macaroni21

Possibly you live in USA? Not living there myself, ending up with fistfuls of dirty low denomination US bills is pretty useless to me too. So, if I have to receive change, I would rather take riels. At least I can use them for my next purchase or next trip to Cambodia. On my recent visit, I stuck to riels and credit cards. The latter are not universally accepted but the classier restaurants and Grabcar accept them. Didn't touch a single US dollar through my entire visit. More details on my experience can be found in my post https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2026/02/09/techo-riels-and-tips/ It also discusses the central bank's dedollarisation policy. By the way, I used a travel debit card to get cash (riels) from ATMs. The riel notes were crisp and clean.

I too used to have some reluctance taking Vietnamese boys from bars; they seemed a bit too direct and transactional. Even then, I was uncomfortable with those thoughts because at an intellectual level, it didn't feel right. People from all countries span the gamut of behaviours. My sample size was extremely small by comparison; it simply wasn't fair. Then I found lovely Vietnamese guys (personality-wise) in the Bangkok massage parlours, and in the last few years, been visiting Vietnam more, and I no longer think as I did. There are all sorts. The likely explanation why some members here may think of Vietnamese as somehow different may be because you're meeting them in gogo bars, where hustling is the name of the game. Perhaps, they are just better at hustling than their more laid-back Indochinese neighbours (by the way, I use the term Indochinese to include Thailand and Burma). The Chinese too are very good at hustling, in my experience, but if you get past that or if your interaction with them doesn't involve that, they're wonderful people. Let me give you an example. In Thailand, after a certain kind of touristic show, the performers in their costumes are in the lobby allowing you to take pictures with them. I have had at least 2 experiences in China where, yes the performers were there and they were in costumes, but they were selling souvenir merchandise. I never found out if buying something (at obviously inflated prices) was the ticket to getting a photo taken. Personally, I love seeing the variety in this world.

I have noticed that too, sort of. Circus' outdoor tables can look fully occupied but I have noticed that inside tends to be distinctly emptier. I have also wondered -- and it's not just in the case of Circus but the other places on Soi 4 too - whether fully occupied tables might overstate the health of the businesses. That's a Soi where people like to sit and people-watch. Are customers sitting too long at tables nursing a drink or two? In this business, it's important to get the balance between tab value and table turnover right. I don't know what the true situation is, but I have wondered -- while my friends and I were sitting way too long at a table ourselves 😅 Reminds me of a haircut I had yesterday. Silly me chose a shop in the touristy area of Saigon. Overpriced..., but fell for a cute barber who was beckoning me to go in and avail of his skills. Anyway, it's not about him It's the shampoo girl who performed a lengthy head and scalp massage while doing the wash. It would otherwise be nice ( though would have been better if I had a shampoo boy) but for the house music played at some volume in the back/shampoo room. Trying to be contemporary, they played dance bar music with heavy beats, giving me a headache that she tried to massage away, in vain.

I don't understand what the bottom row of tiles mean. 90 days; 30 days; 14 days. Visa exemption? Visa on arrival? What? If visa exemtpion, why are they(or at least the 30-day subgroup) listed separately and not added to the 54 countries in the big red block? One tiny little thing I noticed is that the 15-day visa exemption list in the graphic/poster posted by @bkkmfj2648 (apparently from the government?) is different from the 15-day visa exemption list at 7 minutes 52 seconds in the YouTube video below. In @bkkmfj2648's graphic, the 3 countries are Seychelles, Maldives and Mauritius. In the youtube video, they are Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Why the difference? DId the cabinet change its mind? (Such confusion and uncertainty is actually quite typical of the way the Thai government operates) But anyway, the video focusses on why the biggest change affects Indians. It also provides the added information that the visa-on-arrival period for India (+4 other countries) is just 15 days, a detail not included in the poster above.

Heard a rumour that it's permanently closed. Went to check out its Facebook page and it's confirmed. Closed since 31 December 2025. Oh well....

Yet another thought came to mind: why does the owner of Circus need to sell? And it's almost a fire sale too. I think it's a safe assumption that leases on Soi 4 will not be renewed. That doesn't mean a business must be sold even if the owner does not want to invest in a new location. He can simply run the business till the last day and then close it. After all, it was implied (though not explicitly stated) in the sale notice that the business is profitable. What I reckon the problem is is that there may be about 4 million baht in an outstanding bank loan. Perhaps the 14 million paid to purchase the business 5 years ago was borrowed, and only 10 million of that has been discharged. If that's the case, then closing the business when the lease runs out will leave the owners with a balance sheet liability of 4 million in bank loan, and no operating business to generate future revenue. Now, I am just making an educated guess. I have no inside information. But what this means is that a buyer must be careful what he is buying. Will it include a loan liability? Frankly I can see no reason to buy the business at all. If someone is interested in getting into the gay bar/ restaurant trade, then set up a new one at wherever is the new location most likely to get traffic. The only possible value is the brand-name/trademark and the goodwill that may come with the Circus name though even that might not be worth much. Circus as a name has only been around for 5 years. Before that, it was Telephone Bar for decades. Yet when a new location near Moonlight opened and began trading under the Telephone Bar name, the crowd didn't migrate there. That should be a salutary example for any new entrepreneur.

Came across this AI search mention of a New York bar by chance: "The Boiler Room (East Village): Located at 86 E 4th St, this laid-back, long-standing neighborhood gay bar was famous for having rotary-style telephones and private switchboards installed at the tables. It allowed patrons to "call" across the room to flirt or buy drinks for one another." Does anyone know of it?

Thanks, @zombie There's useful additional information there. Firstly, That means the rent is (12 x 38,100) + (3 x 350,000) annually. That is 1,507,200 baht per year. It does sound low probably an anchor-tenant rate. Not sure when that previous sale occurred. If it was when Telephone Pub was rebranded as Circus, then perhaps 6 - 7 years ago? Still, 4 million baht offered today is a very far cry from 14 million baht, and definitely raises some critical questions.

I would add that successful bars tend to have gross profits at about the 60 - 70% level. They would also have net profits at about the 10 - 15% level. Which was why the term "profit margin" and the figure of 30% seemed so odd. The mention of moving to Soi Twilight was another odd thing, although @zombie spoke of it as rumours. There is no more Soi Twilight to move to; hasn't been for 6 or 7 years.

A few things about that cited Facebook post in the OP struck me: average monthly turnover of 2.5 to 4 million baht, with "estimated profit margin of over 30%". Firstly, why estimated? Shouldn't there be a precise figure from last audited accounts? Anyway, taking it at face value, the profit -- and this is another issue: what exactly do they mean by "profit margin"? -- would be about one million baht per month. Something tells me "profit margin" may be "gross profit" or "gross margin", to use more specific terminology. This would be earnings before operating costs. Suppose instead the sellers mean an EBITDA of 30%, yet the asking price is only 4 million baht, giving a sort of P/E ratio of 0.33 which is very low indeed. However, this offer may be because they really, really, need a "fast sale". Either the current owners' "other projects outside hospitality" are desperately in need of cash injection or the bar is facing a huge problem in the months ahead and the present owners do not want to be around for that. If the latter, it would be consistent with rumours of lease termination or non-renewal in the very near future. The cost of having to find a new location and outfitting it, with no assurance that customers will stay loyal after a move, may be the very prospect the current owners wish to avoid.

Then in February this year, while queuing to pay at a 7-eleven along Pattaya Second Road not far from Boyztown, the Indian gent behind me tapped me on the shoulder to ask my opinion whether the bun he was holding (among a basket of other things) was vegetarian. I offered my opinion that it probably was; "Taro bun", the label read (turns out he didn't know what taro was). The queue was slow and we had a chance to talk. I learned that he was vegetarian and for the 4 - 5 days in Thailand, he plaintively said he could find almost nothing to eat. (Come to think of it, it's actually difficult to find vegetarian Thai restaurants!). The difficulty was compounded because he came from North India and said they (or at least he) didn't eat rice. They only ate flatbread as their staple, and it's not something he can easily find in Thailand. I stupidly said "Shawarma stalls would have flat bread", before realising, three milliseconds later, that they're not vegetarian! He didn't fancy trying other cuisines, not knowing what was in them, and anyway, he said, the tastes of Thai and Western food didn't suit him. I was going to challenge him by saying that if he had never tried, how would he know, but then I decided to be diplomatic. I had learned to wait a few milliseconds before speaking my mind. The conversation soon moved on to prices of the things in his basket and the long and short of it was that everything in his basket (from a Thai 7-eleven) cost twice as much as he'd had to pay in India. What was in his basket? I remember seeing yogurt and more bread... and lots of beer. He was surviving on that through his entire trip.

Some years ago, I was doing a post-prandial stroll along Beach Road promenade whiling away an hour or so before hitting the Boyztown bars when a group of 30-ish Indian men asked me if I could take a group photo of them. There were maybe four or five of them. We got into a bit of a conversation, and I learned that they were on a short company-paid trip. Can't remember how many days but my impression now is that it was a five-day or one-week thing at most. The were all working for the same company and each had won the best salesman award for the previous year in his sales district. So it was a kind of incentive trip. To my surprise, one of them said it was his second trip to Thailand. The earlier trip was when he was with another company and they had sent him to attend a conference in Pattaya (maybe it was Bangkok, memory's a bit hazy) organised by the regional office of some American company. This may explain the demographic profile that Londoner observed (and I agreed with). Men in the 30s and 40s. Travelling alone without wives or family, in all-male groups. (In many industries in India, women are rarely seen doing sales and marketing). As for why they had little else to do in the days they were in Pattaya, I guess they were supposed to make their own tour arrangements (at their own expense) and maybe the "at their own expense" part was too much of a hurdle.

It so happens that I had a short conversation with four (maybe five) of them a few years ago, and another short conversation with a solo guy in a 7-eleven on my visit earlier this year. I don't claim that what Iearned from just two conversations would be representative, but at least they gave me a bit of insight. But let me share my observations regarding your more general questions first. A handful of women perhaps, always sticking close by their husbands, but I don't recall seeing any children. I don't know about the thinking behind the visa change, but just on objective measures alone, India is really a poor country. I was recently surprised to see, for example, that Vietnam has became nearly twice as rich (in terms of GDP per capita) as India. From: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/?source=imf&region=asia&year=2026&metric=nominal Thailand: 8,105 USD per capita Indonesia: 5,362 USD per capita Vietnam: 5,115 USD per capita Cambodia: 2,902 USD per capita India: 2,813 USD per capita. Sure, there are middle class Indians, but "middle-class" in any country is often relative to the overall economic standard in that country. So one might say that the middle-class Indians are far poorer than the middle-class Thais. This issue will come up again when I describe the conversation I had with the solo guy in the 7-eleven. I reckon the Indian tourists we see hogging the roadsides in South Pattaya are the middle class of India but it's all relative. I think it's a combination of a purchasing power problem and a tastebuds problem. Many of what may appear to us as Indian restaurants in South Pattaya are actually Middle-eastern restaurants that grew up to serve the tourists from the much richer Persian Gulf states. Their prices may seem astronomical to Indians. I've made the same observation. I have never seen these groups in the gay bars, though there may be the occasional upper-middle class Indian arriving solo perhaps but not the South Pattaya lads. The latter may be found on Pattaya beach in the late afternoon and dusk. "Upper" is all relative again, probably equivalent to the spending power of a Western backpacker on Khao San Road. One indelible memory I have is that of a professorial-looking Indian guy so shocked at 500 baht for a drink (this was in a Bangkok bar) he was so at a loss for words, he couldn't speak English anymore. Naturally, neither the waiter nor mamasan understood Hindi (or whatever language he was stuttering).

I think it's just easier to look at a map. Try https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2025/11/01/map-of-silom-surawong-area-october-2025/ Look for #165.

At 5 minutes 01 of the video, the camera pans across a sign that says: We have 3 phases Phase 1: Dress code Phase 2: Underwear Phase 3: Naked

+1

I read that sentence quickly and anycure sure sounded like analcure.

Shhh! We mustn't spread news about what big senders women can be, otherwise our few remaining gogo bars and host bars would reinvent their business to cater to women and throw out those homo punters who, when presented their change in coins in the billfold, actually count them and pick them up!

Fair enough. Based on the description of how things commenced, I too would have taken a "no way" position, but then, I would not assume that the lines I draw for myself apply to everybody else. What's "no way" to me might be more of a "not a clear hit" or at least "not a clear no-way" to someone else.

The reality is often more complicated or ambiguous than you make it sound. "Would rather" and "would rather not" are not always binary choices. Looks aren't everything. In a recent post -- sorry, I can't remember which one or by whom -- it was reported that a shop manager once said the good looking boys are the lazy ones. Not always true, I'm sure, but anyway we all have different ideas of what "good looking" means. I think many of us would have an experience of just going with the flow with whichever boy we get, not wanting to appear rude and hoping for the best. Politeness and giving face are virtues in themselves... though, yes, it can also be exploited by others trying to impose upon you. Many here would also have an experience in which, as the session progressed, it got better and better than we initially expected based on first impressions of the boy's appearance. These would be the times when, as the situation unfolded, one changed one's mind from would rather not to would rather. I wrote about one instance (https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2023/04/28/assigned-a-belly/) when the massage boy assigned to me had a body type that I would almost never choose but I went along with the decision ( based on the shop's roster). It turned out to be a wonderful session. I was glad I kept my initial thoughts/feelings in check

I have the same concern about confusion among the denominations in dark places, but my solution is slightly different. I fold notes that start with "5" into halves. So if a note is folded, it means it's either 50 baht or 500 baht. I would do the same with a 5.000-baht note, but I have never seen one. Does it exist? (it would be terrible nuisance to break, though).

Earlier, I wanted to post a link to a gay-for-pay murder but I just couldn't think of the right keywords to find the Youtube video I had watched a while back. I've now found it:

Between the sheer volume of female customers and the number of drinks they buy (Including boy drinks), there is enough revenue for the bar to be minting money. The bar does not have to rely on off fees. So even if offing hardly occurs, it's irrelevant. As for the boys, once again, the girls tip -- though reports are mixed as to how well or poorly they tip -- but perhaps through sheer volume of customers alone, the boys make enough. They don't need to be off'd, unless it's for the pleasure of cunt. There are successful "Magic Mike" type establishments around the world. They make money without "going all the way". One thing we must never do is to assume that women behave like men. They do not. In this area of sex, straight men and gay men are far more alike, and worlds apart from women (gay or straight). Women like the flirt; the fantasy of a minute's romance. If the boys deliver that (not sure these boys do, though), females will tip thousands of baht. Men think that flirting is a waste of time and money. If the cock is not satisfied, nothing else substitutes. Another observation worth making: females go to these bars in social groups; they rarely go alone (except Japan, but there's another dynamic there, something to do with absent husbands). For them, the entertainment's chief value is to cement the social bond between hens. Vocalisation (screaming) and getting drunk together is part of the social bonding. Men more often go singly than in groups. The value is in the hunt. Silence and stealth are part of the game. -- Re Japan, see https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2024/04/18/host-bars-that-arent-for-us/

Agree about the wisdom of separating the 2 priorities, though Jey Spa is not the place for any kind of good massage, so that leaves just the other objective.

Amazing... been quite regularly visiting Thailand for decades and didn't know this niche existed until now. Have never even heard of Banana State Fashion hotel. Thanks for the education!