macaroni21

Do you see a lot of Russians on the apps while in Goa? I heard this from a friend who was there a few years ago. Apparently Russians like to spend winter in Goa, the same way they go to Pattaya. Speaking of which... we haven't heard from @Moses for some time. Hope he hasn't been drafted 😮 (sorry Moses, just a joke I couldn't resist)

Is the total distance of 1 + 2 + 3 in the upper picture shorter compared to the lower picture?

It depends on the airport, and my one experience hailing a Grab from Suvarnabhumi has led me to place BKK's in the lower (not good) tier. The experience was as you described -- crowds, confusion, poor visibility of car plate numbers... It's a common problem in many airports. My guess is that the local taxi mafia are doing their best to block ride-hailing and as a result airport operators dare not improve provision for kerb-side pickup. @captainmick 's description of the taxi service is accurate. Bangkok has improved it by leaps and bounds from the old days when it was prone to scams. That said, I am mostly in the @vinapu league, usually taking the pauper Airport Railway (ARL) train (that one time when I hailed a Grab was because I was travelling with someone to a conference). State Railway of Thailand has taken over the operations of the ARL, and on my most recent trip, the train carriage I was travelling on looked like it had been refurbished. The ride was also quieter than before (maybe the clankering wheels had been replaced). Now one can even tap a chip-enabled credit/debit card at the turnstyle; no need to queue up to buy 45-baht tokens.

So... taking off from your last mention of Indian guys.... are these guys smooth? 😅

Outcall was exactly what I suggested to my friend. However, I also understand that he's had a bad experience before (not in Bali) when things were stolen from his room. What about Teman? I went there before and my recollection (which could be wrong) was that the room was behind the reception on the same ground floor. My photo of Teman Spa (https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2023/02/28/temans-pricing-got-me-scratching-my-head/) shows a one-storey building. Were you at the same location, or have they moved?

@daydreamer Thanks for that link to the Dept of Transportation. That's progress! Other sectors of commerce could do well to replicate that. I recall that 2 years ago when I was last in the US, I was shocked that the sticker price on retail items (I think Walgreens was where I first noticed it) did not include tax. It was only when my items were toted up at the cash register did tax get added and I was presented with a total bill noticeably higher than a simple aggregate of the prices I had seen on the stickers. As a foreigner, I was taken aback and had to ask why I was being charged differently. The sales clerk did not take well to my innocent question -- but that's a separate issue. Not displaying a full price would be illegal in my country, and I think most other countries in Asia. Certainly we don't see this in Thai and Japanese stores. My point is this: Because of this commercial practice, Americans are more tolerant of what I call unstated itsy-bitsy pricing than other nationalities. Tip expectations is one of those itsy-bitsy things. So in this thread, when people express a certain resistance to tipping for big cock groping or tipping in general, we have to understand the cultural-commercial background they're coming from.

@jason1975 Aren't you the kind who prefers to open a bottle of whiskey? I'm surprised you're not recommending such a strategy 🙃in order to invite (well, maybe not as many as 10) four or five guys over for a mass job interview....

No one should be yelling you out. No one has any right to. The best part of this forum is the diversity in tastes and experiences; we get to see the same scene, whether Thailand, Japan, India or the Philippines, through different eyes.

Don't read too much into the use of the word "massage". In most shops, especially those in Saphan Khwai, the word means little more than foreplay. You can at any time indicate to the service provider that you want to skip the pretence and move on to romping. The reason the word "massage" is so much used, unlike Japan, is because of the regulatory climate. Business that are in the business of selling sex cannot say so openly (unlike Japan), so they use "massage" as euphemism.

Just a word of thanks to @Travelingguy for these useful reports. By chance, they're timely too. Last weekend, an old friend of mine was musing about making a visit to Bali and was asking me for updated information, which I don't have. Unfortunately, he's now also slightly mobility-impaired (we're all getting on in years); he can walk but more than a few steps (especially without handrails) and stairs will be a challenge. Do you recall which of the places you've mentioned required customers to go up a set of stairs?

What do FK and FS stand for?

Sorry for the long post. But I realise that @Primeone385 was making assumptions -- understandble since he has not been in Thailand before -- about equivalency between what he's familiar with and what we're talking about here. And these assumptions about equivalency may not be valid, as @a-447 and @spoon have also pointed out. So I had to first explain the many ways in which "gogo bars" in Thailand are different before going on, and on and on (haha).

@Primeone385 It is very helpful that you have stated what your references and experiences have been. Doing so helps us understand your questions better. As you must have guessed, there is something very different about how bars operate in Thailand compared to the US or Brazil (I'm not sure how comparing bars to garoto saunas will help). A very specific kind of bar Firstly, I should clarify that there are many different kinds of bars in Thailand, and an outsider like yourself may not realise that this thread is only about one very specific type of bar which regular punters (sorry Americans, it's a British word) visiting Thailand tend to call "gogo bars", but which in my opinion is also not a very helpful term. It can mislead people to think that these bars are similar to what are also known as gogo bars in other countries. Language is full of these traps, where a term used in one country can refer to quite a different thing in another country. Ask a New Zealander what time he takes "tea", for example. Or compare what is an elk in Northern Europe versus an elk in North America. Essentially, what we're referring to here is a bar whose two main business objectives are to sell drinks (like all bars) but also to sell boys' services. I suspect you've guessed all that already by reading the forum. The boys don't appear on stage one at a time which would be more typical of American bars. Because the Thai gogo bars are in a business of selling off-site services (as opposed to only visual entertainment/stripper acts for patrons), the business imperative is to offer a wide enough range of boys for customers to choose from, the same way a restaurant has to offer a range of dishes for customers to choose. Therefore a typical, successful bar of this type has to have 20, 30 or 40 boys on hand -- very different from American bars where having ten strippers on duty is plenty. That being the case, it is inefficient in a Thai gogo bar to have just one boy on stage at a time. Some bars have 4, 5 or 6 at a time. Others have 10 to 15 boys on stage simultaneously. This practice of "mass offering" impacts the next point: The Big Cock Parade Secondly, Most of the evening, the boys are not nude. So the discussion in this thread is only about a short period of say 15 - 20 minutes when (a) they are nude and (b) they circulate among the audience. This is part of what the bar calls "showtime" which is the part of the evening when the lights dim and the boys standing on stage to be "sold" are replaced by a curated programme of performances -- of varying quality, mostly amateurish. The one part of the "show" that is not amateurish however is the part I call in my blog the Big Cock Parade. That's when a series of boys appear on stage with erect members (a state that is almost always maintained by tourniquets) and, well, parade around. They then come down to the audience and offer patrons a chance for a ten-second grope. The thing to remember is that the parade may consist of as many as 10 to 12 boys and, down among the audience, they tend to approach customers uninvited. Sure, you don't have to touch; you can wave them away for which there is no obligation to tip, but many customers do not like feeling pressured to accept the grope offer with its consequent obligation to tip. Tastes vary and some customers do not find the boys attractive at all so their thinking is: why should I be obliged to give money in such a scenario? Moreover, even if there was just one or two boys among the 10 to 12 whose cock one would gladly fondle (and tip), you may find that others will notice that you're the tipping sort. They'd notice that you didn't wave away Boy A or Boy B, and next thing you know, Boys C D E F G H and so on will be standing in line waiting for their turn with you. Yes it has happened to me, I'm not making it up. How does one tell Boy C "go away"? Even if you did, it won't deter Boy D. He would still be thrusting his dick at you thinking that OK, this old grunt might not like C, but maybe he likes me. Tastes vary One of the most striking observations one can make by following this forum is how tastes among members here vary. Some love the sight and feel of an erect penis. The Dominican Republic section is a case in point. I've joked before that over in that part of GayGuides, everything is about dick; nobody seems to care what kind of body a dick is attached to. I find it particularly amusing simply because I don't have the same fascination; I am more into massage and the full-body experience. So, for someone like me, to have a parade of 11 boys coming at me offering gropes and expecting payment – many of whom have neither physique nor personality I care for – gives me neither pleasure nor value. As you can see from earlier comments in this thread, there are others who feel the same way. Values vary Thank you for explaining that you're American (by that, I assume you mean USA) because one thing I have noticed as I travel around the around is that Americans tend to have a harder time than most understanding other cultures, countries and their operating systems. I think it was @jimmie50 who also noticed this (he himself is American) and he once made a comment, something to the effect that the rest of the world does things one way and Americans do things a different way. My advice to Americans when they leave their home country whether physically or when they explore other countries virtually as @Primeone385 is doing here, is to unlearn everything you've learned as an American. Be extra-careful that many of the things you subconsciously take for granted don't apply outside the US. Different values is one of those things people seldom realise because values are so invisible. Narrowing this to the question of monetary valuation, there are huge differences between how people from different countries put value on something. One observation that I often hear from my friends (from various countries) is that Americans tend to overpay for certain things without even realising it. Just to give a few top-of-mind examples: healthcare; public transport (if it even exists at all in your city). And sex. This is not to say that other countries don't have their own craziness; they do. Indians overpay for weddings. Japanese overpay for gift wrappings. Filipinos overdo the bring-gifts-back-after-you-travel-abroad thing. In Jamaica young men, even unemployed ones hanging around street corners, cannot afford to be caught dead in anything less than new $200 sports shoes -- when their climate is one where sandals will do just fine. And then there is the tipping culture in the US, which, as have been mentioned several times over many threads and many years in this forum, is widely seen as madness by the rest of the world. Americans have become inured to the expectation and practice of throwing money at people when no value is returned, and the rest of world sees this as some kind of psychopathy. ... which brings me to another implicit assumption that we need to be aware of. I have noticed that Americans participating in this forum, especially newer members, tend to assume they're talking to other Americans who likely share their same value system. As I have often pointed out, this is not the case. In fact, we cannot even assume that members here are predominantly White folks from western countries. There are Asians here, particularly in the Asia threads. Consequently, many conversations here are predicated by different value systems. What does a "price" mean? Coming back to the issue of tipping for the chance to manhandle erect dicks, the question was why such a big deal about a 100 baht tip? To reduce that to "only USD3.00" takes the discussion off onto a track that does not lead to understanding. It's not the dollars, it's the principle of being obliged to tip in an unasked-for situation. This objection is heightened when people come from cultures without a tipping culture; they don't tip at restaurants, they don't tip taxi-drivers, etc. It's just not normal to tip when no significant additional value is returned. Mix in the context of an unasked-for situation, it gets worse. Now, one may argue that the bar situation we're speaking about is one where value is returned. There is at least the overall entertainment value offered by the bar e.g. in putting up a show programme, and so one shouldn't begrudge the expectation of gratuities. But here again, we run up against value differences. In many countries, all-in pricing is normative. Having to pay extra is not. For example, in the US, my experience (correct me if the situation is now different and I am wrong) is that airline websites quote a price and then only at the point of payment do they add taxes, raising the final price. In many countries this would be illegal. The airline has to display the full price inclusive taxes right at the start. In such cultures, e.g. Thailand (but also most of Asia), customers go into gogo bars with a subliminal notion that the menu or verbally quoted price of the drink or whatever other add-ons would be inclusive of entertainment. The "justification" that extra gratuities are expected for the entertainment just seems very strange, in the same way that if extra gratuities are expected for a waiter to bring your ordered dish to your table, that would be weird too. It's the same with the sex businesses in Japan. They quote an all-inclusive price and no one is expected to tip extra. Over on the Japanese threads you still see Americans asking how much should I tip? They've been acculturated to feel intolerably guilty if they didn't throw money at the boy. It's been internalised so deeply.

The problem with a term like "Supersoft" when translated into English is that it connotes a level of service that is extra light when compared to what is meant by "soft". So, if "soft" is just a handjob, "supersoft" suggests something even less interactive than that. No wonder people find it hard to parse this term. The better way to describe the three categories would be Soft, Soft-plus and Hard.

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