I'm back in town after six months hard at work in the States. There are some questions about FLs in Bangkok, so here are some points I picked up last summer, and which continue these days (based upon my first full night on Sat night).
By FL, I'm talking about the girls who frequent clubs or SWs (not entirely distinct sets, but relatively little overlap). As someone posted recently, walking up and down Sukhumvit after midnight will reveal a great deal of potential. Last night, on my way home at 5:15am, the taxi came down Suk and I saw perhaps two dozen girls between Soi Nana and Soi 11. Of those two dozen, perhaps four were serious head-turners.
But on to the point of my report - nightclubs. There is a well established trifecta of scenes in BKK for the girls to head to - this information was given to me by a girl in the summer time who was a seasoned veteran of the night scene in BKK. This at the tender age of 26. There actually is a fourth, but that one sucks IMHO, so I wont count it in the trifecta (otherwise I would need to figure out what the corresponding word is for four). The trifecta is as follows:
(Bed Supper Club)
Spice Club (now Climax)
Spicey
Bossy
So Bed Supper Club is the one that I dislike. It is on Soi 11, just past Climax. It is a weird building, made out of sheet metal, with translucent walls so you can see the throbbing neon lights from inside. I hate this place, actually, since it is full of white guys wearing linen shirts and overly gelled heads. No offense to white guys, or those who like gel, but when you have a large number of similar looking people, and you don't fit in, you are not likely to enjoy yourself there. The girls in there know what kind of crowd goes there, so I got no interest at all. By the way, I am brown skinned, dark haired, early-thirties, athletic, American. But I am not caucasian.
Climax is on Soi 11, in the Ambassador hotel. It opens sometime before midnight, but does not get going until around midnight (probably a little later than that). I like getting there early (midnight), grabbing a table with a view (and where I can be seen) and just watching the talent. It gives me the power to choose, rather than walking into a full room of eye balls on your back, if you know what I mean. Climax goes until 2am on weeknights, and 4am on weekends. I have heard that the police are cracking down, but I can tell you that Climax was roaring at 3am yesterday.
The girls at Climax are a mix of straight-up working girls (many of the pool hall girls from Gullivers go here after midnight or so), semi-professionals, and real-life girls looking for some fun and some cash on the side. Each has its own charms - the pool hall girls are a little dodgy since they all talk to each other, and so once you are with one of them, it is really hard to try another. Not impossible, but hard. The semi-professionals are a good group, since they don't have any hangups, and they are not as organized as the poolhall girls. And the amateurs are hit and miss - if you catch a star fish, then you are in for a tough night, but you could just as easily get a firecracker, which has happened to me on many occasions, making it well worth the gamble.
The gentlemen here are a mix, more so than Bed Supper Club. The preponderance of ethnicities, I would say, is caucasian, but there are enough other ethnicities to make anyone feel comfortable. There are usually a couple of black guys (no more than that though), a couple of Indians, and a couple of Arabs. Then there are the various mixed ethnicities, mestizo if you will. The age range is from 18 to death, with the median probably around 32, 33.
Once Climax closes, the girls who are still looking (or partying) head to Spicey. This place is down Sukhumvit past MBK, turn left around a block past MBK, then a few minutes winding through alleys. The taxi will drop you off in a spot where the more safety-oriented amongst us would think twice about getting out, but it's ok. The area is dark, there are a dozen or so Thai males walking around menacingly. But when you get out, one of the menaces opens the door for you and says in surprisingly good English 'welcome to Spicy night club'.
Oh, thanks dude, that makes me feel better. So you are led through what looks like someones open-roof garage and into a dingy small room with a counter. You pay your 300B entry (which gets you one drink), and in you go. Alternatively, if there is a group of you, you could buy a Johnny Walker and that gets five people in, and you get treated like a high roller. The JW costs $1200B (I think, maybe 1500B?), so you lose nothing.
The room itself is dark and smokier than Climax. The gentlemen here are a little less gentle than at Climax. The mix of ethnicities is decidedly darker, and the feel of the club is a lot grittier, rougher. I was there last night and I saw two fights involving punches and broken bottles. Not to scare you, but that kind of thing does not happen at Climax all that often. Just so you know, they have a zero tolerance policy for fighting. If you are involved, whether you are the instigator or the victim, you get tossed by a goon who has hands the size of my flat-screen tv - I mean they are huge frikkin hands. He reaches over and puts them around the back of the fighting pup's neck, and as soon as that happens, the fighter realizes how huge these hands are, and he amazingly stops struggling and falls limp, as if knowing that to resist hands like these would be futile. It's worth going just to see this guys hands, really.
The girls are a mix too, but there is definitely talent on display here. The club has a looser feel, and so the girls are a little less conservative than at Climax. I think Climax is like a softer, gentler version of Spicy. It starts earlier, the girls are a little more prissy, the guys don't get into fist fights. I arrived at Spicy at 1:30 on a Sat night, and it was positively depressing. The room was around 1/3 full, about 60% girls, all looking at me (which is a nice thing). But it is really hard to get any action going when the room is this empty. I thought I was in for a dead night, but it worked out ok. See my next post for that.
The third club is Bossy, which is in the Pratunam area. This place is thought of as the after-Spicy club. Spicy is supposed to close at 4am, but last night I was there until just past 5am - maybe weekends it is open earlier. Bossy is a cool place- perhaps my favorite of all three. It has a rough feel to it, like Spicy, but somehow it is more glitzy. You pay the same cover charge, and when you walk in, you are on an elevated platform where you get a view of the stage to the right, and the dancing mass of bodies right in front of you. There is an elevated seating area against one wall, which seems like a pointless place to be. But you can walk through the crowd, look for your poison, circle a couple of times, and then return to the general vicinity of the girl you picked out and try to work your magic. The crowd here is also mixed, with enough brownies and blackies to make a guy like me comfortable, and enough whities to make any ethno-phobes comfortable. It is still a white-dominated crowd, but it doesn't blind the eye, so to speak. Sorry to be this graphic with the ethnic descriptions, but a lot of people wonder about these things, and so I am just trying to be descriptive. No offense to anyone.
This place goes late, although I have never been there when they closed. I have always managed to snag some little lovely and head on back to the hotel well before closing.
One more thing: I *think* that if you take a cab with more than two people in it to Bossy, you do not need to pay the cabbie, since the club will pay him. That's an added perk.