One thing that you notice in horrible places like Pattaya, is that unless you are willing to walk around and just empty your wallet everywhere that you go, the fake friendliness turns the other way pretty rapidly. You are constantly harassed in that tourist shithole and people can turn on you very quickly if you lose your cool and tell them to get away from you.
I get that people need to make some money but is is absolutely relentless, it makes you want to not go outside and to only shop at places that are like the Wal-Mart of SE Asia, where all prices are marked on the items so you can't accidentally get scammed.
But that is not the only bad side of Pattaya, there are many many other reasons to totally stay away from this popular-for-reasons-I-cannot-understand destination just 90 minutes south of Bangkok.
This image is from an unrelated to what I am referring to incident, and good on the publication for blurring out the faces. However, this is not at all a rare thing in Pattaya because mix booze with a bunch of sexy for hire girls that the idiots think actually like them, and testosterone takes over and people end up brawling frequently.
Recently, an American in a girly bar exchanged not so friendly words with 3 British guys in the same girly bar and this quickly resulted in retarded fisticuffs in the street.
In these sorts of situations that I have witnessed, normally some people will try to break it up but the bravado in some idiots encourages them only to become more aggressive when this happens. It is the social "like button" when other people get involved for some reason.
Also, and this is an important thing to remember if you are ever over this way and feel the need to start a punch up with strangers, the police are very slow to respond if they respond at all when it is a "foreigner on foreigner" interaction. Unless someone has a weapon, they are likely to just allow the situation to play out rather than get involved.
It is kind of funny when the police do respond though because, and I don't mean this in a nasty way, Thai men tend to be considerably smaller than westerners and in a situation like this I believe that the 4 guys could probably have taken on twice that many police officers. Thankfully, sensibility took over by the time the boys in uniforms turned up and then and only then did they stop attacking one another.
They don't really do handcuffs here, nor do they have police cruisers. When you get arrested in Thailand, they just toss you in the back of a pickup truck and haul your dumb ass off to the station most likely to discuss how much bribe money you have to pay the police to not go to jail for whatever made up charges they are considering putting on you.
This occurred at 4:30 in the morning and I can't help but laugh when I hear that these fools had probably been drinking for 8 hours plus at this point and the fines they were going to face at then hands of the police are likely paltry in comparison to the bar bill they had all accumulated at the over-priced girly bar they had been at when the fracas began.
It is also amusing to me that the news story where I learned about this from states with a certain sense of tourism price that the walking street was still very busy at 4:30 am. For context, it is illegal for a place selling alcohol to be open at 4:30 am. Just kind of goes to show how little affect any sort of law has on a place like Pattaya.
In the end, as the story reports, the 4 arrested individuals became best buddies at the police station and who knows if any of this was legit. I think they were just realizing that the situation is going to get a lot worse if they don't calm the "F" down in a police station.
The police considered this a victory because as you can see in the bubble in the top two of the men involved were hugging it out at the police station. The official report from the police is that all 4 of them were charged the standard fee of 1000 Baht for public fighting or something and then released. I can absolutely assure you that it was more than that. The police in Pattaya cannot be trusted for anything.
I know I bash Pattaya a lot but there is a reason for this: It gives the rest of the country a bad and undeserved name. If you do ever visit Thailand, and I suggest you do because it is a great place, do yourself a favor and stay away from Pattaya, or any of a vast majority of the other places that guide books tell you that you should go to.