The trend of presenting foreigners as a bad presence in Thailand continues on the airwaves that are the newspapers and online forums. Social media has started to have groups that are specifically looking for foreigners behaving badly and this is not good for people like me that keep their noses down and just want to live a regular life.
The stories seem to always come out of the same 3 places, Bangkok, Phuket, and of course, Pattaya.
This time around though the farang-haters are putting on a more devious hat and approaching something that isn't really even about your average person visiting here or staying here.
While I am pleased that the police at least tried to utilize some level of civility by protecting his privacy by blurring his face out, they definitely made sure the public knew that the FBI was searching for him, that he was staying in Phuket, and that he is wanted on child-sex-oriented allegations back in the United States. As if the drunken idiot foreigners visiting and wrecking stuff wasn't enough, we now have the focus on wanted pedophiles in the news about being in a country that used to have quite a lot of this going on but seemed to make some sort of recovery from it.
Speaking of drunken idiots, there was still plenty of that in the news and it is of course the usual suspects in the usual place: Brits in Pattaya!
After midnight? check perpetrators covered in tatoos? check in the girly-bar part of town? check after midnight? check At least one person wearing a football top? check
it's all so tiresome ya know? These sorts of things have become so common that they aren't even surprising or shocking when they make the news. I don't know what specifically spurred on this fight (don't really care either) but it always seems to be the same thing. I have been in areas like this and it is really a stupid thing the way that some dudes get some sort of territorial feeling or jealous feeling about a girl that is working at the bar when if they were just to stop and think about it for a minute: This girl doesn't actually like either one of you - she is just in it for the money you are spending on her at the bar.
I don't know if this is how the situation started, but I've seen it happen many times before. I was in a place the other day for dinner and a few - which is really the only way that I roll anymore - and I saw a couple of young lads get ready to rumble so to speak because and older gentleman, who honestly doesn't stand a chance with the very pretty girl behind the bar, because he was doing the awful crime of talking in a friendly manner to her as she was doing her job... and making her laugh.
The young lads or at least one of them seemed to think that she is "his girl" and didn't want the much older Australian to be "flirting" with her. I kind of know the girl in question as I regularly eat dinner here and after all had left I asked her what the hullabaloo was and she said "that young guy is so jealous me!" (exact words, not a typo). She doesn't like the older or the younger guys in any sort of dating way, she is just doing her job and trying to earn tips yet these morons think that she "like likes" them. Their will be a fight there eventually I am sure.
When you look at the Thailand news at various English-language language websites the news is dominated by foreigners behaving badly and recently there was a protest of sorts in Phuket that drew about 200 people that were trying to force the police to be more "just" in their charging of foreigners with crimes and then deporting them.
I already know why that isn't going to happen even though some police spokesperson will probably come out and say that they will. In all of these situations the foreigner will be offered a way to buy his way out of trouble, some amount of money that is really high for a local but normally "no problem" for the affluent traveler. The traveler pays and walks free. The financial hit that he took might hurt for a while, but it also gives them this sort of "untouchable" feeling that they can commit crimes with impunity. I've seen these people: They are the ones that are drunk driving all the time and causing problems everywhere that they go. If they do get busted they just buy their way out of it.
The people can protest all they want but until you reform your police force and the really high level of corruption that exists inside of it, this problem is never going to go away.
for the most part foreigners actually do behave very well and respectful while they are here but these people are not in the red-light districts at 1AM and beyond. Shocking I know!
