Part 2.. hotties, massages.. and shops galore!Assalamualaikum and hello all..  Yes, I know.. I'm supposed to not take too long to update this blog. But a thousand things popped up between then and now. But enough excuses..  The morning of the second day, we decided to take a leisurely breakfast (thanks again to our gracious hosts), then decided to get our bodies tuned-up.. Thai massage style! But as with things in my life, why take the direct approach when you can take a detour? We took a walk into an alley.. smack into a morning market! Centered on a stupa (with a no-kidding jinn sitting there all fat and pretty from the offerings and incense smoke!  ) and consisting of a few streets' worth of wet and dry stalls, it reminded me of the old Chow Kit hawker complex that got cleaned up in the mid-1980's.. we bought some mangoes and sweet sticky rice (pulut daa!) for breakfast.. One thing I've heard about Thai massages.. they're really thorough, covering every square inch of skin and as many cubic inches of flesh as can be squeezed or pinched by fingers (and I'll bet that they'd go deeper if they could stick their hands inside!). And yes, there are lots of places there where you can ask for the extra service  . Of course, I didn't dream of asking for that (and not just because I had Azatul and Auntie Faridah close by either!) but I did get everything else.. basically it's a trip from pain to pleasure starting back to front, top to bottom to top again (and yes they did touch that area, and no they only adjusted the ligaments and nerve channels down there. Honest!) Result : a renewed me! Not only did I regain 5 years' worth of flexibility, I also got my blood flow going again.. fast and hard! The massage is definitely on my list for next time I swing back! Early evening saw us over at Yao Rat.. Bangkok's Chinatown. You gotta have one of those to put your city on the world map, and this place was no exception. What was exceptional though was the profusion of wares you could buy, starting from baby stuff (yes, I got some more for Adam Daniel) to wedding door gifts (hey, I can't just feed you guys for free.. I gotta give you something to remember the occasion by!) to Thai silks (ooh honey, remind me to marry you in those..) to guns?! Lucky them those stores are closed.. else I'll be in there going oooh and aaahh over weaponry that's illegal to stare at in Malaysia! And yes.. go watery-eyed over the memory of a certain .30-06 rifle and Leupold scope..  Then, after a short trip to dump the merchandise, we went to eat at this Pakistani shop. Weird it is to say, but the food.. was delicious! We gorged up to our gills then waded through the crowd (they were mostly Arabs watching soccer on big screens and ogling the locals).. through brass work stores showing off their wares, including these hot, life-size busts of naked women (it's not so much the nakedness that got to me, but the "skin" tone.. I'll bet any hot-blooded guy would go gaga over skin like that, and no surprise that Azatul - honey that she is - tried to blind me while I was drooling over them!  Patpong Street.. is nothing like I've ever seen anywhere in my travels so far. Imagine two miles of explicit sex acts and wares, mixed in with about 10,000 stalls' worth of every item you could possibly want to buy (and quiet a few you wish you could if you'd only keep your mate in the hotel room!) My eyes went  , my mouth went  , and for a second I thought "I'm in heaven", with the doors to every bar thrown wide-open, and the bouncers and door-guards letting you stare past them for about 10 seconds (to someone like me, that's an eternity of bouncing body parts and gyrations on sticky poles accompanied to raunchy music). But only a second.. all that explicit sex jars you into thinking, "What a Hell this place must be.." The side streets reeked with piss and beer, the crowds were oppressive and so horny even Azatul got a few stares, and the wares so numbingly abundant I kept my wallet closed.. glad to see Watson's of Patpong Street were going on full blast though. Part 3 is next. I'll skip the conclusions, and go straight to a topic no one's ever heard of.. the future (read: technological and societal singularity, trans- and post-humanism) and Islam.. and how this all fits. Wassalam.. | 
