thaiophilus

"Woke police"? Someone's been reading too much Daily Mail and believes everything they are told. 🤣

Thai pronouns and honorifics are highly nuanced and I don't pretend to know any of the subtleties. น้อง (Nong) literally means "younger sibling" regardless of sex. Here I think it's used to imply a respectful relationship to the customer. (Thai doesn't make the same distinctions in familial relationships that we are used to. For example there are words for father's younger sibling, mother's younger sibling, parent's older brother, parent's older sister, but not for the other combinations of father/mother older/younger brother/sister.)

No point in interacting with people who aren't arguing in good faith. Whataboutery (look it up) is the key word here.

Please don't feed the trolls.

Only Thai nationals, unfortunately, unlike MRT where it's everyone over 60 regardless of nationality.

In Japan, visiting the sento/onsen, often as a family or social group (sports team, bunch of friends etc etc) is still very much part of the culture even though everyone has baths at home. The big sento have all the other things you'd expect at a spa, restaurants and so on, so people often stay for many hours. At the other extreme, I've watched the sun set over the sea at a seaside onsen that was just a vouple of natural pools in a space between some big rocks. That was mixed bathing - the women wrapped themselves in towels, the men were naked. A visit is definitely recommended if you like eye candy, but you need to know the etiquette.

Yes and no, up to a point. GIYF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Thailand but TiT so the laws are not exactly paragons of clarity.

Very sensible indeed. Never throw away documentation until you are on the next phase of your travels! Some airports even demand your baggage receipts before you can take the bags. (The boarding pass inspection is probably because a recently arriving flight was a stopover that didn't terminate there, so they need to be certain that confused passengers to wherever didn't get off in the wrong country. It happens.)

It might be worth pointing @young11 to a certain Massage Explainer for more details of how it all works 😉

The proverbial hundredmillion-dollar hamburger. I wonder who was on board? 🤔

One possible difference: is the ATM billing you in baht or your home currency? If it's kindly offering to do the conversion for you, the "dynamic currency conversion" rate you get will be far worse than if you insist on being billed in baht and letting your home bank do the conversion at the mid-market rate. Just say no!

Which UK banks might those be?

"The Men of Thailand" 7th edition from 1999 lists A-Bomb, Ambiance, Le Cafe Royale, BBB, Toy Boys, which all still exist in some form.

Glad to hear he's still in business. His farewell massage was my last encounter before departing in 2020 🙂

Is that Gun who was at the Ambience for a while and before that at Narcissus on Pattayaland 1? If so, I second the personal recommendation. Otherwise I found Scandic as Macaroni says, though to be fair I haven't been there for several years and they may have improved.

How do they define "senior"? 60, 65 or 70?

There was certainly a breakfast room when I was last there in January 2020. I can't remember which floor it was on. Maybe a covid-related closure?

The Japanese lack of street names is logical (to them!): "why would you want to label the empty spaces between buildings?" 😵 Because of this, they have small district police stations all over urban areas, whose main job is to give directions: https://jref.com/articles/koban-japanese-police-boxes.199/ "If you want to know the way, ask an omawari-san".

You're expecting consistency and correctness. TiT so it isn't going to happen. People make mistakes when transliterating unfamiliar languages. Google Maps regularly gets things wrong outside of California, and is slow to correct them. Given a mixture of letters and numbers that it doesn't recognise, it's likely to guess that you want what someone else recently searched for. There is no single satisfactory romanization of Thai, so everybody makes up their own. (There's an official romanization but it isn't satisfactory: it doesn't even distinguish short and long vowels, never mind tones) The 'r' sound is fluid. It's a marker of the Bangkok prestige dialect but in other parts of the country it becomes 'l' or disappears altogether. And at the end of a word it's pronounced 'n' . In this case the Thai spelling has no 'r' symbol ร, so 'intramara' is just wrong. 'inthaamara' would be a better representation (h after t means it's aspirated - a 'breathy' T, not the English "th" sound) and the second vowel is long. A canonical address would be something like "<plot number>/<house number> thanon <street name> soi <number>" but there are many variations HTH 🙃

ATM limits are typically 10 000 to 30 000 B. Or just hide them somewhere else in the system. It's a safe bet that the bank will not be the loser.

Not sure if that's what you meant, but don't buy baht until you arrive - you will get a much better exchange rate in Thailand than back home. Use exchanges (Super Rich, TT or similar, not banks.) Don't exchange money in the arrivals area of Suvarnabhumi, go down to the basement (Airport Rail Link) level where the rates are better. Be aware that the ATMs will charge you 220 baht (around $6) per transaction. That's on top of whatever your home bank charges for foreign exchange and use of foreign ATMS. ... and if hotel are not paid in advance you may find that sometimes they insist on cash. "machine broken, no card" (which may not be the real reason!)

Fortunately, despite the assurances of the (more?) dreadful Rees-Mogg he has chosen not to stand even though he still thinks he's the best person for the job. That probably means that an Invisible Hand made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Anyway, Prime MInister of the day is now Rishi Sunak. Can he beat 45 days in office?

... and she's gone, setting a new record. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-63309400 One of the things that first fascinated me about Thailand was its bizarre politics, with so many parties and and a continuous succession of new scandals, new governments, new constitutions. Where else would a PM (Sarit, 1952) launch a coup against himself? Where else would a party bring down the government by not standing for election? (Abhisit, 2006) TiT, I thought. Couldn't happen anywhere else. Little did I know...

I've had a look through my collection of ancient guides and have unearthed these maps from 1994-1997 (those are the publication dates, so they may already have been obsolete by then. Apologies for the unclear text on some - it's difficult to scan pages that won't lie flat. In that little alley the 1994 map has Khun Bar, Golden Cock, Super A, Lucky S, Super Lex Matsuda and Mama Sun (which was karaoke bar) 1994 (Thai Scene/Notcutt), 1995 (The Men of Thailand 5/Allyn) 1996 (TMOT6) 1997 (Thai Scene) 1999 (TMOT7)

Yes, that's the one.