SIAM: Garden of Smiles

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"Please Enter In." For quieter moments, Bangkok offers quieter delights. "Turn to your right," says the city's popular guidebook, Black Shadow, after listing the theaters, restaurants, nightclubs and sporting events in town, "and you will at last catch sight of the one attractive house standing magnificently in a narrow passage. This is the place of your destination. Please enter in. These young and charming girls has each her own style of love. She is, however, at your service. Charges: Ticals 50.00 and 100.00. There are many more beautiful ones but with higher charges." The visitor, diffident at entering this place, may find courage in remembering that just across the street from Bangkok's Central Police Station stands the Buddhist Temple of the Fruits of Prostitution, a legacy from a departed lady bountiful.

When there is nothing to do in Bangkok, the Siamese give a party. Anything will do as an excuse—a new door for an old house, a new pot for the kerosene stove, or the casting of a new Buddha. Practically no one in Siam casts his own Buddha any more, of course, but since it would be unthinkable to buy or sell an image of the great god, the Siamese "rent" the Buddha from a store on a lifetime lease, and hold a casting party anyway.

Or the party may move to one of Bangkok's many Chinese restaurants', every one of which has exactly 384 dishes listed on the menu. This 384 is not a mystic Sino-Siamese number—it derives simply from the fact that all the restaurants patronize the same printer. Most of them have 20-odd dishes on hand, and if the customer can't have what he orders, mai ben rai. And there is beer from all over the world: Mexico's Tecate, America's Pabst, Germany's Klosterbrau, Denmark's Carlsberg.

Bangkok's nightclubs are currently in the grip of a new dance craze. The ram-wong has spread to Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, and experts say it will hit the U.S. soon. It is a modernization of an ancient dance, in which couples curve back their fingers, spin and weave about each other, but never touch. King Phumiphon should love it.

What with all the diversion (and very good business), Bangkok's colony of Westerners has doubled since prewar days, new numbers 1,200, including 400 Americans. Foreigners love Siam. Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was entranced until he met with a painful accident. A doctor explained that his swollen cheek was caused by a poisonous moth. "How," cried Hirschfeld, "can I tell people at home I was bitten by a moth?"

Signs of the new Westernization are everywhere. The front platforms of the streetcars are adorned with Coca-Cola signs, beneath which yellow-robed monks ride lest they be contaminated by the presence of women inside the cars. Every tenth shop on New Street (one of the oldest thoroughfares) seems to be an X-ray shop. The Siamese are the most X-raying people in the world. They go to a doctor, then rush to have an X-ray to see if the doctor guessed right.