My Bangkok Bar Girl Asked Me for 300000 Baht

I’d been living in Thailand for 3 months and I was loving everything about it.

I was down in Phuket and I was one of those guys that was doing remote work.

Most of my days were spent in my room working and when I got a chance I’d go out to a local street food stall to get something to eat.

I’d hardly ever been out at night in Phuket, apart from the odd time every now and then.

I was so busy working and feeling so fortunate to be able to be living in Thailand that I kind of missed out on many things that Thailand has to offer.

But I really liked being there and didn’t want to go anywhere else.

At that time, I had no idea about all the connotations that go along with meeting girls in bars.

I was quite blind to things that go on and I’d not been to one bar like that in Phuket and they were not even on my radar.

The Visa Run to Laos

Close to the end of that 3 month stint in Phuket, I knew I needed to go and get a different visa.

My first time in Thailand was on a tourist visa and one extension and that lasted for 3 months.

I wanted to make sure I liked Thailand before I invested in a more long-term way to stay in the country.

When I knew I wanted to live in Thailand longer, I decided to get the education visa and do Thai language or Muay Thai.

I thought I was going to stick to Thai language as I was interested in Muay Thai, but I didn’t know if I could dedicate so much time to it.

So I left Phuket and made my way to Laos with all the documentation from a language school in Phuket that I would need to get my education visa.

I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t possible to do it in the country and why everybody has to leave, but that’s how it was and I thought it would be fun to go and look at Laos.

I had to spend a few days in Laos in the capital Vientiane and it was a nice change to being in Phuket.

I found it quite interesting that I would never have visited there if it wasn’t for needing that visa and I saw quite a lot of other people in the same boat as me and they had a great bar along the river and it’s the river that you look over and see Thailand on the other side.

The beers were great and speaking to other people from all different walks of life who are waiting to get visas made for a good trip.

I thought I wanted to explore more of Southeast Asia at some point.

Up until then, my only experience in Asia, let alone Southeast Asia, was Phuket.

When I finally got my visa sorted out, instead of flying out, I decided to cross the border and get on a bus and make my way down to Bangkok.

I’d not been to Bangkok yet, so I thought I wanted to look at it and maybe look at some of the sites before going back to my home in Phuket and getting stuck back into my work.

I can definitely say if you’re earning even a medium or mediocre Western salary, it goes a long way in Thailand.

And that’s why I never left Phuket because you know the money was coming in and it all seemed good.

So when you leave for Laos from Vientiane, you cross the border over the river and you’ll find yourself in Nong Khai on the Thailand side.

I decided to spend a night there and it was an interesting little town.

Not much in the way of tourist things going on and it was very different to Phuket, but it was a good experience.

The next day, I got a minibus down to Bangkok.

And you can tell when you’re getting close to Bangkok.

And I don’t mean because you can see the road signs telling you so, I mean you can see the big buildings and everything gets a lot more built up the closer you get to the city.

We were arriving at nighttime and all I was seeing of Bangkok was it was so different to Phuket.

Bright lights, flashing lights, and interesting things to look at at night.

Of course, it’s the capital city and millions and millions of people live there.

But until you experience it for yourself, it really is a shock on the senses.

First Impressions of Bangkok

Part of me thought that perhaps I could move to Bangkok and live there instead of going back to Phuket.

I did have my condo down in Phuket, but it wouldn’t be hard to fly down and get my things and leave.

I was having these thoughts and had not even left the minibus yet.

I thought Bangkok would be better for networking and getting to know more expats who are in a similar boat to me.

Recently left their own country, working in Thailand remotely and wanting to get ahead.

That was me getting beyond myself.

And when the minibus stopped at a designated location, I had no idea where it was, never been there before, but I hailed a taxi and asked them to take me to Sukhumvit Soi 18 where I had a hotel booked.

I was staying in a hotel called the Rembrandt, and it wasn’t that expensive for what it was.

It was a good four-star hotel, and the views out over the city were fantastic.

I was staying in a room and you could see a big body of water off in the distance which I think was Benjakitti Park and there were so many high-rises all over the city.

One thing shocked me was at the building opposite from where I was staying.

I was on the 19th floor.

There was a guy working without any safety equipment on a balcony and he must have been 20 odd stories up.

He was just there precariously balanced.

one wrong move and he’d fall to his death.

That Western part of you just wants to shout out and say, “Be careful. Put a harness on or something.”

But the Thai inside you thinks it’s amazing that people can just live without all these restrictions placed on them by the powers that be.

Safe to say I was loving Bangkok.

I had my education visa to hand and I remembered that I was attached to a school down in Phuket.

All these dreams of me eventually moving to Bangkok would hang on my ability to be able to change that to a school in Bangkok.

Maybe they had a branch office in Bangkok as well as Phuket.

So, that would work out, but we’ll get to that later.

I thought I just want to go and walk around and experience Bangkok for the first time.

One thing that really struck me about Bangkok was that you have these huge skyrise buildings that can’t be more than 20 years old.

right next to really old school Thai style houses that must have been there for generations.

I think these guys are the last holdouts refusing to sell their land even though they could get an amount of money that could retire them a 100 times over.

Looking out of the hotel window to some of those houses, you wonder how it must feel to live in a house where people on every side of you are living in high-rise buildings just to be able to look into your house.

But I was also thinking it must be a badge of honor to be able to live in a house like that because not many people can anymore.

The land must be worth a fortune.

It was only a short walk from the hotel I was staying at to get to the main Sukhumvit road that everyone talks about.

I saw the mall in the distance and I thought that must be the one that everyone talks about called Terminal 21.

So I walked there.

By the time I was there I was already dripping with sweat.

The Bangkok heat is something else.

I wanted to go there because people talked about the food court in that mall where the prices are cheaper than anywhere else.

Something to do with the deal that they had when they were building the mall cuz they used to sell food there in that place or something.

So, they had to sell it in the mall at certain prices.

The same as before.

I think a plate of food for only 30 baht was what I ordered and I thought that was great.

I then went down to Nana and just had a walk around.

Guys selling all kinds of stuff on the street and it wasn’t too dissimilar to how it was in Phuket.

But in Bangkok, it was like it was taken to level 20.

The First Night Out

Had to return to my hotel to do some work because I’d been neglecting that over the past few days since I’d been to Laos for my visa.

So, I ended up spending a good seven or eight hours trying to knock out two or three days worth of work so I could enjoy Bangkok before having to return to Phuket and see if Bangkok was going to be my new home.

Finished working around 8:00 p.m. and I decided to go out.

I brought up Google Maps and saw that there was a cut through from Soi 18 going to Soi 22, which I understood had a lot of bars, and I wanted to go for a beer or two just to calm down after a hard day’s work.

I made the cut through and turned left back to the direction of the main Sukhumvit road.

And indeed, I’d say there were five or six bars dotted along that street.

There were more closer to the main road, but I didn’t get that far on that day cuz I found myself in a bar that was just playing my style of music.

And I ordered a drink.

I asked one of the girls to play pool with me.

This was my first experience with a girl in Thailand.

I’d been too busy beforehand and had not even been trying, but it was so much fun playing pool with this girl and buying drinks for her at the same time.

I left that bar after having two or three beers, and I had a good time there.

I felt I found my new go-to place in Bangkok.

A few bars down, I went in another one, and this one was different.

There was a girl in there that I would say was a solid 10.

10 in my book, and that’s all that matters to me.

Suppose other guys would disagree, but wow, I’ve been in Thailand all this time and I’d not once thought about the girls.

What was wrong with me?

She told me she’d been working there for 3 years.

And I thought, wow, that’s a long time to be working at a place like that.

But she said she stopped working a year ago when she met someone, but it didn’t work out.

So, she went back to work there again.

I was really conflicted in my mind and didn’t know what the truth was.

These girls are working.

That’s plain to see.

But are they working just for the money?

Or if an opportunity comes up when they could stay with a guy, is that what they were really after?

That was the conundrum I was having.

It’s one thing them to work in a bar, but it’s another thing if they’re there just for the money or if they’re there to meet someone and money from them, I suppose.

And that’s the cynical way of looking at it.

I left that bar because I knew I needed to wake early in the morning to do some work and which I did.

The Decision to Move to Bangkok

Getting even more attracted to move to Bangkok cuz I imagined myself working while looking out across the Bangkok skyline.

I found it gave me so much inspiration to be able to do my best work and not feel like I needed to take a break all the time.

My condo in Phuket was okay, but it wasn’t a high-rise and it looked out at a not very substantial view.

Imagine having a condo in Bangkok looking at that view, turning your head up and looking out of the window for a moment of inspiration.

And yes, I did go back to her bar that evening.

And this time, you could tell she was trying harder.

And I decided to go with her.

I just told myself it was real and she wasn’t working.

I thought she’d be working with hopes of other things.

I had to work again the following morning and she left.

She told me it was her day off.

I didn’t know why she told me it was her day off.

Perhaps she wanted to know if I wanted to see her on her day off.

I did tell her, “Do you want to go somewhere this evening?”

And I met her at the Emporium Mall not too far away, and they had this restaurant there where they serve Portuguese style chicken.

I wanted to try that because I love Nando’s.

Wasn’t as good as Nando’s, but I couldn’t believe all the variety they had in Bangkok.

Again, Phuket has a lot of variety, but Bangkok is more extreme.

From there, we went to a bar in the Phrom Phong area, just a normal bar, not one with girls inside, and it felt like a normal real date.

She ended up staying with me that night, and in the morning, she said she had to go back to work.

She didn’t ask for anything from me, so I thought it must have been a real date.

What a good time I had on a proper date with a gorgeous Thai girl.

And here I was knowing I needed to go back to Phuket soon.

I had contacted my school in Phuket and was lucky to find out that they did have a branch in Bangkok so I could do my lessons there instead.

I already made my mind up.

I wanted to move to Bangkok, but I went back down to Phuket to get my things out of the condo.

I had to break the lease on the condo and I lost my 2-month deposit, but I thought that was fair because there were still months left on the contract.

The landlord I had was great, and I know they would have given me the deposit back if I stayed until the end of the term.

Phuket wasn’t the same anymore.

When I got there, all I could think about was being back in Bangkok.

Would I miss the beach though?

I probably would.

But there were beaches close by to Bangkok you could go to easily.

So, I thought this was a minor loss for the huge gain that would be living in Bangkok.

Finding a Condo in Bangkok

I already knew which area of Bangkok I wanted to live in.

I wanted to live near the hotel I stayed at on Sukhumvit Soi 18.

I walked into a few buildings in the area and asked if they had any condos for rent, but they told me I needed to speak to an agent first.

I thought that was strange because when I got my condo in Phuket, I just walked into some buildings that I liked and they all showed me around available units.

When I found one I liked, they just contacted the owner and we signed a contract.

It was so easy.

I since learned that does work in Bangkok for some buildings, but not for others.

It depends on the policy of the building.

So, I ended up contacting an agent and telling them the region I wanted to live in and if they could find me some units to look at.

They showed me a lot of units and I quickly learned that part of Bangkok was quite expensive.

It was also hard to find very small units there as well.

Lots of buildings were older and therefore had bigger units.

But I did find one close by for 22,000 baht per month and it was on a high floor which was one of my main priorities with a good view looking in the direction I wanted to look.

I’d be able to set up my office desk looking out of the window in the bedroom and that’s what I dreamed of doing.

So I signed the contract for one year and moved in.

The Relationship Begins

When I got the condo on my first night, I went back to the bar where I met that girl.

She could recognize me, as you would expect, as she’d seen me a few times, and I thought we went on a real date.

I told her that I’d moved to Bangkok already because I liked it more than Phuket, and I had a visa that I could extend to learn Thai.

We spoke about it in Thai together, laughing at my pronunciation, and I asked her if she’d like to go and look at my condo.

She told me that she lived above the bar where she worked.

She said eight girls lived there and I thought that was a lot, but I suppose it made sense for her so she didn’t have to rent somewhere close by.

They did have cheaper places available, but they weren’t very nice.

And it made more sense for her to save the money.

We went to the condo and she said, “Wow, I’ve not seen like this before.”

Saying all the right things.

One thing I hadn’t thought about yet, when a girl says she’s been working in a bar for a month, you know she’s lying, but you don’t mind.

But when a girl says she’s been working in a bar for 5 years, that makes you think otherwise.

In the morning, I was woken to a noise in the condo.

She was cooking breakfast for me.

She said she’d been out earlier on and brought some ingredients to cook me a bacon sandwich.

I thought that was really weird.

How does she know how to make a bacon sandwich and that I would even like it?

But she said she used to have a boyfriend from England before and he used to like it when she made breakfast for him and she wanted to show me that she could be a good girlfriend.

I wasn’t that serious with her yet, but I imagined myself waking up, having breakfast ready, going into the bedroom, working with the amazing views of Bangkok, and going out in the evenings with my girlfriend.

Could you be my girlfriend?

That’s something I was thinking.

I might actually like.

Every time she left and had to go back to work, you just put it to the back of your mind where she was going.

And I’ve since thought about it and spoken to other guys who have been in relationships with girls that worked in the bars.

And I think they can get into the relationship too quickly just to stop her from working in the bar.

In other normal circumstances, they would take things a lot slower.

They wouldn’t want her to stop working in the bar for no reason.

and that’s why they get her to stop working in the bars quickly and move in with them too quickly.

That was my mentality when I went back to the bar that evening and I told her that I wanted her to live with me and be my girlfriend.

She wasn’t sure at first, but we agreed with the bar so that she could stop working there and she could go back anytime without any problems.

You know what that means.

So now I had a girlfriend living with me in my condo in Bangkok.

Only a month before this, I was down in Phuket working.

Not been out, not doing much, not met any of the girls, not looking at the nightlife, not spoken to any of the expats, a long-term tourist or digital nomads or anyone.

And now I was living in Bangkok with a girlfriend, had a few expats that I’d spoken to about their lives in Thailand and why they chose to live there and do what they do.

And I was living in a very expensive part of Bangkok.

But if you know where to go to find cheap food, you could still find it.

On the soi I was on, they even had a street food vendor that sold food up until midnight, and the food was great.

But the beauty of it also was if you wanted any other cuisine in the world, it was all probably within walking distance.

I could go on a motorcycle taxi to be able to find it.

I was really settling into life in Bangkok.

I was going to the language school often and picking up the language as best I could.

And my girlfriend was helping me as well and speaking in Thai as much as possible.

She also tried to teach me some words in the Isan dialect.

I know a few of them but not much.

Like if you say something tastes good in Thai, you say aroy, which means taste good.

Or if it tastes really good, you say aroy mak.

But in the Isan dialect, you would say sep.

Being a native English speaker who just speaks English and no other language, apart from the Thai I’m picking up, but I’m not fluent.

Some of the girls you meet in Bangkok can speak two or three different languages, not including English.

That’s one thing I learned about being in Bangkok and mixing with girls like my girlfriend.

They all have different languages that they speak depending on where they come from.

They can speak the main Thai language because that’s what they’re taught at school, but they have their home dialect as well.

If someone’s from Bangkok, they’ll just speak normal Thai.

But if someone is from somewhere else, they’ll speak that language as well.

So if you find yourself in the company of a girl that lives or came from close to the Cambodian border, she might be able to speak a bit of Khmer.

close to the Lao border.

She might be able to speak a bit of Lao.

I thought that was fascinating.

From where I lived, I could see the Benjakitti Park, and I love going there in the evenings to walk around and do exercise.

I always found it odd that my girlfriend didn’t like to go with me.

She would just stay in the condo and say in one or two single words, “I’m lazy to walk.”

That’s another thing that struck me.

We’d go downstairs from the condo to the main road, and I was good with walking 10 or 15 minutes to the BTS, but she wanted to go on a taxi or a motorcycle taxi.

I just couldn’t understand that.

Granted, it was hot, but it’s still a bit of exercise.

And the worst was when we were coming in a taxi from lower Sukhumvit.

Once you passed the Asok intersection, the soi I was living on was on the opposite side of the road.

And if it was just me, I’d get out of the taxi, cross the road, and walk.

Couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes.

But she wouldn’t want to do that.

She’d want to continue up the road until we found a U-turn, sitting in traffic, and getting dropped off right outside the condo, even if it meant sitting in the taxi for an extra 20 minutes.

There were lots of interesting little things that I didn’t understand, but I was having a good time with her and I was getting on with her well.

Oh, and I also want to mention one of the favorite malls I like to go to was MBK.

And the most sensible way to get there was to walk to the Asok BTS station and go on the BTS.

But no, she’d rather go in a taxi and sit in the Bangkok traffic.

I never understood that, but to each their own.

The Request for Money

And that brings me to the part of my story when I finally understood the difference of dating a girl that worked in a bar and a girl that didn’t.

A girl that had her own successful job and wanted someone to be a partner with as opposed to a sponsor.

My girlfriend was only 3 years younger than me.

I was supporting her and paying for everything.

I mean, that’s how I watched my dad treat my mom when I was growing up.

And that’s how I saw my grandfather treat my grandmother when I was growing up as well.

And I kind of like that traditional way of doing things, traditional gender roles or whatever you want to call it.

But I don’t ever recall my mom asking my dad for sums of money for random things.

Like imagine how weird it would have been if my mom asked my dad for £5,000 so she could go back and pay a debt that her mother had taken out against some land.

That just wouldn’t happen, would it?

at least not in my family or any of the people I knew where I came from.

But that’s what happened with the relationship I was in.

I thought everything was good and we were moving together well and we respected each other and we respected each other’s roles and I thought we were building something that might last.

But when one day she told me that she had some really bad news in her family.

She told me that her mom from back up in Isan was really struggling financially and didn’t have any money.

I have no problem with sending the odd few thousand baht every now and then, but this was different.

I was told that her mom had borrowed some money against their rice growing land.

She borrowed it a long time ago, fully expecting to be able to pay it back, but when she was struggling to pay it back, and the interest was building.

I thought that the interest rates in Thailand were set at a certain amount, and it couldn’t be more than that.

But this is Thailand, and this might not have been the most above board loan.

But anyway, this money was secured on the family’s rice land.

She said that her family used this land to grow the rice that they eat for the whole year and then they sell what’s remaining of it.

If the land was going to be repossessed, they would be in an even more desperate situation.

I felt really bad hearing this.

To start with, I actually felt like we were getting closer because she was sharing this information with me as though we were a genuine real boyfriend and girlfriend.

But then she asked me if I could pay the money to cover this debt.

It was 300,000 baht.

She saw that I worked hard and I had some money, but that was nearly $10,000, maybe £7,000.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

We’d just been together for about 3 months, and she had just asked me for this money.

Just like that.

If she’d been working for 3 months, there’s no way she’d even earn a third of that amount of money.

Plus, I was supporting her and paying for everything, and she wanted this.

Initially, I asked if she was serious.

Did she really expect me to hand over that amount of money for nothing?

And then the worst of it.

She was saying it in a really sweet voice and she was moving closer to me and grabbing my hand and pulling me closer to her.

“Please, it will really help my family and I really need it.”

I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but laughing.

I told her there was no way I was going to be able to give you that money.

Absolutely not.

We’re not married.

We’ve been together for 3 months.

And if you think I’m going to give you that money now, you’re going to be asking again and again and again.

And I’m never going to be able to save any money.

I’m never going to be able to build for the future because you’re going to want all the money.

In return, you might be a fantastic girlfriend, but if I don’t give you the money, you won’t be.

I didn’t want it quite like that because her English wasn’t great.

But no, I told her point blank, “You’re not having it.”

And she could see I was serious.

She quietly moved away from me when I told her that and said that I didn’t love her.

It’s not a question of love, I told her.

This is a question of you trying to get money out of me when you haven’t known me for long enough.

I told her it was insane.

The Aftermath

We didn’t last for long after that, but that was my first and only experience with a Thai bar girl.

It’s interesting to listen to the stories on your channel and people being taken for large sums of money.

But when this happened to me, I didn’t even know that there were so many scams like that.

I just saw it as common sense that you don’t give money to someone in such circumstances so easily.

Perhaps if she’d been my wife for 10 years and she’d never asked for anything up until that point, maybe I’d visited the family and seen them and things like that, even then it would have been hard to hand over the money.

But you might think about it, but in the situation we were in, no way.

That was a great lesson to learn, though, and the only thing I had to do was move to a different condo because she did try to come and visit me a few times after that, and I wasn’t interested.

Another two months deposit lost, but again, a small price to pay.

I moved closer to Thong Lo and loved it there as well.

And I hope you found this one interesting and keep me anonymous.