Pattaya

Two weekends I a row in July I headed to Pattaya which is supposed to be the scum of Thailand. What I actually found was that it is just a beach town that went astray. The first time I went to Pattaya was because the rest of my U of M homies were going. I was going to go to Sukkothai  that weekend, but decided that it wasn’t smart to go by myself. So I tagged along to Pattaya.

When we first got there we found out that we were staying at a hotel called AMBIANCE in the “Boyztown” District of Pattaya. At first it kind of sketched me out, but it turned out that it was actually a good place to stay. Boyztown is full of Ladyboys and male masseuses’. So it ended up being quite safe for 4 girls because no one was interested in us.

While in Pattaya I had 2 great runs in the mornings it was hot, therefore there were no dogs to chase me, also a saw quite a few dogs on leashes! For the remainder of my day on Saturday I walked around the main beach street and at night we met up with the guys from Campus 3 and went to the house they had rented. It was actually pretty fun. We made our way back to Walking Street (the bar district) but we had a hard time finding any open bars because there was an election going on and they aren’t allowed to serve alcohol during an election. After walking around for a while we stumbled upon a bar full of people and decided that they must have been serving drinks there. There was about 8 of us lined up at the seated bar for a couple of hours. We played Connect 4 against the bartender and she whooped us all, I was very impressed!

The next weekend was the marathon in Pattaya so I went back. It was a much different atmosphere that weekend because there was 10,000 runners taking over the city. As races go, Pattaya was a great host city. I didn’t end up feeling too good for the race but I still managed to run 1:30 for the half and they gave me 6000BHT prize money (200CAD) I was pretty pumped, the race winnings covered all of my expenses for the two weekends.

All together Pattaya did not live up to its negative reputation. Yes, there were some shading things going on with older men and young Thai women and Boys but I avoided it easily and ended up having a blast.