Another Random Photo!

Another busy day, so it's another random photo chosen with my eyes shut.  If it's anything interesting, I'll tell you about it, and if it isn't ... I'm off.

Oh dear!  Definitely interesting-ish! It's one of my series of shots of our friendly neighbourhood ladyboys' daily puja offerings.  I have no idea of why I'm taking these photos nor what I plan to eventually do with them and just hope it's nothing awful.

I haven't told you this before, but we live just along the hall from a flatful of Thailand's only-ever genuinely ugly ladyboys.  Previously, I didn't even know Thailand HAD ugly ladyboys because, more normally, they look like this:

 ... but one look at our new neighbours and the scales fell from my eyes and I realised the error of my ways, so can now tell you that Thai ladyboys range across the full spectrum from truly lovely, like Miss Tiffany above, all the way across to our chappies down the hall.

And thus, given their line of work where being truly-ugly must surely be a handicap and thus, perhaps, because life is especially hard for them, these lively fellows offer MASSIVE puja (although it's not called puja in Thailand, is it!) to their gods every morning for success in their daily undertakings.

And they do it in the communal hallway too.

Flowers on their improvised altar outside their front door I don't mind.  Nor do I mind the incense.  Even the bowls of fruit they put out, I don't object. But when there's an entire baked chicken dinner or a small roast suckling pig with dumplings, I find myself saying brutally Kristallnacht lines like "We never had vermin till they moved in!"  which may be true but is also something you never want to hear yourself say about anyone.

Mind you, vermin-attracting or not, I took their side in a fight on the street one night, but I couldn't help it because it was one of those times where, although you have no idea what's really going on, you side with the folks you know because the others are just so genuinely vile and awful. 

Naturally, the fight occurred on Lockhart Road, heartland for The World of Suzie Wong:

 

Although this brothel is in Bangkok! 

And the street-warrior gangs consisted of, on one side, Our Neighbours - bolstered up by the local hard-faced Mama-sans and a gaggle of our winsy-gorgeous but deceptive tough little Filipina prossies - and on the other side the vilest, foul-mouthed, most genuinely awful gang of large, truly-ugly black-American drag queens!   

And the fighting consisted entirely of screaming and screeching, pushing and shoving, with flurries of shrieking and little girly-chest slaps where everyone protected their manicures.  It was indeed charming to watch, although I was really only there because I got trapped in the crowd while passing by, going out for dinner.

 

Clearly it was a turf war because there's undoubtedly room for only ONE gang of truly-ugly ladyboys, even in Lockhart Road, and the fact that Our Guys had neighbourhood support meant that everyone agreed Our Guys should win!

And then, when the police finally arrived, the cop with the yellow stripe (HK police wear a yellow stripe on their shoulder if they speak English) asked me -  so-obviously merely a disinterested by-stander and therefore unbiased - who was in the wrong, I immediately and with undoubted bias pointed at the American ladyboys and they were the ones arrested.  Yayyyy!

Mind you, the police sooo wanted to arrest the Americans because they were so vile.  The instant the police arrived, they were on to them, shrieking about what Our Guys did to them and the cops so-obviously couldn't understand a word and kept pointing at Yellow-Stripe-Cop and saying "English! English!" and the Americans were shouting back at them "What do you mean, English?  He's a Chinky-Chinky Chinaman just like you, you stupid c**ts!"

Hey, you don't need a yellow stripe to get what that means, and so, after their quick demonstration of "how to get yourself arrested in a foreign country", they were handcuffed and bustled into paddy-wagons and we never saw them again.  Yayyy!

So that's the story of how Our Guys won the turf war for ugly-ladyboy space on Lockhart Road! And indeed the gods got a mighty big offering the following day!  A little roast suckling pig with dumplings!

Yeah, yeah! I know!  I was definitely asking for it!