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Bar Girl Bank Account
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Back in farangland, if I gave a girl a gold necklace, I would spend a lot of time choosing a design appropriate for her — delicate or heavy, intricate links or attractive pendant. When I gave it to her the girl would ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and say thank you with kisses & hugs, and usually a bit of sex.
In Thailand, the reaction from a bar girl to your gift of gold is likely to be proportional to — not the beauty of the jewelry — but it’s weight.
You see, gold jewelry is the way bar girls store their wealth. A gold necklace is a bar girl bank account.
In Melbourne or Memphis I might find it difficult to locate a place to buy or sell gold. Here in Bangkok nearly every major street has several gold jewelry shops where you can — not only buy gold jewelry — you can sell it as well.
Buy prices are posted daily, and are based on weight. When you buy a necklace, the price will be based on a sell price that is slightly higher than the buy price, plus a small amount for design features.
The weight of gold here in Thailand — and this may be confusing — is in baht. Of course, this is the same word used for currency in Thailand. Perhaps it’ll be less confusing to my British cousins who use the word pound for the weight of gold as well as the price of shoes.
(weight: 2 baht price: 23,000 baht)
In any event, a 10-baht gold necklace represents a pretty healthy bank account for a Thai bar girl.
Now, back in my pre-Thailand days, if I gave a girl a piece of jewelry, I expected her to treasure it forever for it’s sentimental value.
Don’t expect this from your Thai bar girl. The first time she has financial difficulty she will pawn the necklace for the market price on the day.
I learned this last year when my Thai girlfriend at the time asked me to buy her a gold necklace for her birthday. We went to the jewelry shop and spent nearly an hour together going through different designs until she found the one she really liked. I bought it for her, spending about 11,000 baht.
A few months later, I noticed she wasn’t wearing it. I asked where it was. It took some pressure to get her to admit that she’d pawned it, but she could still get it back.
“How much do you need to pay?” I asked. She needed 9,500 baht plus another 2 or 3 hundred for interest. I gave it to her, and she got the necklace back. Don’t think that she now understood the sentimental value I attached to it. Sure enough, she pawned it again. I think she managed to buy it back on her own, but the chances are that sometime in the past few months she’ll have sold it, especially since we are no longer together.
Basically, between the 11,000 baht purchase price and the 9,500 retrieval amount, I may as well have just given her 20,000 baht.
As farang, I think most of us have a sense of romance about gifts we give to women. Back home, a more expensive gift is typically valued highly, and kept forever.
Here, if you want your TG to keep your gift for sentimental reasons, give her a plush doll… she’ll keep it forever, and it will always remind her of you. Thai girls love plush dolls, and they have no value, so your girl won’t sell it.
If you give her a gold necklace, just assume it’s a cash gift that will later be pawned, and re-sold to the next punter from Germany who wants to impress his girlfriend-for-the-week. Your gift of gold will be something that she’ll show off proudly to her friends (assuming it weighs enough), but it will be converted into a more liquid asset whenever the need arises.
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