On the edge of the grounds of the hotel where we are staying is a raised platform, about 30 inches high, perhaps 10 feet wide and 30 deep, and over it is a canopy, so that most of the rain stays off the deck.

A few feet from the platform is a sign advertising manicures, pedicures, tattoos and … Thai massage. For 30 minutes, 300 baht; for an hour, 400 baht — or a bit more than $12, if we figure 30 baht to $1.

And on the deck are a half dozen women who give the Thai massages.

Since the massage is performed out in the open, none of the “clothes off” rules apply. They just perform the massage right through whatever you are wearing. And Thai massage is generally done with little or no oil.

It seems a bit odd, but remember that Thai massage features lots of pressing and pulling, moves not far removed from chiropractic manipulations.

This is not Swedish, with a lot of rubbing and oil, though those are available.

So I decided to give it a try, late one afternoon, and the women determined who would carry this out, or maybe it was her turn. She put down a little pillow and a thin bit of cloth to cover the mat between customer and wooden deck.

And off we went.

It was not the most peaceful massage in the history of the process. The women seemed quite jolly and talked among themselves throughout, including the women who were performing massages — probably on auto-pilot, mentally.

Anyone who has seen the Seinfeld episode The Understudy and recalls the subplot involving Korean manicurists making remarks about Elaine … soon comes to believe the same is going on with the Thai masseuses.

Or I did, anyway.

Let’s see, they know each other pretty well, so perhaps not much news there. Not much jolly news. What is new to their situation? That would be the foreigners who are getting the messages. Me, for example.

I am just going to guess they speculate about where the customers are from, and their body type. “My goodness, this one is fat.” Or “look at the nose on this one!” Or perhaps it’s, “For someone clearly quite old, this one is not particularly decrepit.” Yes, I prefer to believe that.

After chatting about the process with some others who have patronized the “shop”, I have heard of masseuses chatting on a cell phone the entire time while walking on someone’s back .. perhaps losing concentration while chatting and moving someone in a direction the body did not want to go … reaching over to slap a customer on the back to kill a mosquito … and a consensus that chatting and laughing was nearly nonstop.

(Clearly, we could use with a Frank Costanza to translate for us. Or perhaps it is better off not knowing.)

My masseuse was intent on getting “pops” from various chiropractic-like moves, including the famous “push the shoulder one way, the hip the other” which often elicits an audible crack from the lower back — except for people like me, who just don’t yield cracks from that move. My practitioner seemed pleased, however, when she got my neck to crack in one direction. “Finally!” was perhaps the translation.

I can’t imagine this a regulated business. Not out in the public and charging $12 an hour.

It seems exploitative, I suppose, but does Thailand’s social system look after women between the ages of, say, 30 and 50, who may not have a lot of marketable skills?

If someone does 4-5 massages a day, makes some money in tips and gets to keep most (all?) of it in a country where the per capita annual income is $5,200 (or a bit over $14 a day) … well, that’s not a bad day, especially outside the big city of Bangkok.

If someone is OK with pushing and pulling the limbs and walking on the backs of foreigners, of course.