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.Sure.Relieved, anyway.Cautiously, I moved my arms and legs, extending them, flexing.I arched my back.So far as I could tell everything seemed to work, and my knuckles weren't noticeably bigger than they had been before.Now that it was over, in fact, I supposed I could say I felt good.I gave Uan her cousin's chicken and rice as a bonus, and she went away reasonably happy, even though I failed to be as blissed-out as she figured I ought to be."Excuse me," came a voice from behind me."I couldn't help noticing you were having a massage.Could I ask.What was it like?""Magnificent," I told the greenhorn, a player of loud rock 'n' roll tapes on the beach against whom I had earlier been secretly fulminating."Aside from one woman named Olga, back in Montreal, I've never experienced anything like it.You owe it to yourself."In truth, however, I had been disappointed.Surely there was more to it than that.After everything I'd been told.I had heard about Wat Po, back in Bangkok, of course, and its reputation as a centre of training in the techniques of traditional Thai massage.In fact, I had asked Uan if that was where she'd done her apprenticeship.But she'd said no; her cousin in Sattahip had taught her everything she knew.Probably on one rainy afternoon, I thought to myself, perhaps unkindly.But could it be there was still the experience of a real massage to be savoured?At Wat Po, the prices are written in both Thai and English, but the alert customer will see that the prices aren't the same in each language.When I remonstrated, fairly gently, I was told there was more of me, as a farang, and thus it was only right that I should pay more.Thinking then in fairness they should post a rate scale based on the number of square metres of surface area to be pummelled, I nevertheless coughed up what they asked — 120 baht per hour — and was directed to a small room where I could change into a pair of loose pyjama bottoms.The large room where the massaging was to take place was equipped with 20 or 30 beds, most of them occupied by masseuses and carcasses.All along the back wall the yellow- and orange-painted room was open to the afternoon sun, which lent a cheerful air to the proceedings.The lady they assigned me was built along the lines of a rice barge.You could believe they kept her in reserve especially for outsized farangs like me.She would've also come in handy if you needed any rampaging elephants subdued.It was essentially the same routine I'd been treated to on Jomtien Beach — maybe Uan's cousin in Sattahip had learned her stuff at Wat Po.But the difference was that this lady had an authority that Uan had lacked.More than any difference in skill, she was twice as strong as Uan, and maybe three times.She flopped me around as though I were a piece of meat on a cutting board.There was art involved, though, because none of it hurt.And, as Uan had, she seemed to feel that the success of a good massage was to be found in the amount of noise you could coax from the carcass at hand.When she got around to dislocating all my fingers, she looked at me proudly, as if to say "There you go, you great ungainly farang, you.Not for nothing did I study for 15 years at the feet of a master."The hour passed quite quickly, though—more quickly, I thought, than had the half hour on the beach.And I did feel relaxed.What the massage had to do with it, mind you, was an open question.After all, I had been lying around largely inert for all that time listening to the wop-wop of the ceiling fans and the languid chatter of the masseuses.I figured I would have felt refreshed even without the massage.So what good had it been? There had to be more than this to massages; what was everybody always talking about, anyway?My friend Stack Jackson recommended a therapeutic institution called the Shaking Heaven Physical Massage and Social Club."You want a massage?" he asked me."They'll give you a massage."At the same time, Stack shared some health advice circulated by the American Embassy in Bangkok.They mentioned that there were institutions in the city where the masseuses employed certain unorthodox techniques that could be hazardous to your health.That's if you considered, for example, dropping dead in your tracks unhealthy.It seemed that many of these ladies thought their clients enjoyed the rush they got from having the arteries in their thighs blocked for a time, and then suddenly released.Maybe this was fun, who knows? But it also occasionally proved quite fatal to people with blood clots [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]