The Ping Pong Show

The Ping Pong Show. A true “Thailand only” experience. This is Wikipedia’s description of this obscene cultural phenomenon:

“Ping pong shows are an activity. The show consists of women using their pelvic muscles to either hold, eject, or blow objects from their vaginal cavity. Such objects include: long string, whistles, pens, cigarettes, candles, darts, spinning tops, razor blades, chopsticks and, of course, ping pong balls.”

Despite it’s killing of the cat, curiosity got the best of me and I went to one in Phuket. It’s not necessarily something I wanted to do, but felt like I had to do while living in Thailand.

To be completely honest, I just wrote a full post about the entire experience, in detail, and it’s a good one. I just can’t post it. It’s honestly disgusting and I almost stopped a few different times. If anybody really wants to read it, I’ll email it to you. Let’s just say for a “ping pong show”, there were very few actual ping pong balls involved. There were however fish, birds, string, needles, cigarettes, blow-darts and fine penmanship.

Overall it was a pretty sad experience. I did a little research before writing the aforementioned black-listed post so I could come from a more informed standpoint. Most of these women are immigrants from Laos or Cambodia and only get 2 nights off per month. They receive about 6000 baht for the time worked (I make 25k for comparison). I have no idea how these poor girls support themselves. Apparently if they’re not immigrants, they’re mostly former factory workers who lost their jobs when the economy was bad.

I gotta say, I should have listened to the numerous people who told me these things weren’t worth it. I’m not going to say I regret it, but I won’t be going again. At least I can now give any future attendee a realistic expectation of what to expect. I know most of my posts are usually light-hearted and kinda funny, so I’m sorry for a bit of a downer one. Let’s all be thankful for what we have and have a look at a nice picture of a kitten to cheer ourselves up. Have a nice day everybody.