I Went to Thailand to Hang Out With DJs and Ended up at Au Bon Pain

It's around 10 PM on Saturday when a bartender with spiky hair like Ryan Cabrera's hands me my fourth glass of a sticky sweet drink called "La La Guava" and DJ White Shadow starts spinning RL Grime's remix of "Love Sosa" by Chief Keef. Wobbly, I make my way towards the DJ booth to drunkenly bop around. Looking behind me, I see that the majority of the audience isn't at my level of enthusiasm. But that doesn't matter. Pretty soon I'm joined in front of the booth by a cabal of young girls in tank tops and shiny spandex, go-go dancers who help hype up White Shadow's set with syncopated pops, locks, and drops. As I watch, transfixed by the way the dancers sway their hips, I also realize there's an 80 percent chance that most—if not all—of these dancers are "ladyboys," or transgender women.

No, I'm not in a Chelsea club. I'm in Bangkok.

I've just returned to the Thai capital after spending two days on the island of Koh Samui, and, on my penultimate night, I'm raging to trap music with what is essentially a ladyboy twerk team. A mix of Bangkok socialite types, flat-brim hat-wearing hipsters, local celebrities, drag queens—and celebrity drag queens—have turned up to the W Bangkok to hear house DJ Paul Oakenfold, White Shadow, and DJ/producer Andy Caldwell. The party is the cap to the W Hotels & burn DJ Lab, a six-day DJ boot camp co-hosted by the hotel chain and burn, an energy drink owned by Coca-Cola.

The "lab" itself has been like a bizarro version of The Real World, with seven attractive strangers—DJ producers—picked to live in a house (okay, hotel), work together, and "see what happens when people start getting real." The group of seven, chosen after entering an online competition, have been given the opportunity to spend six days in Thailand working with and receiving advice from mentors in the music industry like White Shadow, Andy Caldwell, W Hotels's Global Music Director Michaelangelo L'Acqua and producer and Mo' Wax record label founder James Lavelle. Coming from cities like Seoul, Istanbul and Mexico City, the young DJs have been working on their tracks and recording an album while installed in massive rooms in the W Bangkok and, later, private villas complete with personal plunge pools at the W Retreat on the island of Koh Samui. All I can think about is that cheesy hashtag #DJLife.

The author, center, with another writer and the ladyboy twerk team.

Around 30 journalists whose geographic diversity is rife for United Nations jokes were flown out to cover the lab and, basically, to party in Thailand. I was one of them. Tagging along with the DJs between Bangkok and Koh Samui, we'd been leading an existence that can only be described as Diddy-esque: we'd sipped Veuve Clicquot on a yacht, hung out with an elephant before having dinner on the beach (why not?) and skinny dipped in our private pools. We'd snorkeled, gotten massages, and taken boat tours down Bangkok's canals to visit Buddhist temples and the Grand Palace.

While many of my fellow broke writers and I spent much of the trip manically snapping photos for Instagram and commenting every few minutes that we couldn't believe we'd ended up here, the DJs seemed to be taking all of this over-the-top shit in stride. They were grateful—and a bit dazed—by the opportunity to work with some of these industry pros in Thailand of all places, but they were unfazed by all the lavish incidentals like tubs full of champagne and all-you-can-eat oysters. No doubt part of their composure had to do with the fact that this was, above all else, a career-building opportunity. While we were busy gawking at everything and partying, they were working on tracks in the studios set up in the hotels until 2 AM. They were not here to fuck around. Or, at least, mostly not.

Though the DJs have been cloistered away in the studios for much of the trip, there are a few nights of fraternization in Koh Samui, which creates a curious adult Teen Tour-meets-Birthright vibe. On our last night there, a chi-chi party at the hotel bar turned into an after-party at one of the pools, with sloshed twenty-and-thirtysomething journalists and DJs stripping down to their underwear and jumping into the water. We had chicken fights and makeout sessions, and the whole scene included complex geopolitical undertones as everyone peer pressured hesitant bystanders to join the party by telling them they had a duty to represent their country or city—whether Mumbai, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney, or New York—and dive in.

But in Bangkok, it was mostly back to business for the aspiring producers while the reporter tag-alongs got to play tourists. While exploring the city, we seamlessly weaved between old and new—Buddhist temples and Dean & DeLuca outposts, murky canals and Alexander Wang stores. One night, the media group rode old-school tuk-tuks (awesomely flamboyant motor scooters) through the city's anarchic traffic to Maggie Choo's, an underground jazz bar filled with go-go dancers, European businessmen and super attractive Bangkok kids smoking, drinking and flirting. Accessible only through a Chinese restaurant, the place is styled like an opium den with exposed brick, dim lighting and vault-like caverns reserved for smokers – basically, it's right out of André Saraiva or Serge Becker's fantasies and was way too cool for me. Feeling uncool quickly became a running theme in Thailand. Even when I thought I was rocking my fashion A-game in my "Céline Dion" Reason sweatshirt, I was quickly overmatched by the steez of my new Bangkok friends, Apple and Punnee, who rocked sleek bobs and black-and-white striped blazers. It got to the point where I felt irrationally happy when one of them complimented my lipstick one night. "Is that Russian Red by M.A.C.?" Yes, yes it was.

One night, in need of a break from "cool Bangkok," a few of us decided to leave a swish party at the W Hotel in favor of catching a pussy ping-pong show, but soon discovered we had showed up too late—apparently the shows all end at the relatively tame hour of 2 AM. Instead, we wound up eating french fries under fluorescent lights at McDonald's while fending off a pack of Australian tourists, one of whom had just puked on his shoes. This could have been happening in Midtown New York. The next day some of the other editors and I tried once again to find the "real Bangkok." We took the pristine elevated trains to the city's massive Chatuchak street market, where we snacked on satay and crab Rangoon and haggled over tiny elephant key-chains and wall clocks with holographic photos of the Thai royal family. Worlds away from the hip clubs and luxury stores, there was something comforting about all the dirt and kitsch. For once, I could wear my ratty sneakers.

Though not for long. Sweaty and smelling of street food, I returned to the hotel, where there was a raging pool party featuring three DJs from Singapore, Seoul, and Hong Kong (none of whom were part of the lab). While listening to the DJs spinning the type of progressive house and techno you'll find in Miami or Ibiza, it started to dawn on me that despite the fact that I'd spent almost a week hanging out with DJs from around the world, I had yet to meet any Thai producers. At first it kind of bummed me out that I hadn't exactly been exploring the local music scene, but then, while watching toned Bangkokians splashing around and laughing with one another, I began to wonder if it really mattered. Of course it would have been cool to dive deeper into the Bangkok underground, but if I was worried about finding authenticity, was it any less authentic to encounter Thai kids vibing out to DJs from Singapore—or Paul Oakenfold—than some local dude on the decks? If someone from another country were to come by a party in Brooklyn and see kids dancing to, say, Disclosure or Brodinski and remark, "This party is great but it feels inauthentic not to be watching you have fun dancing to a New York DJ," I'd probably tell them to go fuck themselves. I did not want to tell myself to go fuck myself.

A few hours after the pool party, my increasingly misguided attempts to strip the shiny, chic veneer off of Bangkok to experience more of its down and dirty underbelly had one last hurrah. Before heading to the airport to board a late-night flight back to JFK, I joined two other writers for dinner. Making the highly dubious decision to eat cheap street food three hours before spending nearly an entire day on an airplane, we asked the hotel to recommend a good night market. We headed off with visions of grilled meats on a stick and noodles spicy enough to make your asshole hate you, so we were surprised when we arrived to see, of all things, an Au Bon Pain. And luxury stores. And a ferris wheel. The fuck? The hotel concierge had sent us to a "fancy night market."

But looking around, the market wasn't overrun with German families or British backpackers. It was full of Thai people. Imagine that: Thai people in a Thai market! As the initial frustration over ending up at what could have almost been a mall in suburban New Jersey, I picked up on a sense of realness to the place, regardless. Here was something emblematic of a wealthy, modern, and cool Thailand rather than whatever traditional one I was looking for.

The three of us ate chicken curry and drank Singhas before I noticed that I only had half an hour to get back to the hotel for my airport pick-up. Inside the cab on the way back, my driver sternly quizzed me about who I was, where I was from, and why I was going to the W Hotel. Without knowing why, I lied and told him I was from Canada, not New York. I honestly have no idea what possessed me. A fear of potential anti-Americanism? Concern that he'd ask some tough questions? Before I had too much time to consider the psychological implications behind my answer, though, I could see the driver's face break out in a grin from the rearview mirror. Without any pretense, he started to sing—to sing the least cool song ever, in fact: "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion. As he belted the last lyrics and we neared the hotel, I smiled and started to relax, and he started to chant what sounded like "Oh, Miss Canada! I love Canada! Miss Canada! Michelle Obama."

[Ed. note: Shortly after this trip, Thailand would erupt in political protests and sporadic violence, the result of many citizens' dissatisfaction with the current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the perception that her administration has merely been a proxy government for her deposed brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who ran the country between 2001 and 2006 before he was ousted in a coup. As of today the protests are continuing and Prime Minister Shinawatra remains in power.]

Abby Schreiber is a regular at Au Bon Pain in Brooklyn. She's on Twitter - @AbbySchreiber28

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