Hangover 2 filmed in Bangkok and Krabi, Amazing Thailand.

This is the worst hangover yet ... the sort of drunken night out that's not even blurry, it's completely deleted from your hard drive, until you wake up and start piecing the story together piece-by-achingly--painful piece.

At which point it becomes a living (or re-lived) nightmare ...

The action (and I do mean action) mainly takes place in Amazing Thailand with Bangkok as the leading lady, and a beautiful cameo supporting role by the limestone islands and emerald waters of Krabi.

Sadly, Bkk itself is depicted all grey and squalid, whereas in real life it's only like that at day time. Just kidding. in fact the general march of marbling Bangkok over the past 5-10 years has been staggering.

Congrats to the location scout for finding a place with cockroaches that big. These things could be mistaken for elephants if they had trunks, jing jing.


Bangkok's Chinatown, Yaowarat (or "F***ing Asiatown" as they call it), gets a good working over, to the point it often feels more like an early Jackie Chan flick set in Hong Kong than Bangkok, so stylized were the street scenes. Of course, Thai girls, Bangkok bar girls, go go bars, ping pong balls and hair-trigger machine guns all get the expected role in this lad's pre-wedding night out gone massively, irretrievably wrong.

The cultural tone of the movie is probably best summed up by Alan's observation as they roar along in a song taew van towards the Chiang Mai monastery: "When a monkey nibbles on a penis, that's funny in every language!"And the well-endowed katoey lady boy scene does its bit to keep things firmly rooted in the gutter. (I won't spoil the movie for you, but the photo in the end credits of the groom-to-be on the receiving end of the ladyboy is priceless!)

That the main actor is named Stu just made all of this just a little close to the, um, bone for me.

At the upper end of the scale, the Lebua Hotel (arguably the finest hotel in Bangkok) and its 63rd floor rooftop restaurant Sirocco enjoy a starring role, replete with CIA, mafia and helicopters.

Throw in some quirky touches like, oddly, a hilariously reworked version of Billy Joel's Allentown, dripping in pathos and bodily fluids, and an inexplicable song-and-dance routine by professional thug Mike Tyson, and the Hangover 2 has got something for everyone.

Just like Bangkok, I guess.


Quick quiz: Do you think Hangover 2 will attract tourists to Thailand or put them off from coming? Love to hear your thoughts.

Tattoos -- (Th)ink twice, mark my words

Ok, here's your lateral thinking quiz for the day ...

You're one of many Thai girls with a farang boyfriend. You love him long time (like most bar girls do, jing jing). So much so, you decide to get a tattoo of his name, Mark.

So you head down to the tattoo parlor in Bangkok and request your boyfriend's name to be inked into your left arm.

You emerge with his name in 1.5-inch letters running gloriously down your left shoulder for all the world to see: M A R K.


But then, the unimaginable happens ... you break up with him. But you still have his name branded on your arm. Suddenly his name is a REAL four letter word!

So what would you do?

Scroll down for the clever solution I saw recently in Kanchanaburi (where said bar girl now works) ...




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That's right! She changed the word to M A R K E T. Full points for ingenuity; just a shame they didn't match the font size!

For the record she's no stranger to tattoos ... on her right shoulder is a tattoo of some kind of aquarium scene, a naga fish or something.

But it would be improper to suggest she was some kind of seafood market ...