Trip to Thailand - Part 1- Nutty cab driver - Sawadee Ka ! Ma Pood Thai! Leave me alone!!

How wonderful when you realized that at the age of 40 (well, almost), you still have a gang of buddies who are ready to have some juvenile fun with you. Even though sprout after sprout of grey hair is now visible on your scalp and almost all of your friends are happily married, even with kids. Family is a big concern when you are planning a big 4 day trip with your uni buddies. And every 10 years, we have this, and it's such a big deal to all of us. As I wrote on my facebook, a triumph of sisterhood.

This time, I still live up to my name of rabble-rouser. My main role is to provide entertainment and laughter for my folks. I am never a good organizer of a trip so I leave it to my friends to deal with it. Anyway, we had loads of fun. We went back to where we belong: Eat,shop and be merry. Lots of horrendous laughter every five to ten minutes (I think in some ways it's pretty much what happened to girls from Catholic girls school- totally unrestrained when it comes to expresing their joy). I squeeze time to enjoy the sun by the pool while my dear friends cook their way out and smell with chilly and curry from buttering up their culinary skills in a Thai cooking school.

The first two days were rather peaceful even though my brothers were on the verge of dying when they heard that I would be going to Bangkok. "I can't believe you did that to us. Don't you know there are those red-shirters. Why are you that carefree? I want to die." I still can't understand why men are prone to heart attack. Or perhaps that only happens to those men around me. Sorry!

We couldn't sense how serious the situation was because at the heart of Bangkok, it was business as usual. We only knew that the red-shirters were going nuts and wrecking the ASEAN conference in Pattaya. Only in Pattaya. So, we kept laughing like crazy, shopping till we dropped, massaging here and there and most importantly eating whereever and whenever we could.

Not quite carefree... indeed the night before the red-shirters returned, we were already in trouble - with taxi-driver. We had dinner at China town and afterwards we split into two groups and got on taxis. As usual, I began with a seemingly proficient "Sawadee ka" and then before they started talking to me in a language that I barely understood, I flaunted the hotel address (in Thai of course) to direct the driver to the hotel, the next thing was that he spoke to me in Thai and squinted his eyes. Right away, I suspected that he probably didn't know where to go. He kept talking to me in Thai, with me telling him "Ma Pood Thai" which means "I don't speak Thai." Perhaps my thai friend taught me the wrong phrase. Because the more I told him "Ma pood Thai", the more Thai he spoke. I was so scared. And then while he kept speaking to me, he missed a turn and we went all the way to a one way road. We almost wanted to kill ourselves. He kept turning round and round. My friends were feeling sorry for him because apparently he didn't know where to go. In fact, he was freaking out. I, the merciless one, was in full rage and at the end, I made my frustration verbally known to my friends. "I am really pissed. You know." Once I said that, they stopped talking and I bellowed at the driver, "STOOOOP!!!". He was so scared that he dropped us off at the middle of the road and cars just screeched by. We rushed across the road and quickly walked 5 minutes down to Parragon.

We took another cab at Parragon. This time, we wanted to make sure the cab driver understood English, and didn't take me as one of them. So, I switched to English and he perfectly understood and he spoke perfect English. As soon as we fastened our seatbelt and thinking of the jacuzzi in our rooms,he, the sneaky driver, took us to a big detour. My friends and I, who just did the round and round the rosie, quickly realized that was wrong again. But the driver just hummed song and kept saying, "solly.Oh solly!! I am solly!!" Now we know he is cheating. I went so berserk that anything came out from my mouth was God knows what as vulgar as possible in English and I screamed the hell out of him. I told him i would take him to the police station (and coincidentally, a police car was just in front of us). And my friends at the back were screaming"NO BULLSHIT!! GET YOUR DAMN CAR TO OUR HOTEL!!" And I kept saying the f--- word in Cantonese with a mix of the English f---,without realizing that i was doing it.( I was notified by my friend that I was the epitome of a psychopath). Probably that scared the driver, he immediately said, "OK!OK! Free meter." And at the end, I stormed out of the car, without paying a penny, of course.

Well, "Never underestimate the power of a woman" but better, 'Never underestimate the power of rage to a woman'.