Special Edition! My Muay Thai Massage

NOTE: This blog takes place in Thailand, not Japan. Does this contravene the rules of a Japan blog? Let me ask my boss. Yep, he said it's okay. "Tell people it's a special edition", he said. "Suckas eat that up."

SPECIAL EDITION!!
Before traveling to Phuket recently I knew 3 things about Thailand: Thai massage, Muay Thai kickboxing and ladyboys. I resolved to try at least one of these. If you are hoping for this story to go in the direction of ladyboys then I’m sorry to tell you that you’re reading the wrong blog, but no judging; I know why most people go to Thailand. No, I figured least risk to my beautiful face was Thai massage, so I thought I’d give that a shot. there was a place just across the road from our resort, and it seemed clean..ish, so we ventured there. My spider sense first went off when the receptionist told my pregnant wife that she couldn’t get a foot massage “lest the baby explode” (Thai translation accuracy not guaranteed).

Spider sense - and sympathetic feet - tingling

I don’t know what they do to feet normally, but I wanted no part of it. Anyway, since I spend a lot of my leisure time lugging around the world’s heaviest guitar, I opted for a head, shoulders and back package. My feet were safe! 

Or were they… (Spoilers: They were not.)

Before anything massagey could occur I had to strip down and put on some pajama like massage pants, which I put on backwards (Did I mention this was my first time?) I then gingerly stretched my body out on the table, put my face in the… face hole? (technical massage equipment term accuracy not guaranteed) and prepared for every film stereotype of intense Asian massage I had ever seen to come true on my inappropriately flimsy spine. But the woman in charge of subverting all of my expectations (and, also, my massage) went for the element of surprise by beginning with my feet. For all I knew, every Thai head, shoulders and back massage began with a foot rub, so I went along with it. It took somewhere between 1 and 3 massage moves to realize this wasn’t going to end well for me. The lady seemed to be trying to put my foot into a choke hold. She exerted so much pressure on my virginal feet that I worried my baby might explode anyway. You know that scene in The Avengers where Hulk swings Loki around like a wet beach towel?

This one!

 That’s so metaphorically what happened to me that my foot filed suit against Joss Whedon for intellectual property theft. After a brief eternity of podiatric pain she moved onto my legs. Here I learned that I’m a lot more flexible than my high school P.E report would have you believe; I just needed to transcend my fear of agonizing torment. It was at this point that she got up on the table with me. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. I’m going to be honest with you about my expectations: I expected some kind of screaming and I expected feet on my spine. But she remained uncannily silent, like a ninja. As for the feet on the spine thing, I’m afraid I cannot say with any certainty which parts of her body the lady used to reconfigure mine. I am quite confident though that the strongest, most efficient weapons in her formidable arsenal were her two gnarled, questing thumbs. Her signature move (which I have designated on her behalf, based on a definite preference for it) I called ‘the Cuttlefish’ because of the resemblance to the area she described in one sweeping motion up my shoulder blade.   This tiny lady taught me more about sadism than a versus match of Soul Calibur IV against the Marquis de Sade.

He always picks Ivy.

At the beginning of this post I said that I knew nothing about Thai massage, but it turned out I'd already had a Thai massage that night when I fell down the stairs after drinking two-and-a-half chu-hais instead of my recommended zero chu-hais!
Like the best kinds of torture, a big component was psychological. The whole time I was thinking, ‘I deserve this. I actually paid money and asked (sort of) for her to do this.’

Next time I’ll stick to kickboxing.

DISCLAIMER: Not one to let a dreadful crippling put me off, I have since this misadventure had three more massages, of diminished intensity. It seems that not all Thai massages are smorgasbords of ache and torment. Indeed, once I shrugged off the PTSD, and the second masseuse coaxed me from my safe place huddled in the corner, I realized that each masseuse has their own style, as unique as a fingerprint – like the ones that tiny, infamously memorable lady left in my ribcage.