Lost in translation

There are always new ways to find ways to find out how you can be screwed over when traveling.

In an excerpt from my soon-to-be published book, I share how I was screwed over by massage oil, deceptively cheap beers, and bananas.

After you read this, you will never look at bananas the same way again.

Happy go lucky

After a visit to the Forbidden City, the Hutong (old city) and to the Great Wall in Beijing, I thought that one of the best ways to appreciate the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of Chinese Civilization was to get a deep-tissue massage.

However, instead of soliciting a massage from the hotel’s swanky in-house massage services, where prices ranged from the cost of a kidney to the cost of a lung, we asked our tourist guide to contact a home service masahista so we could experience local massages at gall bladder prices. And this gall bladder price was about 150 yuan (around P653).

Since we were discreetly hiring the home-service masahista, the tourist guide informed us that she would be seated on a couch at the lobby of the hotel discreetly clasping a pamphlet of her massage services. Once we arrived at the hotel from the day-long tour, my wife went ahead to pick up the masahista while I packed up our pasalubongs of souvenir statement tees (the shirts had shortened “I Love Beijing” to “I Love BJ.” I had to be very judicious in giving these pasalubongs to friends) in the tour bus.

Initially, my wife and I had imagined that my masahista would be a burly and wrinkly 300-pound lady who reeked of camphor and had fists that could pummel me into siomai wrappers.  However, much to my wife’s surprise, the only woman she spotted at a lobby couch was a young lady with milky white skin, dark brown hair and hazelnut brown eyes whose petite figure squeezed into a tight white collared shirt and a pair of cream-colored short shorts.

My wife cautiously approached her and asked, “Are you the one the tour guide ordered for Mr. Ledesma?”

The woman furrowed her brows slightly, tilted her head to one side, then nodded. “Yes, okay.”

“Um, okay. That’s good,” my wife replied to the masahista as she led her into the elevator that I had been holding for both of them.

The masahista looked at me, then looked back at my wife, and grinned. “Is he your boyfriend?”

My wife let out a hearty laugh. “No, no, he’s my husband! We’ve been married for past three years.” Then my wife gently stroked her stomach.  “In fact, I’m pregnant again.”

The masahista’s eyes grew large. “In Beijing, married women will be jealous if their husbands get a massage.”

My wife rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Oh no, no, no. I am sooo used to it. In Manila, we get massages all the time.  We even get them at the same time.”

“I see.” The masahista smiled to one side of her mouth. “Your country is very different from China.”

When we entered our hotel room, the masahista asked my wife, “Madam, will you watch as I give your husband a massage?”

My wife sighed. “No, I’m just too tired.  I’m just going to sleep.”

“That’s good. You rest. I’ll take care of your husband,” she answered.

After I washed up, changed into my puruntong shorts, and laid facedown on the bed, the masahista straddled on top of me and said, “Sir, the massage is 700 yuan.”

I tried to shake the masahista off my back but for some reason she felt like she was 300 pounds. “But the tour guide said the massage was only 150!”

“Seven hundred is my usual price, Sir!” she insisted.

“Why!? Will you be massaging me for three days!?” I asked. “Or do you have four hands? Do you take kidneys as payment? Just how many body parts of mine will you be massaging?”

Then the masahista rattled off several body parts that I was remotely familiar with while explaining that she had to pay for her taxi fare, her manager and the several hundred relatives she was supporting in a remote province just to massage me tonight. 

My wife haggled with the masahista until she grudgingly agreed to a rate of 500 yuan.  Once the rate was settled and I knew that she would not take a kidney for payment, the masahista began to drizzle massage lotion on my back. That’s when the doorbell of our hotel room rang.

My wife answered the door and found a matronly looking woman standing outside our room was dressed in a plain white outfit and whose hair was neatly tucked into a bun. “Massage?” she said.

My wife took a few steps back. “RJ,” she said as she smiled through gritted teeth. â€œI think I may have picked up the wrong girl from the lobby.”

“Why? Does that woman have four hands?”

My wife approached the masahista who was busy kneading my back. “I think I may have made a mistake,” she laughed nervously. “There could be somebody else waiting for you downstairs.”

The masahista stepped off of my back and growled at my wife. “But we already started! You must pay me first!”

“No, I don’t! You only massaged my husband for a few minutes!” my wife pointed towards the door “You have to leave the room. Now.”

“Not until you pay me!”  the masahista screamed.

My wife and the masahista started exchanging a flurry of expletives that did not need any subtitles for me to understand. Meanwhile, I put on the first T-shirt that I could get my hands on, tiptoed my way to the bathroom and called the hotel security to save the masahista from my wife.

Several minutes and an embarrassingly long explanation later to the hotel security later (it didn’t help that I was wearing the “I Heart BJ” pasalubong shirt), the guards bodily removed the masahista from our hotel room so she could wait again in the hotel lobby for the DOM (dirty old man) whom we had deprived of her therapeutic services.

That goes to show you, my three female readers, that not all massages have happy endings.

I was there for the beer

I wanted to do a six-part investigative photo report for The Philippine STAR of the different bars that littered the Patpong — the infamous red light district in the heart of Bangkok but was uncertain if my desk editor Scott Garceau would foot the entertainment expense.

Given Scott’s adamant refusal to process my request (EDITOR’S NOTE: We don’t honor requests written on lipstick-smeared bar napkins), my wife and I were only able to visit one of the establishments in Patpong that was subtly named after a female body part (which I found rather strange because there were a hundred or so dancers onstage who were of indeterminate gender).

But those first floor performances were merely a teaser for the more visceral of shows that were hidden on second floor of these buildings. I have only heard about these performances from a friend of a friend of a felon and from the drying breaths of DOMs as the criteria for the second floor performers did not rely as heavily on aesthetics as it did on muscle control — the women were performing creative acts with body parts that were not intended to perform creative acts.

I say that “I’ve only heard” about these performances because my wife and I attempted to watch a show, but purely for anthropological purposes (and also because the hawker said that inside we could find “free entrance passes” and rock-bottom beer prices).  

By the time we disinfected our seats with alcohol, the lady onstage was midway through her first performance — a creative act that required muscle control, internal pressure and projectile bananas. But more than that, this creative act required audience participation as audience members had to dodge projectile bananas.

Before my wife and I had the chance to chug down any of those rock-bottom-priced beers or to dodge any incoming bananas, we were was distracted by the piercing shrill of the mama-san, an intimidating mountain of a woman who had logs for arms and boulders for thighs. She was screaming in broken English at some American tourists who had failed to pay the correct bar tab. This mama-san’s broken English alone could cause physical trauma. 

“Screw the ‘free entrance’ passes and rock-bottom beer prices!” I thought. It was time to hastily depart from this establishment lest our brains hemorrhage from her broken English.

I quickly signaled to the server for our bill.  But when the server shoved the bill into my face, my progressive hair loss went into overdrive. â€œWhat the %^$&!” I thought (and I was thinking pretty loudly).  The two beers approximated the GNP of some sub-Saharan African countries (or several hundred kidneys). And I was supposed to pay this for the opportunity to dodge projectile bananas?

The next piercing shrill came from my wife. “They’re craaaaaaaazy if they think we’ll pay for this!”

The mama-san overheard my wife and stormed towards our direction. “You pay now!”

I tried to keep my composure, but it wasn’t easy as I had soiled my adult diapers. My wife was about to sprout a pair of leathery wings and detach from her lower extremities when I told her to step aside and let me handle this in a more diplomatic fashion.

“It was my wife was the one who wanted to come here!” I groveled. “We don’t have that kind of money! We aren’t politicians!” I sank down to my knees and pleaded. “And please don’t turn me into a ladyboy! I don’t know how to dance onstage with knee-high boots!!” I wailed until I passed out on the banana sludge-covered floor.

This was actually my strategy all along: I played possum on the ground while my wife, God bless her, confiscated my testicles and spoke on our behalf. Actually, there wasn’t much speaking done. It was more of a shouting match between her and the woman-mountain that involved a stream of invectives that I would rather not hear outside of a non-intimate context which invoked the names of Buddhist, Hindu and Judeo-Christian religious figures and that ruptured eardrums within a 30-foot radius. 

After 30 or so minutes of spirited haggling and once we had regained our auditory functions, my wife found a way for us to pay for a fraction of that bar tab. I also think that the mama-san wanted to move on so she could scream at her next set of clients.  

Regrettably, my dignity did not escape unscathed. I still had to find a way to pay for that bill.  But I also learned a new magic trick as well. One of these days, let me show you how to launch a banana.

* * *

For comments, suggestions or a deep-tissue massage, please e-mail Ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.net. Follow @rjled on Twitter.