Sunday, March 01, 2009

Hatyai is about eating, shopping, massaging, praying &


We were a group of about 40 adults and kids. Except Fabien and some kids, most of us have been to Hatyai at least one. Therefore, we were not going to the typical tourist destinations but mainly the goals were to eat, shop, pray and do some massage.

Thai food is famous in the world. Look at all these different spices at a market.

We were told that seafood here is a lot cheaper than Malaysia, so we grabbed as much as we can. :-)

The famous fried pork at a restaurant facing the Buddha statue.

The Buddha statue from the restaurant.

Beside seafood, a lot of Malaysians come here for the bird nest and shark fin soup. This bird nest + coconut combo = 500 Thai baht or around 10 euros. Fabien didn't touch any of these as he found the concept of bird nest weird.

Hubby wanted to try pathai in Thailand but it seems that pathai is not so popular in this region. We had a hard time finding it and I think a lot of the group members were disappointed to eat a plate of noodle as lunch instead of seafood or some typical Thai dishes.

There was a lantern exhibition and I found them splendid.

Hatyai is a shopping heaven for many Malaysians as suddenly we feel the strong purchasing power. At the end of the trip everyone brought home many Made in Thailand products.

We had an oil massage the first afternoon when we arrived and we really enjoyed it. It was 600 baht per person for 90 minutes. Hubby was skeptical for the Thai style massage at the beginning as he didn't enjoy the Indonesia bone cracking style. He finally tried it while I was doing shopping and he felt very good after. A traditional Thai massage only cost 240 baht for 90 minutes. We then tried the foot massage twice, 250 baht or around 5 euros for 1 hour.

Beside all these activities, Thailand is famous for it's sex tourism industry and Hatyai is no exception to this. We didn't go to the infamous "Tiger show" or "Thai Girl show" or "ping pong show" as we were not really interested. Usually these shows are popular among some old and lecherous looking men. In this kind of show, Thai girls use their private part to perform some sexual related show. Last I heard, these girls pull out fire cracker from their private part and light it after. Scary.

We heard that we can see prostitute everywhere in Hatyai but after some observation we couldn't spot any of them. We tried to look at some "Stop" sign junction but nobody was pulling any man passing by for business. The only "suspect" we saw was an "ah kuah" or man dressing as woman waiting for business.

After some consultation, we were told to look at old man or western man with a young Thai girl. The girl usually come along with a bag for her changing clothes. They would dress sexily and would not talk much with their client. With all these tips we started noticing them. True, they are usually with older man. At one point we spotted a woman who dressed extremely sexy with heavy markup and we told ourselves that she must be one of them. Surprisingly, we saw her again and this time she was with a man and two kids who call her "mummy". After this we simply gave up.

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