Sorry to bring us back to Pattaya again, but the recent threads on the place made me think about how, in spite of the fact that it's not terribly big, it does seem to attract some of the oddest people that I, for one, have ever seen or heard.

As a frequent visitor, I repeatedly come across people whose overheard conversation (why do people feel the need to speak so loudly on the beach or into their mobile phones?) or other activities imprint themselves on my consciousness and, over time and probably for utterly irrational reasons, make me take an intense dislike to them, even though I don't know them at all and have never actually spoken to them.

Perhaps I can give a couple of examples of such characters. Maybe others would like to add more and we'll see if there are any who we all recognise...

(1) a guy looking like an ageing hippy who, a few years ago, could be found repeatedly driving around the Day-Night area in an open topped four-wheel-drive vehicle with an elaborate sound system and huge freestanding speakers through which he blared music and some sort of personalised fanfare to indicate his arrival at a bar. He would stagger out of the (chauffeur-driven, I seem to recall) vehicle looking rather the worse for wear, go into the bar for a few minutes, come out again (cue for the in-car noise to begin again) and then tootle off - usually in the direction of Sunee Plaza - only to return again 30 minutes later.

(2) a Jomtien Beach regular who frequently seeks (in a very loud and hence involuntarily overheard voice) to impress the more naive and impressionable beach boys by telling them that he is an ex-cop, has killed lots of people in his time and is quite capable of taking out anyone in Thailand who double-crosses (or perhaps merely just crosses?) him.

The vast majority of people I have met in Pattaya over many years - especially the Thais - have been delightful. Maybe the two I have pinpointed are really very nice people too. Maybe, to others, I myself am just as weird in behaviour/conversation.

But Pattaya certainly seems to be a place where you begin to suspect that a surprisingly high proportion of ex-pat residents must be living because of their innate social ineptitude and/or their inability to fit in successfully in the land of their birth.

In which case, maybe they can only feel at home (and in the position they would like to occupy in life) in a country like Thailand where many inhabitants award them "status" merely because of their farang birth and not because of their real human qualities or abilities?

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