macaroni21

There's a laundry shop on Saladaeng Soi 2. Google reference: https://maps.app.goo.gl/weKZVc9kEbGPiEsi8 Easy walking distance from the Raya Hotel. Their Facebook page has not been updated for a long time though.https://www.facebook.com/s.t.laundryandalterations/ Here's what it looks like from Google Streetview.

I don't know what happened in my brain, but when I read "introducing iPads to the seats", I pictured every seat being cushioned with absorbent anti-incontinence pads. Might not be a bad idea considering the client profile in some bars.

I wonder who inherits the X-boys now. It would be a shame if the bar changes its business model under the successor.

One more: whilst Prestige Massage's rooms are on the upper floors, they have a lift. No need to climb stairs. Prestige is on the pricey side though, and I'm not certain if all the staff are willing bodies.

The Avarin shop that is not next to Tarntawan Hotel has massage rooms on the ground floor just behind the foot massage lounge. Chaichana on Patpong Soi 1 has massage rooms in the basement, just one floor below its foyer. The stairs down aren't difficult. Prime has ground floor rooms in its third building, though Prime is not known for offering a milking service to conclude a massage. There is also one shop on Silom Road under Saladaeng station that has ground floor rooms but unfortunately I can't remember which one it is. But you could easily walk that 100-metre stretch and ask the boys out front of each shop if their rooms are on the lower floor. Further afield from Silom, Prince has ground floor rooms as does Jey Spa. The above is based on memory which may be a little faulty, so please double check my information with the shops themselves.

Trump's condolence statement on Truth Social (may God forgive me for even quoting it) was terse to an extent that it seemed forced and insincere. “Rest in peace Pope Francis! May God bless him and all who loved him!” Whereas other leaders referenced Pope Francis' values, none of that from the orange man. BTW, anybody watched the film The Conclave? Did you like the twist at the very end?

A one-hour look at the work of the Australian embassy in Bangkok and the consulate in Bali. This may interest especially expats living in Thailand.

There's a usually a long gap between production and upload to Youtube, and this one is no different. The 59-minute documentary "Fairytale Of Kathmandu | A portrait of a fallen idol and the murky world of sex tourism" was made around 2007, but only uploaded this month. It opens with a charming and cheery tone: the celebrated Irish poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh makes regular trips to Nepal. He loves the exotic and simple life there, and over the years he has acquired many young men as friends who dote on him. But as the film maker follows him around, she captures scenes that raise many questions. And like the ominously dark monsoon clouds that come rolling in over the valleys of Nepal from the south, the tone of the film changes. The Irish police undertook an investigation starting from 2006 (see https://archive.ph/20130217192154/http://www.independent.ie/national-news/boys-were-damaged-by-sex-trysts-with-poet-1286378.html) but nothing came of it. Apparently there was no investigation by the Nepali authorities since no complaint had been filed and all the boys were reportedly of legal age.

I too would believe that the Thai system will go relatively well, it is after all, not a complicated software to write or implement. As for mention of Cambodia, I am reminded of a conversation I had with an acquaintance last year. Involved in healthcare systems, he was in Cambodia for some reason and had an opportunity to interact with hospital and Health Ministry people. He told me how impressed he was with some software that he was shown. Only later did it make sense. The Chinese built the system for the Cambodians.

By all indications, the decoupling of US-China trade and economies is surely going to go the full distance and the economic pain on both sides will be bad. I would caution against underestimating how much disruption this will also cause to China, even though much of the media is talking about the costs to the US. However, the key difference is that China has a leadership that is good at planning. Like Canada, it has a people that is united about the external threat. On the other side, the US has an incompetent leadership and fractious internal politics. In the medium term, this difference in leadership will make a big difference even if in the short term, the pain and disruption are similarly acute on both sides. Yet, despite the looming costs to come, pro-Trump voters remain solidly behind him. MAGA is a sort of religious cult. As with most cults, members of a cult rarely allow empirical facts or logic to shake their beliefs. Also, suffering is seen as a rite of passage, easily explained away as due to persecution by outsiders, and never the fault of the cult's own teachings. So what lies ahead? We've been through this before! The next two decades look likely to be a reprise of the 1930s, with no single dominant power nor any global trading system. In politics and economics, the world was in distinct blocs. As a result there were countless points of friction, any one of which could blow up into military action as bloc-leaders sought to expand or defend their interests. I don't intend to sound alarmist, but let's not forget that World War II might not have flared up in East Asia in December 1941 (more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland) if not for the US trade embargo on Japan. Japan (which many people have forgotten was on the side of US-Britain-France in the First World War) felt in the late 1930s that it was being deprived of access to oil and other raw materials because of the embargo imposed by the US and its West European allies (then fighting Hitler), and so it sought to carve out its own bloc in East Asia. If the above was news to you, it may be because, like many westerners, you might have thought of World War II as a single war across the globe. Actually it was two different wars that happened to occur at the same time (with different initial sparks), but which happened to involve a few (not all) of the same players – the US and to a lesser extent Britain. France and the Netherlands were initially involved but soon disappeared from the Asian theatre after Hitler marched into Paris and The Hague. Many countries were only involved in one war, not both. For example, Germany, Italy, Canada and the Soviet Union were major participants in the European war but not in the Asian war (right at the end, after Germany had been defeated, the Soviet Union did turn its attention to the east, in order to grab some advantage). China, Australia, NZ and Japan were participants in the Asian war but not the European war....but I am going off-topic now.

To the OP: Thai attitudes to same sex relationships are social constructs; only loosely related to religion. You would find, for example, very different atttudes in other countries that are as Buddhist as Thailand. You probably come from a country where the dominant religion is that of an Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and societies founded on Abrahamic religions tend ot think (not entirely true) that the teachings of religion are or should be the source of social/moral attitudes. In particular the Abrahamic religions are more sex-obsessed than non-Abrahamic religions – they have a lot to say about sex. It may surprise you that about half the world's population do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion, and as a general rule, those other religions have little to say about sex or sexually-related relationships. Yet, these societies do have attitudes (and widely varying ones too) about same-sex relationships. And they may well have one attitude to male-male relationships and a very different attitude to a female-female relationship. It is a Western construct to see male-male and female-female relationships as somehow two eggs in the same basket. So whatever attitudes these non-Abrahamic societies have towards gay male relationships (I shall set aside what they think of female-female relationships) don't so much spring from their religion, but are hand-me downs from social conditioning. Another feature that is worth mentioning here is that Thai culture – as with all other traditional Southeast Asian cultures – see gender more than sexual orientation. If your lover is gatoey and you're a cis-gendered male, it is one thing. If both of you are cis-gendered males, then it is seen as a completely different kind of thing. Generally, southeast asian cultures tolerate and to a degree accept transgender identity and they are more familiar, from their socio-historical legacies, with relationships where one partner is transgendered. Doesn't have to be fully transgendered. Effeminacy is similarly tolerated. There are far less socio-historical underpinnings to attitudes towards cisgendered male-male relationships. Historically southeast Asian societies tended not to see these relationships so they haven't built a corpus of social attitudes towards them. What attitudes they hold today are of more modern genesis, which is to say those attitudes have a large dollop of Western influence if one is speaking of urban Thai communities exposed to contemporary Western culture. If one is speaking of rural or small town communities, or even of communities rooted in the shantytowns around Bangkok, then I suspect one may find quite different attitudes, due simply to less exposure to contemporary Western culture. Note: I speak of contemporary western culture. Large swathes of urban elite Sri Lankan society (also a predominantly Buddhist country) have also had their attitudes to cisgendered male-male relationships shaped by exposure to western culture, but in their case, they were largely shaped by western culture of decades ago, resulting in a significant degree of homophobia. Ditto with Korea which is about 50% Buddhist. Arguably Korea is more homophobic than Sri Lanka. Even among the Thai elite that have exposure to contemporary western culture, it is just one strand out of many that meld to form their beliefs. Bear in mind that perhaps half of the Thai elite in Bangkok are ethnically Chinese, and many of their social attitudes are deeply rooted in Chinese social expectations. And here, the strong belief in the traditional family and the responsibility of bearing sons for future generations in order to carry on the family name will likely override whatever crazy western ideas they come across about accepting homosexuality. I speak with some experience on this matter since I have over the years had many local Thai friends who are professionals and business leaders. There have been plenty of opportunity for them to educate me on the very complicated attitudes they encounter. I have no experience with Thai rural or small-town communities in this regard, so I really cannot say how cisgendered male-male relationships will be seen by them. There are some on this board who have boyfriends from Isaan or other small towns, and might have received a warm welcome from the boyfriends' families. However, I would caution that we shouldn't read too much into their particular experiences, since those farang-thai ex-moneyboy relationships are hugely coloured by economics. One characteristic of Thai society (again, nothing at all to do with Buddhism) that may obscure their honest opinions is the tendency to avoid confrontation – fights along Pattaya Beach Road and Soi 6 notwithstanding – and their acute awareness of the need to save face for all around. So even if one encounters a performance of gracious welcome and acceptance, one should always remember it could be just that: a performance. But perhaps that is good enough. If everybody around is placidly polite, does it really matter what they really think? By the same token, you will need to become "Thai" to receive this consideration. That means, you will need to learn to behave their way and not do anything that undermines "face". So you will almost surely have to restrain yourself from overt displays of same-sex affection; if you don't, you won't be seen as giving them due respect, and consequently, they won't feel obliged to return respect to you; which means their polite smile and silence will vanish in a flash, and you may be featured in the next viral video of a farang beaten up by irate Thais.

I am not speaking from all that much experience and I have never bottomed in a Japanese shop, so please do not take what I am about to say as the gospel truth, just as semi-educated gues: The agencies' websites typically display alongside photos (sometimes with faces blurred) what the boys will or will not do. I think you will find that the majority of them will top, and many will only top. The locations of shops' private rooms vary; sometimes a shop will have rooms in the same building, sometimes they rent rooms in nearby buildings. If in a room within the shop, you can assume the walls to be paper thin, Even in off-site rooms which are typically studio apartments in separate buildings, the walls can be thin. There was one time when I could hear the neighbour flush the toilet and run the shower. Muffled voices too. If you're the type who sing opera as you climax, consider wearing a mask when you're entering or leaving the building, so curious neighbours won't be able to see your face. Japanese places are very strict about the time. So if you have booked 60 minutes, it is 60 minutes from the moment the boy meets you. If you spend 10 minutes washing yourself, those 10 minutes would be counted within the session's overall duration.

@Moses When you have time, could you try a slightly different version? The boys need to be with much bigger eggs (maybe ostrich-sized). There are some size-queens here. 🤣

Gone off topic from the get go. 😁

As @khaolakguy suggests, this can be misleading: The blue infographic above (see @reader's post of 1 April) says that one has to present the emailed acknolwedgement of the submission at the immigration counter along with passport, etc. This means the submission must be made BEFORE arrival. Like in many other countries, it can be made up to three days BEFORE arrival date.

I believe that gogobars require boys who do not show up for work, unless it is their pre arranged day off, to have to pay the off fee. Does this mean that a boy who is absent also needs to pay 1000 baht to the bar? I wonder if exceptions will be made for when the boy is sick. Hotmale should be taking advantage of this move to capture some of the traffic. All it needs is creative promotions and advertising; after all, the shows aren't all that different between Fresh Boy and Hotmale. If Hotmale still cannot/does not capitalise on this, it should be a crime. But something tells me that Hotmale would rather follow the same 1000 baht pricing. That too, especially if it also applies to boys unable to work on the rare day, should be an aggravated crime!

Well-spotted implication. It's either a sign of booming business or price resistance. It could be both at the same time. Any decision to impose a higher charge is usually backgrounded with with good customer traffic. Perhaps it may have noticed that customers entering the bar sometimes exceed the available seats, and so those left-standing customers simply order a boy and not a drink, and then go off. Yet it could also signal resistance to the 500 baht price of drinks, where customers choose not to sit down, and instead just order a boy and go off within 2 minutes.

Isn't wasting water the whole point of Songkran - at least the modern-day version of it?

🤣 @floridarob I think you missed @vinapu's point. He was shocked that @bkkmfj2648 checked YOU up right at the bar to confirm your balls of steel. So did he?

Wait! You're reading too much into what I wrote. I was using the rentboy scenario to show how (almost) impossible it would be for the US to restore trade balance through re-industrialisation. I wasn't predicting cheap rent boy prices in the US. US products in many industries just aren't competitive in the global markets at current exchange rates. To become competitive, the USD has to fall dramatically (the rentboy example), but such a dramatic fall will have a zillion consequences in a zillion areas, not least of which is the total loss of credibility of the USD as a reserve currency. Having said that, in history, sometimes the impossible happens and the USD may one day be as much a joke as the Nigerian naira. Short of that... My point was that Trump's hope of reviving domestic manufacturing in the US can only go so far: substitution of now-highly-taxed imports. But the made-in-USA products won't be competitive in world trade (like the American rentboy) due to wage levels , cost of living, etc, and so domestic manufacturers in the US will face upper limits in terms of their economies of scale. This in turn means they may not be able to get their cost-per-unit down. Then vicious cycle: not viable for exports. Under such a scenario where US manufacturers can't export much, how will the US get trade balance? It has to make permanent the restriction of imports. Also, American consumers will pay more for the the US-made product than consumers elsewhere pay for the Chinese/Korean/Brazilian/Romanian-made product. Coming back to the rentboy business, we see Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines and even Madagascar "exporting" their rentboys to meet Thai import demand. Based on reports here, we've even heard of Russian and Ukrainian rentboys. The Big Tool bar in Pattaya has Russian and Brazilian dancers. I have heard of Pakistani and Nepali rentboys in Malaysia, and Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese boys in Singapore. Is the US rentboy prepared to "export" himself to Thailand, Bali, Rio or Medellin to work for local levels of pricing? I think the answer is no. And that's why I see how improbable it is for US industries to become major exporters. Like rentboys, Trump's re-industrialisation idea, and getting foreign countries to buy American manufactures, has serious limits. Currently the US has a trade deficit in rentboys. Americans go to Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Thailand, etc, but sex tourists from the non West don't go to the US. Can't afford it. Another way to put it: American sexwork is not competitive enough to be exported. How can any US government restore trade balance? Very simple: tax every American who buys sex abroad. The tariff must be big enough to deter outbound sex tourism, thus redirecting these Americans' sex buying to the American rentboy. Then trade becomes zero export and zero imports. Balanced!

In response to the title of this thread, it is probably true, albeit in an indirect way, that the Trump administration's actions will impact tourism in Pattaya. But certainly not only in Pattaya. More and more forecasts are coming about the likelihood of a global recession. Some countries will of course suffer more severely than others, but recessions depress travel and tourism.

I read that book and I remember it well. Paul Kennedy's analysis was an eye-opener. However, I would not imply that the US will not remain a great power, at least for the rest of this century. Very likely it will be one of two powers in a bipolar world though if (post-Trump) it fails to repair its relationships with Europe, Canada and other democratic countries, it will get increasingly isolated to the point of irrelevance. Even if it tries to repair those relationships, I fear permanent damage has been done; there will never be the same level of trust again. Foreign powers are smart enough not to imagine that this is just a Trump-and-Vance phenomenon. They know that the agonies the US is suffering right now arise from systemic factors (more below) including cultural and ideological ones. These agonies will remain long after Trump and Vance, and to that extent, the US will continue to eat itself. I was born when the British Empire had just crumbled. Like so many here, I witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and the re-arrangement of the world order from the bipolar world it represented. While both empires fell relatively quickly; we should not assume that the US empire will vanish as quickly. I think the difference may be that the British and Soviet empires had their economies hollowed out to a much larger extent than the US' today, and so when they collapsed, it was more complete. The US economy is still relatively strong so even if its political influence wanes (mostly due to self-inflicted damage) it will remain an economic force to be reckoned with. The British empire My understanding is that the fall of the British Empire was a classic example of military overreach, but a fiction of military might still have been sustained for a century more if not for Kaiser Germany and Nazi Germany. The two World Wars accelerated the humbling of Great Britain by draining it of precious resources. Also - and we often forget - by the beginning of the 20th Century, Britain had lost the technological edge and industrial might to the USA. So, by about 1915 or 1916 when Britain was struggling in the trenches in France, dependent on supplies from across the Atlantic (attacked by German submarines) the writing was on the wall. There was still much political pretence of power in the 1920s and 1930s (King George V's extravagant visit to India for example), but the economic troubles and electoral upheavals of that period further hollowed out the UK. The Second World War was the coup de grace; after that it could be nothing but retreat after retreat from imperial status after 1945. So, even as I speak of a fast collapse of the British Empire, it still took about 30 years from 1915 to 1945, and then another 20 years to 1965 before decolonisation had more or less run its course.. The Soviet empire The collapse of the Soviet Union, in my estimation, took about 25 years, which is still remarkably long considering that the Soviet empire was only built on military mght, never on economic might. The Soviet empire came about because its armies were victorious over the Nazis across large swathes of Europe. There was enough industrial prowess to support a powerful military but Russia never developed a well-rounded economic engine to deliver prosperity and a better life for the peoples it had conquered. Starting from 1956 in Budapest, merely 10 years after the establishment of its sphere of influence, it had to use military power to suppress a revolt. This would be repeated every decade. Unlike the decline of the British Empire which was all over the newspapers even as it lurched from one crisis to another through the 1920s and 1930s, the fiction of a powerful Soviet Union was kept up through the 1960s and 1970s such that its weak foundations and gradual hollowing out were largely invisible to the Western public. Sure, the Soviets engaged in propaganda making themselves look great, but even more so, the invisibility of Soviet weakness was also due to American propaganda which needed a fear of a powerful adversary to justify its military-industrial complex. @PeterRS's hope for an updated Kennedy book is seconded by me. I think it will reach quite different conclusions when taking the Soviet example into account. Although the Soviet empire was engaged in several proxy wars plus a direct intervention in Afghanistan through the 1980s,they weren't particularly costly (except maybe the last one), Instead the already weak economy behind the Soviet empire was further weakend from the 1960s onwards through rigidity, over-centralisation, inefficiency, and the idiocies of ideological blinkers. The stiff, aged Brezhnev only symbolised what was happening throughout its economy. Maybe there was a dose of corruption too, but nothing like the scale of what was to come from the post-Soviet Yeltsin years on. In other words, the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire was primarily an economic event in my opinion rather than a matter of military over-reach. It was very different from the collapse of the British empire. And the US empire? Of course it is too early to be writing about the fall of the US empire. However, when it is written, I think it will be a different story again from the collapse of the British and Soviet empires. In its heyday, the US had trememdous economic, technological and military might, and so it resembled the British empire at its late 19th Century apogee. Unlike the British empire which had a relatively tiny population in its metropolitan country compared to the population sizes it dominated, the US home population (and economy) was also relatively large. It was an empire with far stronger footings than the British or Soviet empires. So how does an empire of such solidity collapse? In short: because it was stolen. It was a case of larceny on an epic scale. Eh? The American ideology of trickle-down economics created a relentless and accelerating enrichment of the 1-percent at a cost to the 99-percent. And it's not just ideology, it is also culture-with-a-religious-fervour. The American culture over-prizes freedom over responsibility; built into it is a distrust of the role of government. The American myth is about escaping the clutches of authority (into the untapped potential of the Wild West frontiers, for example), where "government" is synonymous with regulation and taxation (King George III and successive US administrations in Washington) rather than shared security, pooled resources and wellbeing. Leveraging this myth, the 1-percent essentially stole the American economy with the consent of the American electorate. "Tax cuts" is a winning slogan. It helped when the opposition neutered itself by engaging in arguments about (1) adding more letters to LGBTQIA... (2) slavery reparations (3) defunding the police, etc. If we look back, we can see the symptoms of this Grand Larceny from decades ago. Among developed nations, the US is striking in how impoverished its people are relative to its economic headline numbers. The cost of healthcare compared to other developed countries is well known. And yet, Americans' health is arguably worse than in most other developed countries. The US has a perpetual housing and homelessness crisis. It has a perpetual, endemic drug problem. Don't even get me started on guns and the public safety issues (and costs) these create. It incarcerates a relatively large percentage of its population (at a cost to the State, and a cost to its social fabric). Higher education leaves Americans with a ridiculous debt burden that is seen in no other country. People in the US have to buy cars and pay for gas or take flights even for short hops to a degree that people in other countries do not, because of a failure to invest in public transport and fast rail. For a country of its wealth, its failure to provide public goods - public health, public housing, public safety, public education, public transport - and a decent social safety net is quite astounding. Not so obvious: Americans are so influenced by status culture that they spend disproportionate amounts of money on status goods that do not yield much return in real terms (and status culture is a result of almost unregulated media freedom, promoting celebrities). Is it any wonder that the average American has reached breaking point? He is now frustrated and lashing out. At the same time, he is also trapped by his own culture (freedom!) and the American myth, so that he cannot see that the way the US organises itself is the fundamental problem. Blaming foreigners is much easier. So, this is not just a Trump phenomenon. The inherent contradictions of the US model are what's at work here.

I find it rather funny. His massage fails make me feel like an expert in navigating the unexpected here in Thailand. The translation from Japanese to English takes some getting used to, especially when he uses terms like "cave exploration" (I think it means insertive sex), "sword" (penis) and "white light" (cum?), "exit" (ejaculation?) The structure of Japanese sentences also do not convert well into English, so you have to overlook that. Overall, it's nice to see what a straight sex tourist gets by way of experiences.

My thoughts exactly!

What's the point of having wealth unless one shows off? 🤣 It's actually quite universal behaviour, only that the way we show off varies from one culture to another. In the West, it tends to be flashy cars and yachts, in Arabia, I think racing camels and falcons... Remember the term "conspicuous consumption"? The term wasn't invented in Asia.