Nightmarch

[PattayaPete 530]

Beer bar or gogo: up to you!

I’ve been asked, more than once, and usually by beer bar owners, why I tend to concentrate most of my reports on gogos to the detriment of the vast multitude of outside bar beers. The answer is fairly simple. First and foremost, the majority of bar beers are ‘personality’ places, that is, the owners depend on attracting and keeping regular customers by being in the joint on most nights and doing the meeting and greeting.

 

Given that there are around 900 bar beers across the length and breadth of Fun Town, and there are probably owners who come from about 30 countries, it stands to reason that boozers who have the Swedish flag hung from the rafters are probably hoping to attract Scandinavians rather than Germans and English; those with an English flag (the Cross of St George, not the Union Jack) are probably declaring their place as ‘off-limits’ to Germans and lost Japanese.

 

The owners and managers of these places may well be personable types and their boozers worthy of a libation or two on a regular basis, but language and cultural barriers mean the majority of their customer base centres around natives from their neck of the worldly woods.

 

My own feeling is most people reading this regular missive are primarily interested in the search for Miss Yai Bonkalot and her willing ensemble of damsels of loose morals rather than a beer boozer run by a garrulous German or a spirit-imbibing Finn with deep pockets and a wallet-load of personality.

 

This brings me to the second point regarding bar beers: the talent on display. Even the most one-eyed beer boozer owner will admit that while he can get plenty of older women of dubious virtue to man the beer pumps for a monthly salary and fixed working hours, the attractive younger brigade (that is, between 18 and 23-24 years old) prefer to front up if and when they feel like it. OK, so the booze bar owner saves on a salary. The unwitting customer who spotted Miss Young and Stunningly Right for A Night while he was sat nursing an alcoholic refreshment at the beer boozer across the way the previous evening and decided to ‘play it cool’ by waiting 24-hours before pledging his troth (no, I don’t know what the f*ck that means either, but I read it somewhere once –in a Mills and Boon romance novel- and always wanted to use it in a column about ladies of the night),misses out because the apple of his small eye has decided she’d rather ply her freelance activities at a different beer boozer.

 

In other words, the good sort you spot at a beer boozer on Monday night at 9:00PM might not be there on Tuesday night at 7:00PM or any other hour of the evening on that night. It’s a fair bet that if the damsel you fancy is sitting on the outside of the boozer then she’s a freelancer rather than a salaried employee.

 

The best boozers have a combination of really personable owners (eg, Atlantic in Soi 3, Coral Reef, Best and Cherry in Soi 8, Lek in Soi 7, the Kennel in the lane between Pattayaland Soi 1 and 2, and, of course, the Boxing Roo on Third Road come to mind), reasonable prices for the ‘water that makes you legless’ (eg, Eagle in Soi 7 and Sailor in Soi 8), and can usually accrue and maintain a few attractive ladies prepared to spend an evening or two helping to reduce the bank balance of a walking wallet or ten.

 

I think the value for most people in frequenting bar beers is to build up a circuit of places where they are welcomed and become known to the owners or long-term staff and where they feel comfortable. What then happens is you become a regular and will spend a few nights a week or a month having a couple of thirst-quenchers while ogling what talent might just have taken up warming a bar stool for the evening.

 

Yes, many of the ladies dispensing alcohol and honing their Connect-4 skills at an outside establishment are worthy of getting to know in a more intimate fashion, but if I were to spend just a week wandering 20 or 30 of these places making copious notes about the numbers and locations of the best quality, by the time my social study has made it into print, probably three-quarters of the breeding stock will have moved to greener pastures or been locked into a long-term contract dispensing sexual favours for monetary recompense and readers will bombard me with irate missives demanding I have my eyes examined for the onset of glaucoma.

 

The Race that Stops a Nation: The Melbourne Cup, a horse race run over 3200 metres at Flemington on the first Tuesday in November every year (in 2007 the first Tuesday is the 6th), can be seen at the Boxing Roo beer boozer and porkpie hat emporium. Stalls will open at 10:30AM (yes, that’s in the morning), with the race getting underway at 11:00AM. Uncle Kenny says there will be food and prizes and for those who can stay the distance, the San Miguel Band will be belting out a few tunes later in the evening.

 

All Sisters Under the Skin: Although I went to the ‘soft’ opening in September, I hadn’t been into the new Sisterz gogo (Walking Street) since then because I wanted to give Rambling Ricky time to settle into some sort of groove. I wandered in on a recent Thursday night, through an entrance that put me in mind of an epileptic fit: all flashing lights and frosted glass. The place had plenty of chrome pole huggers -I counted about 35- and while some were dressed in the standard g-string a number were sporting about as much material as it takes to make a slingshot. In fact, it was draped about their bodies in such a way as to leave very little to the imagination.

 

Those who remember the layout of the former Honey gogo would be quite impressed with the way the large space has been utilised, to such an extent it means a lot more people can pack in which gives the place a good atmosphere. There’s a happy hour from 8:00-9:00PM with Chang draught amber fluid, house liver wasters, lolly water, and Thai rotgut at just 35 baht. Outside of happy hour, Chang draught is the house special at 55 baht a glass while the standard fare for most thirst quenchers is 95 baht.

 

Around and About:

Congratulations are in order for the owners of the Taboo gogo (Soi 16, off Walking Street) who celebrated their first anniversary with a party on Saturday night 20 October. There were plenty of people who thought Taboo would be lucky to survive the low season, but they’ve done just that and I wish them all the best for this coming high season and for their second year in a tough and unrelenting business.

 

Down in Soi Town-in-Town, off Central Pattaya Road, a new inside boozer called the Driving Range Golf Bar should just about be up and running by the time this edition hits the streets. Putting my Einstein cap on, I’ll take a wild guess and say the joint is run by golf tragics.

 

Just down from the deservedly popular Cherry noshery on Third Road (opposite the X-Zyte head-bangers auditorium), a former munching palace has been transformed into a boozer called Donovan’s. It looks like the owners have taken the much-abused Irish pub theme idea and, next thing you know, we have a bright green sign out front and, well, you know the rest.

 

Keeping with the Irish theme, the Oliver Twist English pub on Central Pattaya Road, opposite the Nova Lodge sleeping palace, has changed its name and has now become an Irish bog with the name Berrigans/Bannigans or something like that. I’d had a few too many libations of an alcoholic nature and couldn’t read my notes the next day, and I couldn’t be bothered wandering back to check the name of the joint. Suffice to say, Oliver Twist probably wasn’t getting ‘enough’ and I suppose the new name is designed to cash in on ‘the luck of the Irish’.

 

Piece of Pith: Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.