Eye Candy on Beach Road

October 30, 2011

To bring you this column I had to fight off gangs of Indian tailors, hawkers, beggars, barging Russians and hordes of shoppers streaming from the malls on the town side of Pattaya Beach Road.

Ignoring these distractions, I focused on finding interesting items of art. Not good ones, mind. Only interesting - which is just as well as it’s hardly the bleeding Metropolitan Museum of Art over there, that’s for sure.

The old stuffed shark (photo above) serves as a sobering reminder of the passing of time for Pattaya’s legion of working women, usually seen in the familiar Pattaya cycle of younger girl in go go bar, who becomes an older girl in Soi 6 who becomes an old bag on Beach Road.

This toothless old shark seems to say “you too will end up on Beach Road, in the same condition as me - well stuffed and falling to pieces”.

I like the above plastic heads which have been placed outside one restaurant, where they sit, bearing silent witness to the shenanigans and crime on the other side of the road.

They are also a very appropriate symbol for other, murkier aspects of life in Pattaya, a city which specialises in all kinds of head, from the giving of it (everywhere) to head shots (guns).

Dream On

On a sunny day with a blue sky background, these metallic sails outside Central are a pleasant sight.

However, to me they represent wishful thinking about the way Central hope Pattaya will go; the clean blue sea flecked with tall sails atop expensive sailing boats owned by posh residents, moored in the no doubt soon-to-be-built marina, after which they all troop into Central to eat and shop, and spend gazillions of quid.

‘Aint gonna happen though. Or not in most of our lifetimes.

Boy with Swan - Mistreatment of animals is a perverted Cygnus.

I saved my favourite piece until last. This statue of a boy with a swan is again an entirely appropriate image for Pattaya.

Located in the pleasant grounds of Caffe Toscana, this fountain lends itself to a number of thoughts.

First of all, is he playing with this unfortunate creature? Is he trying to kill it? Or worse, to mount it?

And is the boy choking a chicken, grappling a goose or strangling a swan?

I think the latter, but look how close he is to it. Disturbingly close.

Perhaps the boy really is THAT into birds, and if so, where better to put this statue than in Pattaya, where it can function as a piece of symbolic art representing the city, to which ornithologists all over the world flock to get to grips with its many varieties of birds.

Although, as also represented in this statue, the bill for that kind of grappling can be quite large.