MUAY-THAI BOXING

This is awesome.  You take a seat in a bar centered around a Muay-Thai boxing ring, order a $1.50 beer, and you have a front row seat at an incredibly exciting show.

The fighters are between 100 and 126 pounds, and they wear thick gloves, and no elbows or knees are allowed in these non-championship matches, so no one really gets hurt (I never saw blood or an injury).  The break between rounds is long (5 minutes), so the fighters will often engage the crowd, trying to outdo each other with gymnastic moves (back flips, front flips, one-armed pushups), or by flirting with the western girls in the audience.  In the end, the winner collects a few bucks from audience members.  Matches go from 6pm until 1am every night.  Each guy will fight between two and three times in a night.

Between matches, you might see a “snake show,” where some lunatic angers a series of deadly snakes for the crowd’s amusement (at the end, they “milk” the snake into a glass, so you can see that it really was venomous).

This kid was quite cute, especially after I gave him a laser pointer.   Then he suited up and got in the ring with another kid.

They really do start young.  The guy below at the left, named Are, started at age 9.  He's now 39 and still fights 2-3 times a night, although he'd rather open a shop--"any shop."  He gave me a Muay-Thai boxing lesson, taught me some good tricks, and utterly exhausted me.  He refused to take 1000 Baht ($25), "too much," and accepted 500 Baht.

These guys go at it, thrashing and taunting each other, with never a dull moment.  You could
never count anyone out.  Several times a fighter would take a good shot or two to the head
and seriously start to stagger—in K-1, Pride Fighting, or regular U.S. boxing, it would often
over right there—but then he’d amazingly come back.  You also couldn’t predict the winner
until the last shot.  Instead of one guy dominating, both fighters just whale on each other until
someone gets in a powershot that just turns out the other’s lights.