By Juli

Barely minutes after breakfast settled down in our empty stomachs, the troops from Monash University Malaysia aka us set ahead for what the activities of the day would bring. And wishful thinking if we were expecting to be chauffeured to our first destination ….. the Foundation for Women (FFW). One 15 baht bus ride away brought us to what would look like a shophouse in Chinatown, then again this is generally consistent with what a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) would expect to look like. Our Thai hosts greeted us graciously with traditional salutations followed by generous servings of cakes and more cakes. When the talk began, what began to unfold seem to suggest an ardous struggle for the cognition on the rights of Thai women in a patriarchal society. Our host who is a staff of the centre informed us that FFW provides services to women and implement activities by applying human rights principles aiming at respecting , protecting and promoting the rights of individual women and ‘girl child’. Anecdotal evidence were peppered throughout the whole session about the abuse, exploitation and trafficking of Thai women that the centre has had to deal with since 1984. The underlying factor for most of these activities seem to stem from poverty.

Next stop, a very long bus ride away to Chulalongkorn University where lunch awaits us. Just before you begin speculating, allow me to put that to rest. All we had was dreadful canteen food. I felt as if I was 10 again, eating food from my primary school canteen. Yes, it was dreadful. After this our very helpful guides, Masters students from the university brought us to Siam Square, which was supposedly the heart of youth culture in Bangkok. There was nothing here that one cannot find in Sungei Wang Plaza.

Just around 4 pm, the rain decided to pay us a visit so all 19 of us had to ridiculously run to get a bus back to Chulalongkorn University where our next set of speakers were waiting to educate us on media policy reforms in Thailand. Suddenly what was taught during our core subject Communications, Industries and Policies began to see the light of day. We were informed of the government controlled media situation in Thailand and how the civil rights movement usually fronted by student rights activist like ourselves were the reasons for media policy reforms in the past and present.A comparative analysis was also made on the media situation in Malaysia and Singapore vis a vis Thailand. A colourful question and answer session closed the day.

Having sat through two hours of talk, we were visibly tired and hungry. The feisty looking speaker from Chulalongkorn University was kind enough to walk us through the streets to a hawker centre for some Thai dishes of tom yam, mussels, omelette and fried rice. Filled with Thai delicacy in our tummies , we were all ready to see the other kinds of Thai delicacies, the kind that decorate the streets of Patpong at night. Patpong, the infamous red light district of Bangkok is usually a must see destination for tourists and we were no different. A kaleidescope of colours, music and skin is exactly what Patpong was. The streets were lined with male strip joints or what they call the ‘Ago go’ bars. Here, men were the object of the gaze; well formed, honey skinned beautiful men were parading in their tight little white shorts for the whole world. Moving on, our guides walked us through a series of bars, strip joints filled with women, and men who are now women aka transgered men in their glorious outfits beckoning us to come in and watch them shake their tushy. But of course being the greedy pseudo tourist that some of us were, we did not fail to buy almost every single crude T-shirt from the street shops.

From here, the groups parted into two, those who wanted to see only women parading their everything and those of us who also wanted to see the Adams of Bangkok showing some flesh and perhaps more. The night ended very differently depending on which side of street you were at. But it was truly Bangkok in all its senses : gloriously colourful.