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Bangkok, capital of Thailand.

If you want to spend an evening at the circus, come to Thailand. But you are going to need a week instead of an evening as you might spend the first five days in one of the endless Bangkok’s traffic jams. In order to see the clowns, you don’t even have to pay for the ticket, because you can see them in the street. Although the vaginal launch of ping-pong balls, due to the risk for the artist, is indoors. You only need a strong stomach to have a drink while the expert launchers find the perfect position with the ideal launching angle.

If you are too shy for this show, you can always enjoy the best of all the acts, although you will have to go to the cinema to see it. Any cinema works, but we recommend you the Parangon, a luxurious room with reclining seats, blanket and pillow included. But that is not the show; the good part comes at the beginning, when instead of the previews they show a public announcement about the Thai Monarchy and everybody, with no exception, stands up, full of excitement. They love their king more than Heidi loved her grandfather, even though he is a first class freaky. It is not difficult to see him walking in the streets of Bangkok with his camera around his neck or interrupting a reception to play his sax, the same that he used to compose the national anthem. I can see Woody Allen using him in one of his movies. That would be really funny. The Monarch enters the scene and the whole cinema stands up. He gets out and everybody sits down. Enters the scene again and everybody up. Once and again and again during the whole damn film.

Out of the cinema you will recognize those king-lovers because all of them walk around with the same shirts. Like if they were members of a soccer team but with the royal coat of arms embroidered next to their hearts and a battle-cry on their backs: Long live the King. The official shirt is yellow; the “away” shirt is pink. The former, because according to Buddhism it is the colour for Mondays, the day the king was born; the latter, because some astrologists predicted that pink would bring good health to the Monarch. Unusual? It may be for Europeans like us but it is not in Thailand. Keep in mind that here, they cannot care less about anything, for example, democracy. The previous administration was in power for 20 years thanks to massive purchases of votes from the Thais, with no shame on their part. Nobody did anything about this until a bloodless coup d’etat, threw the corrupted politicians out. Two years later, the military called an election and, surprise, surprise, the polls show the very same thieves as winners.

In Thailand, people don’t show any kind of enthusiasm if it is not to celebrate the king’s birthday. They just don’t give a damn about anything. Even their famous Buddha, instead of being meditating in that well-known sitting position, cheerfully, lies on his back. They only seem to feel like eating all the time and everywhere. Forget about those special dishes that take forever and cost one week worth of work. The other day, in the middle of the street in Bangkok, in two minutes, we got some rice with squid, tomato and onions fixed, and it was “finger-licking good”. Around 30 baths, 50 cents of a Euro, more or less.

However, the most original things are not their recipes, but the weird couples that you get to see over there: middle-aged men with young and beautiful Thai girls. If you thought that sexual tourism was a secret to be kept in the bedroom, you were wrong. The prostitute users are so generous that instead of keeping their “quickies” for themselves, they walk them with nocturnality and premeditation, around the hotel swimming pool or the last fashionable restaurant; the market, or the next door café. Some of them look arrogant, almost defiant and proud of their catch. On the other hand, others look with moony eyes, like if they were ashamed of their public sin. However, most of them take care and spoil those girls with so much care and look so silly that we almost stopped thinking poorly of all of them and started to believe in love. Call us naïve… mi amooor.