Lauren tries to spice up our relationship: Exclusive!
After a long tour of some of the more out-of-the-way temples of Angkor yesterday, some of which were hidden gems, others were just Hadleigh Castle with humidity, Lauren and I treated ourselves to half a dozen drinks in one of the many happy hours down Siam Reap’s Bar Street.
We plonked ourselves down in front of a big open air T.V. to watch the Spurs- Pompey game (still reeling from Arsenal’s loss to Hull, by the way) when we got talking to our waiter. He was shocked to find that not everyone coming to visit Cambodia from the west was super rich beyond their wildest dreams and that Lauren and I were not millionaire types.
It was in speaking to this man that Lauren remembered a conversation we had had with a woman who ran a street stall a few nights back, she told Lauren that she loved going to the Karaoke bars around town. Lauren’s eyes lit up in recollection of the possibility of singing her heart out into a microphone and pleaded for us to go in search of such a bar. I agreed, of course, and we settled our bill before setting off into the night.
I had a vague recollection of there being a neon sign advertising a karaoke bar somewhere near our hotel and before too long we had found it. It did strike me as odd that the sign advertised both ‘karaoke’ and ‘massage’ in one sentence, but Lauren was not to be put off from the chance of imagined stardom so easily and headed the charge. Upon entry, the building was split into two sections, a bar area with, oh yes it is, a strip show going on. Alarm bells are ringing for me, but still Lauren persists, asking the amused staff where the karaoke area is. We are pointed down a corridor and rushed into some rooms.
The alarm bells had stopped ringing by now, instead I was being hit over the head with the wake-up bat as Lauren seemed apparently oblivious to a couple of things.
The first was the group fo all-male Japanese tourists we had to push through to get to the karaoke rooms. This wasn’t through the bar either, but an eiree behind the scene’s type corridor complete with burley looking bouncers lining the walls. The second thing was that the right hand wall held a one way mirror. On the other side of that mirror stood a selection of young local girls, dressed in a way that would make Hugh Hefner blush, each holding a numbered card in front of their barely concealed breasts and staring despondently at their own reflections.
Still Lauren persisted.
We pushed on, with me ‘um’ing’ and ‘er’ing’ until, finally, we were lead by a swarthy type into the karaoke room. A private booth with, well, a sofa that some could say would double for a bed.
Lauren had marched us into a brothel.
We made our escape quick sharp and fell into hysterics a few blocks away. From now on, I’m insisting that if Lauren wants to do karaoke, she can improvise in our hotel room with the cardboard from a toilet roll and me humming the tune.
Tags: Cambodia, Siam Reap, Travel
mikeloken
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