Daily Report: The Pink Palace

Today it was off with Pui, Go, her son Peh, and his wife to something that everybody in Pattaya has seen, but few people have visited: The Sukhawadee Center on Sukhumvit Road... known colloquially as "The Pink Palace."


The place serves primarily
as a convention center with
many meeting rooms, and a
grand room that would hold
about 5,000, I would guess.If you ever wanted to see the stark differences between Thai artistic values and Farang artistic values, this is the place to come. My opinion was that it looked like something out of a Liberace wet dream, or the Elysian Fields of a Drag Queen Goddess... but stylish, it most certainly was not. In fact, I'll admit that it was so un-stylish that it actually came around full circle to stylish in a William Shatner hip-to-be-square kind of way.

I actually call the style Cheen-mai, which is Thai for "New Chinese." It really is popular in Thailand, because it's cheap but flashy.


This statue of Diana,
about 4 meters tall,
turned into a lighting
fixture was particularly
kitschy and tacky.There is one building which houses what looks like a press conference room, a grand dining room, and an audience room. Then, there is the convention center with a grand foyer and a large ball room. Undernearth are several meeting rooms as well. There is a visitor center, a gift shop, a couple of places that focus on the founder's agricultural business, and a restaurant.

Anyway, if gawking at silver-plated cement Roman sculptures, over-sized tawdry recreations of Renaissance paintings, and pastels are your idea of a fun afternoon, feel free to stop by. The tour takes about an hour, and is 200 baht for farangs and 100 baht for Thai people.