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Pimps, pole dancing and paper (Fri 7 March - Sat 8 March 2008)
Hanging out in the bar one lunchtime over a spot of noodles with my pals Amber and Josh and Zak the manager, another guy who was using is laptop joined our conversation. He is an ex cabbie from London who sold up came over here 8 months ago. As is usual, one politely asks what he does and he surprises us all by talking about his bar, how well it is doing, and then sums up his role as “a pimp who runs a bar”. He proudly tells us that he runs a very good bar, he brought 5 girls up from Phnom Penh, paid for their transport and board and lodging for two days so they could decide if they wanted to stay (they all did apparently). He pays them $50 a month (average salary is around $35 - $40) and if they want to make “private arrangements” with the customers then he doesn’t object…. He then goes on to say he really likes it here – he has spent years in Pattaya and Phuket in Thailand and, as he put it, “availing himself of the services there” and says they are now really awful, all the girly bars have ruined those places. I assume he failed to grasp the irony of his words as he helps this place to go the same way…. He did go on to say how his bar and restaurant are really clean, but somehow, I didn’t see myself booking a table for that evening! On Friday evenings here at this hotel they run a sort of “culture show”. It’s by a charity called M’Long and it rescues and trains street children. Part of what they do is to try to keep some of the culture alive and this simple show is part of that, and a hat is passed around at the end for contributions to the charity. The dancers in the show are all teenagers and they do a series of dances that they have learned in traditional costumes that they have made in the sewing training classes. One of the dances on the programme was a pole dance, and after the conversation of earlier in the day, I was a little concerned as to what life skills these kids were being taught… But I needn’t have worried, it was the traditional dance of stepping quickly between bamboo poles on the ground which are moved in rhythm by other dancers. The bar and restaurant area where it takes place is part outdoors and in the middle of the show the heavens opened. But they carried on and at the end of the show they do some rather impressive cartwheels and some more modern street dancing. By that time they were in about 2 inches of water and gradually getting wetter and wetter, the splashes on the audience getting bigger and bigger, but with huge grins on their faces, they were having fun! I think their hat collection that night would have been bigger than usual. Now onto paper – I have noticed that this is not a very automated place. Every time you order something in the bar or restaurant it is carefully written down in English and the paper tucked away. To pay your bill at the end all the bits of curling paper are added together on a huge calculator, but how they manage stock control from this I will never know. When I signed for lunch the other day, it said I had eaten “fried ingredient”. But in some cases this is not as easy. One evening I called into another Western managed small hotel to check it out and ordered a glass of wine. Even though I was paying cash, it still had to be written down, the only problem being the barman couldn’t write English. So through hand signals I was asked by the barman to write out my own “docket” ….. trusting souls….. And when you drop your laundry in there’s no such thing as a receipt – paper or otherwise – you just go back to the stall and point to the pile that is yours. The sad thing is, I’ve always got mine back – obviously my collection of clothes isn’t that desirable!
Hanging out in the bar one lunchtime over a spot of noodles with my pals Amber and Josh and Zak the manager, another guy who was using is laptop joined our conversation. He is an ex cabbie from London who sold up came over here 8 months ago. As is usual, one politely asks what he does and he surprises us all by talking about his bar, how well it is doing, and then sums up his role as “a pimp who runs a bar”. He proudly tells us that he runs a very good bar, he brought 5 girls up from Phnom Penh, paid for their transport and board and lodging for two days so they could decide if they wanted to stay (they all did apparently). He pays them $50 a month (average salary is around $35 - $40) and if they want to make “private arrangements” with the customers then he doesn’t object…. He then goes on to say he really likes it here – he has spent years in Pattaya and Phuket in Thailand and, as he put it, “availing himself of the services there” and says they are now really awful, all the girly bars have ruined those places. I assume he failed to grasp the irony of his words as he helps this place to go the same way…. He did go on to say how his bar and restaurant are really clean, but somehow, I didn’t see myself booking a table for that evening! On Friday evenings here at this hotel they run a sort of “culture show”. It’s by a charity called M’Long and it rescues and trains street children. Part of what they do is to try to keep some of the culture alive and this simple show is part of that, and a hat is passed around at the end for contributions to the charity. The dancers in the show are all teenagers and they do a series of dances that they have learned in traditional costumes that they have made in the sewing training classes. One of the dances on the programme was a pole dance, and after the conversation of earlier in the day, I was a little concerned as to what life skills these kids were being taught… But I needn’t have worried, it was the traditional dance of stepping quickly between bamboo poles on the ground which are moved in rhythm by other dancers. The bar and restaurant area where it takes place is part outdoors and in the middle of the show the heavens opened. But they carried on and at the end of the show they do some rather impressive cartwheels and some more modern street dancing. By that time they were in about 2 inches of water and gradually getting wetter and wetter, the splashes on the audience getting bigger and bigger, but with huge grins on their faces, they were having fun! I think their hat collection that night would have been bigger than usual. Now onto paper – I have noticed that this is not a very automated place. Every time you order something in the bar or restaurant it is carefully written down in English and the paper tucked away. To pay your bill at the end all the bits of curling paper are added together on a huge calculator, but how they manage stock control from this I will never know. When I signed for lunch the other day, it said I had eaten “fried ingredient”. But in some cases this is not as easy. One evening I called into another Western managed small hotel to check it out and ordered a glass of wine. Even though I was paying cash, it still had to be written down, the only problem being the barman couldn’t write English. So through hand signals I was asked by the barman to write out my own “docket” ….. trusting souls….. And when you drop your laundry in there’s no such thing as a receipt – paper or otherwise – you just go back to the stall and point to the pile that is yours. The sad thing is, I’ve always got mine back – obviously my collection of clothes isn’t that desirable!
