Thursday, April 13, 2006

A Sexy Ride Home

Chiang Mai is actually a good city to be stuck in. Internet is dirt cheap here, fast, and I can use Skype to make free phone-calls back to the US.

What with the fact I still haven't signed a summer internship contract, I still don't have summer housing sorted out, and I'm still balancing abot $80k of 0% credit card debt - there are lots of things to take care of, and lots of phonecalls to make... And due to the timezone difference, I can really only get stuff done late at night (if I want to talk to people in the US).

And so, the other night, I finally left the internet cafe at 3AM.. and walked out to a completely empty street. I walked down to the main road, and there wasn't a tuk-tuk/rickshaw in sight.. What to do?

After 7 months on the road, in very safe countries, I've quite comfortable with the idea of hailing down a passing motorbike, and asking them for a ride...

Thus, the first person I saw, I waved down. It was a rather attractive young woman on a motorbike - her english wasn't that great, but good enough to understand where I wanted to go...

I started to make smalltalk...

Me: "So, are you a student"
Her: *laughing*, "No.."

The lightbulb in my head suddenly lit up.. Ding!.... She was a bargirl, on her way back to her bar/place of work after visiting a customer who was staying near my internet cafe.

We made a bit more smalltalk (she's from a poor village in the northeast, has been doing this for about 6 months, all her customers are foreigners, etc), before she dropped me off at my place... and refused any kind of cash for the ride home.

So, er, technically, I've now had a prostitute refuse payment for services rendered..

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