Number Two: Bangkok - Haunted house, rats and contact lenses

After finishing high school I was ready for my second trip: Bangkok. A bald, good-looking Asian man called Edward, who was an agency owner in Thailand, saw me back in Malaysia and wanted me to fly to Bangkok as my second trip. So I did. The place I stayed in Bangkok wasn't actually a girl's dream, it was dirty, full of rats and cockroaches, but this also gave a special touch to it... for a little while. 
That time very few models had laptops, none of them had smartphones, so in order to talk to our loved ones, we had to use the computers in the agency, at an internet cafe or in the lobby of our accommodation. I didn't have a smartphone, nor a laptop, so I had to put up with the computer in the entryway of my apartment building, where I had to lift my legs to let the rats or the cockroaches pass under it without being disturbed. Not exactly the way you would imagine a model's life, is it? People would think model apartments are fancy, but back then it was all about ripping the girls off as much as they could. The agency rented a very cheap place and models would have to pay quite a lot compared to what the actual price was. We knew about this, but there was not much we could do. Finding your own place was limited to expensive hotels and Airbnb wasn't even born back then. Plus foreign modeling agencies love if you spend a lot because all your spendings go to "Expenses" which will be later deducted from your salary. So yes, they were making even more money out of us like that. Ripping models of is still happening nowadays, but because of social media girls can share where they live with the world and because there are so many agencies in every city around the world, the competition is high, agencies needed to up their game to provide better accommodation for models in order to attract them. 

Skin Care Aid for White Skin - 2005

Bangkok, once again, was all about eating and partying. It was so cheap, even cheaper than today - we ate chicken fried rice every day and drank vodka sodas for free in the local clubs until they closed at 3 am. Why do models party? Because there is no mom or dad to make them stay in and they get free drinks and free everything basically. By that I mean all the bad stuff your parents warned you about: cocaine, weed, pills, and who knows what. Somehow I managed to stay out of all that - ok, not the alcohol - but drugs never attracted me, although I'm a big fan of getting things for free just like everyone, I guess.




As I mentioned before, my accommodation wasn't the nicest one. By luck, some of my previous flatmates from Malaysia were in Bangkok as well, and one of them stayed in a much nicer place called Rompo mansion. The famous Rompo mansion. It was like a dorm for models, half of the model population in Bangkok stayed there. Lots of Brazilians smoking weed, girls hooking up with model guys, guys taking home Thai girls or so they thought and so on. I moved to Rompo as well - unofficially - because I couldn't stand my place. I took a motorbike taxi every second day to get clean clothes and check on my stuff in my little shithole, but I slept in Rompo almost every day. The mansion was an 11 storey building, we stayed on the 4th floor with my Brazilian friend, Rose. There was one floor in the building, which didn't function, it was completely empty and always dark: the third floor. You couldn't even push the button "3" in the elevator. They told us it was haunted, a man allegedly murdered his whole family there a year before that so they closed it down. I did some research now, and I couldn't find anything about it, moreover Rompo today is actually a decent looking Apartment Hotel. I can very well imagine that the Thai people working there at that time just fooled us with the murder story. Well, even if it wasn't true, we were shit scared of the Third floor. One time, coming home late at night the elevator stopped on the third floor. It stopped, the doors opened and it was pitch dark, we freaked out and couldn't even get the elevator going. I don't know how long we stayed there but it felt like ages. Of course, we survived.

I didn't actually work much in Thailand. I had one big job at the beginning of my trip, which was a shampoo commercial where I had to pretend to be a monkey. Yes, I'm really good at being a monkey. This commercial paid more than I could ever have dreamt of at that time, so I thought I'll just take it easy after that, it was my summer break after all. The other reason I didn't work that much was the color of my eyes: green. I didn't even understand why they chose me to travel to Bangkok if Thai clients liked girls with dark hair and brown eyes. I was like: what the hell am I doing here then?! So at many castings, I had to wear brown contact lenses which I absolutely hated because I had no clue how to get them into my eyes. Even for my well-payed shampoo commercial, I had to put them in, but you can check that for yourself now. How amazing, right?

Bori the talented monkey

Once again, I did make some very good friends and met so many different people. Some of them I still meet to this day. There was, for example, this curly haired, tall, skinny Slovakian girl who lived in the same shitty place as me and I found her uniquely crazy but very nice at the same time. I never thought that 6 or 7 years later she is going to be my flatmate in Hong Kong and even after leaving Hong Kong I'll continue partying with her in the coolest clubs of Ibiza. Hi, Lea!