I paid for her whole day out in Pattaya. Half an hour before midnight, her Canadian boyfriend showed up.

I'm 44, from Rotterdam, and on New Year's Eve 2023 I went back to a hotel in Pattaya I'd stayed at ten years earlier, in 2014, a couple of streets from Walking Street.

The first time was a quiet trip, the kind you remember fondly without remembering a single specific detail. This time the club across the road went full blast until six in the morning every single night, bass you could feel through the mattress, so the ten days I spent there ended up organised around its speaker schedule more than anything else. I slept when the bass stopped and not before.

I hadn't gone with any particular plan. Ten years earlier I'd gone with a couple of mates from the office, the classic three-week escape before life got complicated with mortgages and fixed hours. This time I went alone, with the vague idea that seeing in the new year somewhere else would beat doing it in front of the television in Rotterdam, and no intention of the trip meaning anything more than that.

The first few days were the usual for a Pattaya trip. I got chatting to a girl at a massage place called Hathi, on one of those streets near the hotel lined with reclining chairs and price boards in three currencies. Between laughing, a joke or two about how tense my neck was, and some well-managed persistence on her part, I ended up going along with quite a bit more than I'd planned on spending that afternoon. I didn't regret it, but it also wasn't exactly what I'd gone downstairs looking for.

One night, walking back to the hotel later than planned, I passed a small bar with quieter music than the ones around it, and a girl sitting near the entrance held my eye a second too long. She didn't have the professional smile the others switched on automatically the moment a farang got within two metres of the bar. She looked like she was somewhere else entirely, body on the stool, head anywhere but there.

I didn't go in that night. I had a more pressing problem on my hands: an earplug had got wedged inside my ear canal, and I spent a fairly ridiculous hour at a clinic a bit further up the road, a very patient nurse trying to fish it out with tweezers while I pulled faces on the table and tried not to flinch. I left with a sore ear, some embarrassment, and, oddly enough, more of an urge than before to walk past that bar again.

So I went back the next day. And that second time I actually went in.

I was served by a bar girl called Candace, half Indian, half Thai, with better English than most of the tourists in that bar, myself included. We talked for a good while about nothing in particular, where I was from, how long she'd been in Pattaya, until she clocked that I couldn't stop glancing over at the quiet girl from the other night, sitting a little further along with a drink she was barely touching.

She called her over without asking me first if I wanted her to.

Her name was Waan. I ended the night with the two of them either side of me, Candace carrying most of the conversation and Waan listening more than she talked, always with that same sense of being only half there. I didn't pay any bar fine to take her out that night, didn't even bring it up. We just swapped Line numbers before I left, which felt like plenty at the time. Later on, back at the usual club, I ran into another girl, Ying, for a bit, though that never went anywhere beyond a couple of dances.

The next day Waan messaged saying she'd see me later. She never showed. Said she was sick, and I didn't push it.

New Year's Eve came round and she messaged again, this time asking if I wanted to grab food. She told me, without much preamble, that her boyfriend had stood her up for lunch.

That caught me somewhat off guard. Nobody had mentioned any boyfriend up to that point, not even in passing. But between the language barrier and how fast things move out there, I decided not to overthink it and went anyway.

We ate near the market, played a game of pool at a small place on the way, and in the afternoon joined a group of her friends at a beer bar on Soi 7 for the rest of the day. There were another two or three farang couples with their Thai girlfriends playing too, everyone rotating through the same pool table under a fan that barely moved the hot air. The afternoon went on pool games, beers warming in the sun, and the kind of half-conversation you keep going when you understand one word in three and nod through the silences.

One of the other farangs at the table, an older bloke with a northern English accent, asked me between racks how long I'd been with Waan, assuming we were a couple the same as him and the girl on his knee. I told him the truth, that I'd met her that same week, and he laughed loud enough that two of Waan's friends turned to look. "We all start out that way here," he said, "the question's what it turns into after." I didn't think much of it at the time.

At some point Waan got up to freshen up and change her shirt. She specifically asked me to wait there for her, so I stuck around with her friends, sitting through jokes in Thai I didn't fully follow but which were clearly about me, judging by the laughter and the sideways glances.

When she came back we carried on playing pool as if nothing had happened. There was half an hour left until midnight when a guy walked up from behind, sat down right next to her, and put his arm round her shoulders with the ease of someone arriving somewhere he already knew.

This was the Canadian boyfriend she'd mentioned that same morning.

I went to the bar for another beer to process it calmly and ran into an Australian who'd been there drinking alone all afternoon. I told him the situation straight. He shrugged and summed it up without any dressing-up: unless she's got your name tattooed somewhere, mate, this is still fair game for anyone.

I didn't take much notice of that philosophy, but I did decide to sort it out myself, directly with the Canadian, rather than make a scene in front of the whole bar. I went over, told him plainly that Waan had invited me that same day, that I'd spent the whole afternoon with her and put down a not-insignificant amount of baht keeping things going, food, pool, beers, and that if he wanted to cover the bar's running tab I'd bow out without any fuss, no drama. He thought about it for a couple of seconds, said that seemed fair, we shook on it like a couple of blokes closing a car deal, and I left feeling reasonably good about myself.

A few minutes later my phone rang. It was Waan, sounding pretty worked up, telling me she'd ended up paying the whole bill out of her own pocket. That was nothing like the deal I'd struck with the Canadian at the bar barely minutes earlier.

It was a sour end to what had been a good day up to that point. I called Candace first, hoping to salvage something of the night, but she couldn't make it there before midnight from where she was. So I ended up calling Hathi, the massage girl from earlier in the trip, and saw in the new year with her instead of either of the other two, watching the fireworks over the bay from a terrace that wasn't the one I'd had in mind at the start of the day.

I followed Waan on social media on and off after that trip, without much of a purpose to it. Eventually I put it together: the Canadian hadn't really been her boyfriend, not that night or any other. He left Pattaya not long after I did, and his name stopped showing up in the photos.

Months later I watched an Italian guy fall into exactly the same setup in her posts, sending her money constantly, getting blocked and unblocked depending on how it suited her and how the money was coming in that week. The same story told again from scratch, with a different farang each time one was needed, running the same script that I, at the time, had genuinely taken for coincidence.

I don't hold it against her, honestly. It was a good day right up until the last half hour, and even that half hour wasn't as bad as whatever the Italian guy got. What stuck with me wasn't the bill Waan ended up overpaying, but how easy it still is, at forty-four and with a reasonably clear head, to get carried along exactly the same way you do on your first day ever in Pattaya, having learned nothing at all.