Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

Maid in heaven … yes, I know she’s not a nun but she has some disgraceful habits

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I’ll bet a good may of you have fantasised about them from time to time but did you ever think you’d see the day when there would be a beauty pageant for Nuns? Well Father Antonio Rungi, from Mondragone near Naples, say he expects at least a thousand to enter his “Sister Italia” contest.

Father Rungi wants to dispel the myth that nuns are frumpy old fuddy-duddies. “Today it’s not like that any more, thanks to an injection of youth and vitality brought to our country by foreign girls”. He said there were nuns from Africa and Latin America who were “really very, very pretty - the Brazilian girls above all”.

“Nuns are women above all else, and beauty is a gift from God,” he said. He also pointed out that nuns would not wear swimsuits or revealing outfits and that what he valued most in a woman was “inner beauty”.

“Nuns deserve much more attention they they get”. He said nuns had both “physical and spiritual beauty”, and often did social, caring or hospital work in which an “attractive presence” was an advantage.

Father Rungi,who has organised religious services on Naples beaches at which sunbathers can say the rosary, said photos of the contestants would appear on his blog at the beginning of September for online readers to vote for their favourite.

Unfortunately his blog doesn’t appear to accepting visitors at the moment.

All together lads “Oooooh, how do you solve a problem like Maria …”

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There’s not much that is old in Old Hong Kong. What’s left is mostly in a district called Mongkok on the Kowloon side of the harbour and even that is hidden behind a barrier of concrete and glass, shops, malls and traffic jams.

According to the Guinness book of records Mongkok is the most densely populated place on earth. It’s easy to believe, but if you elbow your way through the crowds and head off down a side street towards Shanghai Street and Reclamation Street you can get away from it a bit.

Reclamation street once ran along the western side of Kowloon and, as you might have guessed, was built on reclaimed land. Now it is about a kilometre inland but around here it is still possible to find some older buildings, shops and markets.

The menu

It’s also possible to find some old brothels so the other afternoon I went off in search. They’re not difficult to find. Along Reclamation Street they are about the only things that have any neon outside. All the other signs hark back to a time before neon. The ‘menus’ are a bit of a give-away too though they seem mostly to be more wishful thinking than reality. Perhaps they too hark back to an earlier time.

At the top of the narrow staircase I was greeted by the manager. “We have Chinese girl $350 or Thai girl $300″ he said. How about Russian girls I queried but he shook his head “Only Chinese and Thai.”

Reclamation Street

It looked like the reception of an old hotel. A wooden reception counter to the right a few chairs, and old wood panelled walls - cheap looking but old none-the-less. I asked him to show me some Thai girls. He took me down to a room and asked me to wait.

The room boasted more wood panelling, this time interspersed with mirrors. There were also mirror tiles on the ceiling suggesting that this had been a brothel or short time hotel for a good many years. A black and white TV was showing Japanese porn but the bathroom fittings were pleasingly modern but the Athenian corners were cheesy.

After about five minutes two girls appeared. I’d already decided I’d send them away if I wasn’t happy with them but one of them was really very cute indeed so I paid the man and sent the other girl away.

She had a shy almost frightened look to here which was explained by the fact that she had only been in Hong Kong for two days and was very new to this line of work. I spoke in Thai as far as my abilities would allow me which seemed to relax her. She said she was planning to stay for two months, the maximum her visa would allow, and go back. After that she would decide on whether to do a stint in Singapore.

Despite being on a time limit sex was slow and gentle, she gave me what is known as a good GFE (girlfriend experience). Afterwards she showered pronto and made a bolt for the door. “Bye bye” she said, and blowing me a kiss she was gone. I was still pulling my trousers back on. She was a cute girl and she’ll probably do well for herself in this business if she’s sensible. But the first thing she’s got to do is learn to wait for the tip.

Read also: Suzie Wong Revisited
Read also: Wanchai
Read also: The Red Lips bar

Tak ka tan: A bit like Pringles with legs

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Her lacquered fingers delicately pulled the wings away from the body, the legs were similarly dispatched. The torso she popped deftly between ruby red lips. “Arroy” she said. I raised my eyebrows, cockroaches taste good huh? “Not a cockloach!” she replied as she slipped off her stool to go and get me another beer.

Thai cuisine is famous all over the world and restaurants catering to lovers of the countries gastronomic delights flourish everywhere from Sydney to Seattle. But if you’ve had the pleasure of sitting at the beer bars in say, Nana Plaza, for any length of time you may have noticed that some of the things that the girls put into their mouths bare little resemblance to the things you see on Thai menus in the western world.

The other evening, while propping up the bar at Playskool, I issued a five-hundred baht note (about US$15) to two delightful ladies and commissioned them to return with snacks. This is what they brought:

Som tam

Ferocious: som tam

The Tourist Authority of Thailand likes to claim that fried rice is the national dish but considering Thai cuisine is famous for being spicy a plate of kao pad seems a bit pedestrian for a national dish. Tom yam goong is the hot, sour prawn soup that all Thai restaurants have on the menu but for the average Thai that’s a luxury dish.

Som tam on the other hand is cheap and available everywhere. Every neighbourhood has it som tam lady and if you ever need to catch up on local gossip go talk to her. The som tam lady knows everything.

It is made from grated/julienned green papaya which is mixed in a mortar with tomato, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and a fiendish amount of chilli.

It is often garnished with freshwater crab but I refuse that. Eating crab from a polluted river that has been stored in a plastic jar through the heat of a Bangkok day is too much like asking for trouble.

Ka nom jin
Noodles, again with a very spicy sauce. The recipes for this are many and have been handed down through the generations. This one had prawns, string beans and plenty of chilli but it disappeared over the other side of the bar somewhere, I only got to sample a tiny fork-full

Neur bing/Moo bing

Making kaoneow bing

Neur is beef and moo is pork. These were strips of the respective meats dried, cut into strips and barbecued. The strips are about the length of a finger but a bit thinner and are tough and chewy.

Kao neow/Kao neow bing
Kao neow is sticky rice. The rice grains are soaked overnight and then steamed in a rattan basket. This produces a congealed, chewy mass of rice which you can break off, roll into balls and dunk in the sauce of your som tam. Kao neow bing sees the rice being flattened out and rolled into discs about four inches in diameter. These are coated with something yellow and a bit cheesy flavoured and barbecued.

Jing leed

Jing leed: nutty

This is a cricket, wok fried lightly salted and eaten whole. It is quite crunchy and has a delicious nutty flavour. It is about one to one-and-a-half inches long.

Tak ka tan
The common grasshopper and one of the most popular of the insect dishes. This little critter used to devastate crops. When the farmers discovered they were edible they got their own back. These days they are even farmed. Wok fried and lightly salted they taste a bit like Pringles with legs.

Maeng Da
The giant water beetle has quite a bitter taste. It can be eaten whole but I think it is best minced and mixed with chillies, shallots and spring onions and eaten with kao neow. They can also be used to flavour curries.

I didn’t get to try the silk worm larvae or whole load of other interesting things this time around. The dishes are all popular in Issan the north-eastern region of Thailand which borders Laos and Cambodia. This is where most of the girls that work the bars, as well as taxi drivers, construction workers, cleaners etc come from. And they all go down exceedingly well with a bottle or five of cold BeerLao.

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Most ladyboy lovers I’ve spoken to are quick to point out that having sex with ladyboys does not mean that you are gay. “We are still turned on by femininity,” they insist “whereas gay men are attracted to masculinity.”

My old mate Captain Outrageous agrees. “You still treat them as you would regular women, you open doors and stuff like that. In the bedroom you feel like you are having sex with a girl who just happens to have a dick. Once you get over that little barrier you are on your way to some pretty explosive sex.”

I was keen to know about post-ops, ladyboys who have gone the whole hog and had gender re-assignment surgery. “Personally I prefer them with cock intact.” says the Captain. “It adds a little extra to the proceedings and she can’t fake an orgasm like regular girls can. That said there seems to be plenty of guys who favour the post-ops”

But why, isn’t that just going back to square one? “Not at all.” Explains the Cap’n. “What you have to remember is that although she now has the body and genitals of a girl she still has the same lust for wild uninhibited sex that you have. And as I’ve said before; that can get pretty explosive”

Just as there are bars in Patpong that are dedicated to ladyboys there is also a bar, Kings Corner, that is staffed exclusively by post-op ladyboys.

Now the nets first website featuring exclusively post-op ladyboys has just been launched. It’s called Ladyboy Pussy

Website: Ladyboy Pussy
Interview: Captain Outrageous
Challenge: Can you tell the difference

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I’ve been working on a review of popular condoms recently, it will be published here in due course.

Now there are just to many to do a really exhaustive survey so I’ve decided to omit all the special effect varieties, you know, the textured and the flavoured. They may be worth a post in their own right at some point in the future.

There is another type which I won’t include in the main survey but I thought I’d tell you about them now. Largely because it was the first time I’d ever tried them. These give you a tingling or warming sensation. I guessed they must be filled with the same types of herbs and oils that the respectable aromatherapy massage parlours use to sooth tired limbs all over Bangkok.

Now an old friend of mine, who sometimes hangs out at the Thermae Coffee shop and Bar, used to work in one of those parlours so I pocketed a packet of three and went off to look for her. She wasn’t hard to find. “Sawasdee ka, Khun Seymour.” She beamed. “Not see you long time.”
(continues here.., more pics too…)

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There are some funny names in Thailand. Actually most of them are nicknames. They do have formal names, they are often chosen by a monk when the child is about 30 days old. These are usually long and cumbersome and only used for official documents.

In the meantime the doting parents bestow a nickname, usually the first thing they think of when they gaze upon their little bundle of joy. Noi, Nit and Lek are common. They all mean small … which is reasonable enough. Bum is cutely dimpled, Deng means red and Som means orange. Presumably that is how the wee bairns looked at birth.

I have met a frog (Gop), a several birds (Nok) and an alarming number of girls called Moo … which means pig. How that sneaks into the post-natal lexicon is beyond me.

Noi means little and kanya means girl but as you can see from the picture on the right our Noi Kanya is no little girl.

The word porn comes from the ancient Pali language and it really does mean beauty. I’d say Noi Kanya is definitely great Porn.

See also: The bargirl name game
See also: Rainy Season

Mature Asian women: Not shy and demure any more

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From the novel A killing Smile by Christopher Moore:

“Zeno, Headquarters, HQ, the Star Wars Bar on Sukhumvit. You can’t miss it. Fake Greek columns in front of a sign that reads Turkish Bath, Barber, Massage, Espresso Coffee Shop. Fritters fried in big pots of palm oil outside the entrance. Beggars, bar girls, diplomats, spies, writers, bums, ex-Nazis, merchants, gangsters, tourists drifting in and out, eating at makeshift sidewalk cafes beside food carts and stalls. Cuttlefish and lottery vendors working the crowds. Like you, they’re all looking for shamans and ghosts.”

The Greek pillars and the massage parlour have gone now, the original building was demolished. But within days of the original closing, in 1996, a new one opened just a few doors away. It is now in the basement of Ruamchitt Plaza, 199 Sukhumvit Road. Some of the surroundings have changed, since Moore’s description, but the overall atmosphere remains.

It first opened in the 60’s. Cheap beer and cheap women made it a popular hangout for GIs on R&R from Vietnam. It was one of a number of bars that included Thai Yanok, The Blue Fox and the Grace Hotel coffee shop. Thermae is the only one left.

Approaching from Nana it is on the left. You have to elbow your way through a forest of market stalls where package tourists from all over the world come to haggle for cheap trinkets and t-shirts. An illuminated yellow sign points out the steps down to Thermae from behind a barrier of motorbikes. Most tourists don’t see it, it’s not mentioned in the glossy brochures.

(continues here.., more pics too…)