PeterRS

Two other issues concern me. The passages within each tower block were narrow. One or two people with difficulty moving could hold up untold others. The second is that when some felt the fire - apparently it is now known that none of the fire alarms were working - they immeditely took the lifts to safety. With fire of such intensity, the chance of electricity failing is very high. The last place I'd want to get stuck in would be a lift between floors. When I lived in Hong Kong for 20 years, I was in two high rise blocks - the first 25 floors up, the second 34 floors up. Views were naturally spectacular. With 4 and 8 apartments per floor respectively, there were two quite generously sized stair exits per floor all well located in the heart of the buildings. But as these were privately constructed high rises, they were not low cost like those in Wang Fuk Court, and so not many older people - at least that I was aware of. When I stay in an hotel, the first thing I do is check the location of the fire stairs and count the number of doors I'll need to pass till I reach them. Once I was involved in a three-day event in Hong Kong's Ritz Carlton hotel located at the top of the tallest building and my room was on floor 117. I rather hoped they had parachutes in each room! Here in Bangkok I live on the top floor of an eight-story building. There are smoke detectors in each unit and fire hoses and extingiushers on each floor but no sprinkler system. The main open staircase is wide but a perfect funnel for fire. When I moved in, a second staircase at the back did not even have doors. I led a campaign to convert those stairs into a fire escape. Now we have occasional fire drills and biennial demonstrations from the fire department on how to use the fire prevention equipment. Now it feels a lot safer.

Senso is one of the best known gay massage spas in Bangkok. Saladaeng is very close to Saladaeng Skytrain (BTS) station. Get off at the Silom Complex exit at the back left of the train, go down to street level, do a U-turn and walk up 100 meters or so to Saladaeng. Turn right into Saladaeng, stay on the left of that soi, immediately after the first small soi opening on your left there is a dingy looking shop. That's the one. Very easy if you are in the Silom area. This map might help.

I said in my earlier post that I have mine done is a small shop on Saladaeng. It's on I think the first corner on the same side as Senso and probably around 50 meters or so prior to Senso. Cost earlier this year was I think Bt. 4.

According to an article on today's CNN site, a prisoner due to be executed by firing squad in Utah in September, had his death delayed because the prisoner was suffering from dementia. A new "competency hearing" had been set for December but the prisoner died two days ago. I am against the death penalty, but primarily because there have been too many cases where it was subsequently proved that the murdered prisoner was in fact innocent. I agree that number is very small, but I cannot accept any state has the right to end a person's life without cast-iron proof - and that is near impossible to obtain in most cases. Even confessions are no guarantee of guilt. Apologies and monetary payment are no substitute for wrongly taking a life. In this most recent case, there is another issue. The prisoner had been on death row for a staggering 37 years! That is more than double the average of 18 years which death row prisoners have to wait prior to execution. I find this utterly absurd. The mental pain and anxiety anyone must go through having to wait 37 - or even just 18 - years knowing that at some time in the future you are going to die must be ghastly. I admit some of the crimes allegedly committed were probably even more ghastly, but in my view that is no reason for the state to punish a condemned person effectively twice. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/27/us/menzies-utah-dementia-inmate-dies

This seems rather like a post I made some months ago about the online stripchat site. Quite recently a number of Chinese have appeared on the site, many in groups of three or four, all very young, very skinny and play rather silly games before eventually stripping off. They get much higher tips than almost all the westerners. Solo Chinese are also becoming common. A couple of days ago, my bf asked me to look at the screen. It was the page of a young 20ish Chinese who got from the same viewer two 'donations' of 2,200 tokens. He ended up that session with a masturbation show and 5,100 tokens. I understand from the web that 'models' on stripchat earn 5 US cents per token. By my reckoning he earned $255 for about four hours 'work'. Yet most young western models spend longer online and are lucky to end up with between 100 and 200 tokens. So clearly there are some in some countries very hppy to pay way over the odds for whatever tickles their fancy!

Rainfall in the south of Thailand is far from uncommon even into the middle of December. I recall a 5 night stay in Phuket in mid-December 1996 when it poured with rain every day.

Being here on a long term visa, my answer is simple. I take a photo of my passport details page and another of the visa. I cut to size, back one to another and then have it laminated. I always carry that in my backpack or back pocket. There are shops offering lamination all over the place, even one on Saladaeng just before you come to Senso. I realise this is less easy for those here on short trips visa free. Then it is the arrival stamp the police are interested in. So just a quick photo copy of that and the details page should suffice. No need to risk losing your passport and it saves a trip to a police station if for any reason they ask for it.

A real probem for this complex is that it housed mostly elderly people. The largest age grouping was those aged 65 and above. CNN has reported that of recent buyers, the youngest was in their 60s. It was one of the government's low cost housing complexs of which there are many in Hong Kong. Private rentals are so high that a broom cupbord in the city centre is basically unaffordable for most. Government public housing is sold at very substantial discounts resulting in long waiting lists. Residents of Wang Fuk Court became concerned about the cladding and fireproofing over a year ago when they started writing to the government about it. Between July 2024 and November 20 2025 the Labour Department had carred out 16 safety checks, the latest reminding the contractors of the need for fireproofing of materials. The death toll is now 94 with that total expected to rise to several hundred. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/27/asia/hong-kong-fire-survivors-questions-intl-hnk

The fires have now been brought under control in all but one of the towers. The death toll has now risen to 65 with nearly 300 still unaccounted for. Fear remains for those on the upper floors who would have had no means of escape in the burning heat. The fireman who died had been overcome by smoke after entering a building to look for survivors. Locally, the sentiment has changed from one of horror to anger., How did this happen and how were fire alrams not heard, if indeed they went off? There is some concern about a possible building collapse but this is regarded as remote. Major corporations in Hong Kong and mainland China have been quick to make donations to help those who have lost so much. Jack Ma and his Alibaba Group have pledged almost US$7 million, other Chinese companies $1.25 million each. A Hong Kong consortium of companies has already pledged $12.5 million. Photo: Yan Zhao/AFP/Getty Images

My view, and it is only my view but based on what others have written here, is that any visit to Saranrom for cruising is now a waste of time. It is after all quite far from the centre and, again according to others, if there is activity there it starts quite late. One post mentioned 10:00 pm. I doubt if translation apps will be much use. There's plenty of cruising elsewhere in Bangkok and clearly a lot of activity on the apps. Just keep your gaydar working.

@ChristianPFC should give us an update on Saranrom. But please note it has been stated in several previous posts about Saranrom that the boys there do not speak English. So if you do not speak some Thai you are likely to have a problem. You also have to work out the local hotel and cost of room etc. With the fee being so low, I doubt if they would consider going to your hotel. As I understand it (and of course I may be wrong) they go to a local hotel in that area.

I am surprised that @ChristianPFC still visits the Saranrom area. Back in 2017 there was correspondence on this Board about Saranrom. One guest member said that @ChristianPFC had once been threatened with a knife there. @ChristianPFC pointed out that the poster had got it wrong, but there had been some form of altercation. He wrote on August 25 2017 - "I never had an encounter that involved a knife, or other weapon. That incident in Saranrom was bare hands/feet first, and later he picked up a piece of wood (?), that's when I decided to take the next taxi to get away." As was stated then, Saranrom was/is primarily a place for older Thais to meet younger Thais. Foreigners rarely visit now. As I said earlier AYOR.

You should go to Japan. I remember the first time I had fried green tea ice cream - or I suppose I should say tempura ice cream. It was delicious.

For a city that has some of the most crowded parts of our planet housed in a vast number of high rise buildings, major fires in Hong Kong have been relatively uncommon. Yesterday afternoon, though, a massive one broke out spread out over seven tower blocks in the Tai Po district not far from the China border. 44 have been killed including one fireman and 279 remain unaccounted for. Many remain trapped in the upper floors which firemen are having difficulty reaching due to the intense heat at that level. With air-conditioning units having melted and no power, those on the upper levels still alive must be going through absolute hell. Photo: Getty Images Just after 7:00 am today Thai time the blaze had been raging for 16 hours and was still not under control. It is believed to be Hong Kong's deadliest fire since World War II. The cause of the blaze has not yet been identified. But experts have been saying it was made worse by the bamboo scaffoding surrounding the tower blocks which were having exterior renovation. Another has been inflammable polystyrene boards that have been covering many of the windows and which did not meet fire safety standards. Bamboo scaffolding is universal in Hong Kong and has been in use in mainland China for centuries. Two directors of the construction company and one of its consultants have already been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Location of the tower blocks Photo from CNN website https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/hong-kong-tai-po-buildings-fire-11-26-25

Is Saranrom still in existence as a cruising place? I know it was years ago and the price then was Bt. 500. I also know it could be dangerous as shown in a vdo posted on this Board around that time. If it is still on the go, how has the price remained unchanged for around a couple of decades? Have you recently taken someone off from there? About 15 years ago I once went with a friend in his car (I don't drive in Thailand) around 9:00 pm on a Sunday evening. There were then no more than half a dozen Thais hanging around. As the old Spartcus Guide would have added, definitely AYOR.

That vdo is absolutely horrible. My heart goes out to all whose homes have been flooded and familes who have lost loved ones. I have a Thai friend whose home was flooded for 3 months during the massive flooding in parts of Bangkok in 2011. It took weeks afterwards to render his ground floor habitable again. 13.6 million people were affected by those floods.

Agree with @llz. Unless you were flying due south for at least 30 minutes, it would have been impossible to see the flooding in the south. To the north of Bangkok there is a much lesser degree of flooding after the Chao Phraya dischage rate was increased. Even though that took place three months ago, some parts of Ayutthaya Province remain under some water.

Reports indicate that the south of the country has been hit by its worst rainfall in 300 years. Ten Provinces have been hit with the city of Hat Yai being the worst. It experienced 335 mm in a single day. Desperate residents are perched on rooftops. More than 2 million peope have been affected. Military ships including an aircraft carrier with supplies, a flotilla of boats and rescue helicopters have been mobiised to help residents. 33 have aleady died. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg97wx144jo Hat Yai: photo Weerapong Narongkul Bangkok Post

Last month United opened up a new route - daily flights from BKK to HKG. Outward flight departs at 4:05pm and the return from Hong Kong at 09:10am. Being a new and just once a day service, there are special cheap fares on offer. The problem for Hong Kong bound passengers is that the aircraft flies on to Los Angeles. So like it or not you will have extra security checks at BKK!

They're convicted?

We have in another thread a lot of information about the scam centres located mostly in Myanmar. These trafficked up to 250,000 mostly from around Asia to work in mostly dreadful conditions persuading generally those from older generations around the world to part with their hard earned cash. Thankfully China has started to do something about this. With the help of the Thai authorities, one of the biggest scam chiefs, a Chinese national named She Zhijiang, has finally been sent back to Beijing. Today's Guardian newspaper highlights another form of scam, one operating in Amerca's heartland. Northwestern Mutual is one of America's most admired companies. Founded 168 years ago it sits at #109 in the Fortune 500 list. It also tops Forbes list of the best employers for university graduates. Internships which might lead to full time jobs are coveted by students. Posters at recruitment seninars tourinely tout the company as "The Career You Want at a Company You’ll Love." Although given the revelations in The Guardian article, I totally fail to understand why. Jeremy Barr, a senior at Texas A&M University, was attracted by the company's PR. He was chosen for an internship. Jeremy was offered a job in the company's Texas office. He was sent away with “market information surveys” to complete. The worksheets, seen by the Guardian, required Jeremy to interview 10 friends or family members about their finances – listing their names, occupations, phone numbers, and asking each of them to refer him to 10 more people he could contact about their financial planning . . . He was chosen for an internship. Jeremy was offered a job in the company's Texas office. In spite of its questionable practices, the insurance industry is doing all it can to prevent government interference. SInce 1998 it has spent $4 billion in lobbying fees. The training began immediately, but there were no crash courses in mutual funds or market trends. Instead, the new recruits were told to take out their phones, open their contacts, and upload at least 200 names into company software. Then start calling. The goal: 40 dials a day, documents seen by the Guardian show. Friends, cousins, ex-roommates, teammates, anyone who might answer. Jeremy was told to leave 20 missed calls at a time so it looked “urgent”. When someone finally picked up, there was a script to follow: a cheerful announcement of his new role, followed by an invitation to meet and discuss their financial future. If the person on the phone agrees to meet, their financials are input into Northwestern’s software, which spits out a financial plan. Invariably, it will recommend the most expensive life insurance product, known as “whole life”, according to internal documents and interviews with workers. A more senior adviser typically joins the call and gets half the commission. Reps have quotas for these meetings, according to 14 sources, and an internal document from the New York office, that requests five new bookings per week. According to the author, 21 current and former Northwestern workers all had the same stories. Recruitment, they said, is a decoy for harvesting contacts. Reps are not being groomed as future financial advisers, they claim, but pushed to sell life insurance to friends and family. After one month 80% of interns dropped out. Jeremy stayed on and became top of his group. But despite being the product Northwestern encourages all its employees to concentrate on, whole life policies make tons of profit. Many cash out within a few years when they realise they cannot afford the premiums. Those lost premiums are basically profit. Basically, though they are just a lousy investment. An investment in the S&P 500 in 1990 will have grown about 3,700% while a Northwestern policy would have yielded just 44% over the same period (based on its current dividend rate of 5.5%). So, a stock market investment will have grown about 85 times more than the cash value in a whole life policy. Inflation since 1990 is around 146% so the Northwestern investment would have lost value in real terms . . . [Like so many others] Jeremy, once the last intern standing, eventually broke too. He had sold more than 50 policies to clients which he knew often did not serve their best interest. Guilt caught up with him. Just over a year after that hopeful spring morning, he quit. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/24/northwestern-mutual-insurance-jobs-hiring

A little curiosity. First, I am the world's lousiest cook. I can do eggs and a few other things, but I just have no interest in cooking whatever. Second I am an unashamed chocoholic. Friends of mine are going to Muscat next week where there is a much praised original chocolate shop run by two sisters. My friends have promised to bring me back some! So a dessert that always has my juices flowing is a chocolate mousse. Yet in all my years of travelling it is rare that I have found one that really had that gorgeous mixture of taste, texture and consistency, even in a top restaurant. Too many are just too thick. Few have the right texture, a sign that insufficient egg white has been folded into the mixture. The best I ever tasted was served as a buffet lunch item in the La Ronda revolving restaurant on the 33rd floor of Hong Kong's Furama Hotel, just along the waterfront from the iconic Mandarin Hotel. It was perfect in every respect, even to having just the merest dash of cognac to add to the flavour. I took guests and clients to that restaurant many, many times. It was a huge buffet. As common nowadays it had different sections, including unusually for those days an Indian section. After a couple of visits when I realised there was no chocolate mousse, I was told that only two smallish bowls were available for each lunch serving. From that day on, I advised all my colleagues that the first thing they had to get from the buffet table was a generous portion of chocolate mousse which would then wait on our table ready for dessert time. Worked a treat! Never in my travels have I found one to better this from the Furama Hotel. Sadly the great views and its chocolate mousse ended when the hotel closed in 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/nov/25/whats-the-secret-to-great-chocolate-mousse-kitchen-aide

When the apps arrived, I too had more than considerable success. Not here in Bangkok as the bar, sauna and spa scene did not require additional hook-ups. In my Asian travels, though, they were a godsend and I met many guys including a few whom I met regularly for a period of time. Some sites were better than others in certain countries. There was a site named fridae.com which allegedly had half a million members and covered virtually the whole of Asia for several years. Meeting guys in South East Asia was easy. Another, I believe gaydar.com, was great for meeting guys especially in Taipei and Tokyo. Jack'd, Hornet and Grindr gradually become more prominent, and then for those of us in Asia Blue'd was for a time great on my travels outside Thailand. But apart from fridae, I have never paid any membership fees. Then fridae changed hands. It still exists but checking just now, under Personals it claims 1,521 members on line of whom 55 are in Thailand. Click on Thailand and you find just 2 - one aged 63 and the other 75! Try Taiwan. 58 supposedly onlne but only 6 listed and an average age around 50. Don't waste your money on that crap! For at least ten years the site has been at death's door. I still get hits on other sites when out of Thailand and have met a few guys. But as @jimmie50 writes, I first prefer to meet guys face to face now. A sign of ageing no doubt.

A somewhat ridiculous title, I know, but it rather nicely praphrases a long article in today's Guardian. We all know that Caravaggio is one of the gay world's favourite painters. We know that he himself was gay, at least for most of the time. We know that Caravaggio painted the model used in the painting Victorious Cupid which arrives at London's Wallace Collection tomorrow in three very different paintings and that he was his lover. We know this because the British traveller Richard Symonds saw the painting in 1649 and was told its subject has “the body & face of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant that laid with him”. The name of this boy was Cecco. It was painted around 1600 for a well-known art collector. We know, too, that in those days it was not uncommon for artists to have sex with their models. It is claimed that Donatello was madly in love with his apprentice which to many seems obvious when they see his statue of David. The art historian Vasari claims that Leonardo da Vinci “took for his assistant the Milanese Salaì, who was most comely in grace and beauty, having fine locks curling in ringlets, in which Leonardo greatly delighted”. We do have to realise, though, that the latest historical studies illustrate that same-sex relationships in much of Italy in Caravaggio's time, depite the prohibition of the Church and the Courts, were far from uncommon. One historian has discovered that over a 70-year period in 15th century Florence, 13,000 men were convicted of sodomy - this in a city with just 40,000 inhabitants! Most were merely fined and continued with their sexual encounters. Across the channel in England, Caravaggio's slightly older contemporary the playright Christpher Marlowe is reported to have said “They that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools.” The painting is being lent to the Wallace Collection from its permanent home in Berlin and it can be viewed until April 12. There is no special entry fee. And what of Cecco? He went on to become a painter using the name Cecco del Caravaggio but of only average talent. One of his works is to be seen in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. As the Guardian article ends, it writes this - Four hundred years on, we might make more sense of the incredible painting that is coming to the Wallace Collection if we simply use that old word, sin. Caravaggio’s paintings shudder and provoke with sin – the supposedly sinful pleasures of sweet grapes, red wine and sex. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/nov/24/caravaggio-victorious-cupid-model-muse-wallace-collection

Many of the rules on prostitution and sex were devised in the immediate post war period, influenced less by the Japanese themselves and much more by the American occupiers. The Americans were in fact conflicted by their own attitudes to sex and morality. They had condemned the use of what became known as "comfort women" to provide sexual services to Japanese throughout the war. Yet the American occupiers in Japan had around 430,000 of its own troops stationed in the country and these were also young men with a high sex drive. Against this, the American view on morality was essentially conservative and its leaders did not want to be seen as condoning sex. For the Japanese there was another problem. Many of the young GIs arrived in Japan with venereal disease. So the Japanese agreed to brothels being opened but only for American military personnel. The occupying Americans' prudish attitude to sex went a lot further. Even though nudity in Japan was totally natural prior to the war with public bathing essential and whole families attending the same bathhouse (segregation was almost unheard of), this was considered going way too far in the eyes of the occupiers. Thus the Americans passed a law stipulating photos of female genitalia were banned in all media, which in those days basically meant print media. When Playboy first appeared, a small army of Japanese women used small knives to scratch out the pubic hair before it went on sale. With a series of equally conservative governments, the Japanese have never rescinded this law. It did not affect photos of males because the first gay magazine did not appear until 1971. By then, though, the rule was entrenched and was assumed to apply also to the male figure. Hence what I and most others consider the near idiotic situation of almost all gay porn for local consumption now having pixilation. What makes it so stupid is there are machines on sale in the country which will unpixilate photos! And a growing number of producers and indivduals are posting unpixilated vdos online. Some producers are starting to use utilize pixilation that is so tame it is almost unnnoticed. Yet no Japanese government will allow itself to be seen publicly as changing the law!