macaroni21

That pic - is that what Thai male prostitutes look like? 🤪

Correct.

Can't be. The boss I was referring to was a he, not a she. Nor did he have any legal qualification, but a PhD in... something (I've forgtotten what). Ah, but here's a chance to tell a story: There was one time when we were both on a business trip to Thailand. Unusually, he brought his 18- or 19-year old son with him because there was a free weekend following our business meetings and he thought he and his son could do some bonding before the boy went off to university. I too extended my stay over the weekend, but naturally I had plans totally separate from his, and anyway, I was moving to a hotel in the Silom area. But then on either Thursday or Friday some crisis blew up back at HQ and my boss felt he needed to fly back immediately. What to do with the boy? Dragging him home and cancelling the weekend would be a huge disappointment. So the father asked me: "Can I entrust my son into your good hands? Take care of him and show him around Bangkok over the weekend." Oh bugger! All my plans, my plans! But how could I say no? So I didn't say no. The boy moved over to the same hotel as I was -- different rooms, ye with dirty minds! -- and almost the first thing the boy asked me as soon as daddy went off to the airport was, "Can we go to Patpong? I've read so much about it."

I think you're alluding to something which I have long noticed, but rarely say out loud because it comes with a high risk of causing offence. But let me voice my observation now, with an IMPORTANT CAVEAT: PRESENT COMPANY EXCEPTED. I am not referring to either Olddaddy or Pong. My observation is this: the worst examples of English writing is often seen from native English speakers, not from those who speak it as a second language. Partly, it's a self-sorting result. Non-native English speakers are conscious that they are using a foreign language and think they will not be able to write as well as native speakers, so they take extra trouble to check and proof-read what they write; or if they have no confidence, they don't write in English at all. Native English speakers tend to "let loose". If their English is good, all well and fine. But if their English is bad, they may not even realise it, and they write as they speak (slang, highly localised usage, confusing syntax, etc) largely unaware how they come across to others. They are used to people in their own circles understanding them, and since those in the same circles also supposedly speak "English" (note the quotation marks), they all think that the language they use (and write) must be, well, English. It may also have to do with the fact that those who have to learn English as a second language are taught the language in a structured way -- the nuts and bolts of grammar and so on -- and I have often been shocked how schools in Australia and the US (places I am familiar with) do not teach English that way. They assume the language need only be learned though use. The trouble with such an attitude is that students imbibe the language from their family's social circles and their own peers. If those circles don't speak or know how to write properly, then one cannot, logically speaking, imbibe proper English. And yet they hold the belief that what they are speaking is English. An old friend of mine, now a retired schoolteacher, once explained to me that something happened in the 1970s and 1980s to pedgagogy. There was a change to valorising self-expression rather than teaching rules of grammar. Coupled with something to do with multiculturalism -- one is not supposed to criticise accent or idiosyncratic usage, instead, we must "celebrate difference" -- much language quality has gone down the chutey. OK, I've said it. Let the arrows fly!

That was different. @rd2077's "style" is a " breathless no punctuation" style. Might have been transcribed from a voice-based, stream-of-consciousness dictation. Or it might have been machine translated from another language. Sometimes we forget that many members here don't use English as their first language. That said, most machine translation I have come across do put punctuation in, although often at the wrong places. I'm old-fashioned. I've been taught to ensure clarity in what I write. A former boss once told me: if you want to communicate, make sure the other party understands you correctly. It's not the responsibility of the other party to guess what you may intend to mean. Since then, a whole new generation has come and flooded our media with their styles and I feel so out of date. Sigh!

I have relatively recent reviews of a few places at https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/ Just filter for category Phnom Penh. Hope this helps.

As @vinapu has pointed out, this is a very likely reason. Cambodia is not the only country that accepts USD and/or other major foreign courrency for visa-on-arrival etc. I know that Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Indonesia do too (and I've heard Ethiopia), though increasingly visitors use credit cards which can be charged in local currency. But websites also warn visitors against assuming that card terminals will always work (in my experience they often do not!!!) I'm sure there are many more countries with a similar policy.

And that's the problem! When the company running the airport makes money on the side by offering special lanes for paying passengers, it makes congestion among the 99.9% of passengers at the normal gates a positive for its bottom line, reducing the incentive to improve the situation.

If you're going to stay several months, there is no way it'd be wise to bring enough USD to last through the entire period. You'll be making yourself or your room too tempting a target. What this means is that you will inevitably be using ATMs. In that case you can quite easily get riels. All ATMs dispense riels. The Cambodian Central Bank is restricting banks from dispensing small denomination USD from ATMs, though I also hear that some bank ATMs continue to do so. As a cautionary tale: I heard of a case of one guy withdrawing USD100s from an ATM, unable to use them for small purchases (of course) and also unable to exchange them at money changers because the notes weren't pristine. His protests that they came out of a Cambodian ATM just minutes ago fell on deaf ears. @vinapu is right. A non-convertible currency like the Cambodian Riel is almost impossible to find outside of the country. LIke the Sri Lankan Rupee or the Moroccan Dirham, the only viable way is to change in-country. What you probably need is (1) a handful of $5s and $20s to get through the airport and your first two days; (2) a handful of pristine $100s as reserve in case of any technical failure of the ATM network -- I believe you're planning to be in Battambang which is not as geared to serving tourists as Siem Reap and I would wonder about the density or otherwise of the ATM network there -- and (3) a pair of bank debit cards for use on ATMs. The bank cards would be your main source of money... in riels.

@Olddaddy Has your stay been affected by power cuts? There is this Reuters article from 3 months back: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/philippines-warns-serious-power-cuts-heat-outages-strain-grids-2026-05-14/

That was last Friday. That was yesterday (Sunday), two days later.

@jimmie50 posted a first-hand account of a visit in May this year. Personally, I have never done business in that shop, though in 2019, I thought I had visited. https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2020/02/12/the-full-gay-works-in-a-girlie-shop/ My next two walk-bys were also written up: (2024): https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2024/09/21/magically-in-business/ and (2026): https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2026/04/19/magically-still-in-business/ My posts are meant for visits; I rarely post about mere walk-bys. The fact that I wrote this shop up on two walk-bys says a lot! If anyone wants to be an intrepid reporter, I'd suggest a visit after sundown. Things may be different from what's been reported by @jimmie50 and me in 2024 and 2026, which were afternoon occasions.

Is that why there are "tar" balls on Jomtien beach today? 🤓

I recall there was a thread earlier about Thailand trying to insist that all arrivals present proof of travel insurance, an idea that I think has since been abandoned, and it was pointed out that in practice it would be madness because insurance policies come in all shapes and sizes and different languages to boot. How would any officer at Thai immigration be able to check whether the document is what the traveller claims it is? As for young Aussies and selling their homes... there is another way to make some money to pay medical bills: sell their bodies. I can imagine a niche market for "fun" with someone in a leg cast and an arm in a sling, though bleeding wounds might not command much market value. 🤣

We agree on this. But you are still conflating discrimination because of some statute or cultural disfavour with persecution. Persecution has to be demonstrated as real, imminent and personal, not theoretical, even if laws are not codifying it. If a gay person has received death threats, or been arrested before, or been bashed in an alley with the authorities taking no action, that person may make a case for asylum. Ditto a gay woman whose very conservative family (including the village community where she lives) is forcing her, on threat of death (honour killing) to marry a man in an arranged marriage. However, the presence of discriminatory laws itself is insufficient. It does not rise to the level of persecution. Look no further than the active threads in other parts of this forum about sex trips to Jamaica, North Africa, Malaysia, and some countries of Subsaharan Afirca.

Besides the question of how many among the 60,000 who swam across the fence were gay and whether that miniscule number, if any, would justify giving all 60,000 temporary asylum so that they can be processed over the next few years to find that miniscule number, there is another loose use of a word we need to be aware of. Discrimination is not persecution. If discrimination alone were enough to justify refugee status, then all 8 billion people on earth would qualify. Everyone is discriminated on one count or another -- too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too female, too male, too tall, too short, too colorblind, too bipolar... including through legally sanctioned barriers on account of religion, place of birth, previous criminal convictions and countless other dimensions. Laws against homosex are not uniquely terrible and do not rise to the level of persecution.

The choice of words can so confuse that a conversation goes heywire. These 60,000 people breaching the border in Ceuta are not refugees. Too often this word is used loosely in discourse. Refugees are people fleeing demonstrable threats to life and limb (e.g. from conflict or natural disasters) or persecution in their home countries. These young men (and they were mostly young men) were simply hoping to rush into the EU, in violation of border laws, for economic reasons. Several of them spoke to the media, and they themselves have openly said this was their motive. Any sympathy needs to be calibrated against this reality rather than be dialled up by the misuse of the word 'refugee'. That they were fleeing nothing can be seen from the fact that over 48,000 of them so far have peacefully returned to Morocco, albeit under heavy security pressure. The videos also show that many of them are not even Moroccan but Subsaharan. Reporters have pointed out that in the past, the Moroccan government has aided or encouraged border storming for political purposes whenever they were unhappy with Spain or the EU, e.g. in pursuit of their (Morocco's) imperialistic ambitions over Western Sahara or over their feud with Algeria. Whether this instance had any government involvement, nobody can yet say. This reminds me of Belarus using migrants to put pressure on Poland and the EU a few years back. Members here of more leftwing persuasion should be careful of what they wish for. Misplaced sympathy for economic border-violators and the loose border control that results will lead to a local population developing a sense that their own security and social balance are under threat. No use arguing if this is empirically true, for feelings are powerful factors when it comes to voting. Once people get the feeling that their own government has lost control of their country's borders, there is a much greater likelihood of voting for rightwing parties, whose agenda on many other issues, e.g. LGBT rights, social safety net, may be contrary to leftwing ideals. I am sure I don't have to list examples of how often this has happened in recent history. In short, misplaced sympathy is a big, big own goal.

Circling back to the subject of Indian tourists in Pattaya, here's something from The Pattaya News, 2 days ago. Members living in Thailand may follow this channel, but those outside may not, so I hope it's interesting news -- even if rather horrific!

You guys may be confusing Fast Track with Priority Lane.

Maybe we risk over analysing or over simplifying the giving face/losing face issue. After all, people in Western cultures also understand the value of not causing embarrassment to others. On the other hand, and with a bit of reflection, the video narrator's point about certain cultures giving more weight to context could prove more helpful in understanding behaviours. It seems to me that in certain cultures (we may tend to speak of Western cultures, but I am pretty sure that's both over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time) there's a greater reliance on explicitly stated boundaries, whereas in other cultures, people aren't so exercised if things are left unsaid. Furthermore, particularly in American culture, there is a valorisation of attempts to test or push the boundaries -- we see in media depictions of heroes who go right up to the edge of the permissible or even flout the rules and not only get away with doing so, but winning the day to cheers all round. The valorisation of individualism goes with it. Other cultures may consider this too brash, even uncouth. They expect members of the community to be alert to non-verbal cues and situational settings and to modify one's behaviour accordingly in a way that is respectful of others. In a sense, one might say such a culture has a higher quotient of communalism. It has struck me that many older Hollywood depictions of Asian males almost take this to paper-thin stereotypes: where the Asian character is a man of few words, with some supposedly sagacious characters speaking in riddles, but also they are receding characters, not pushing their way forward. And as has often been pointed out, the Asian male in such Hollywood productions are not generally seen as heroic, or even sexy -- by Western audiences. That digression having been done with, here's another: on some other threads in the Thailand forum, we regularly see Western visitors who are less frequent visitors to Thailand asking questions about how one would know whether the shop or boy would be H or not H -- I think folks who are unfamiliar with Thailand also have difficulty distinguishing been S and SS -- and how much to tip, and so on. They display a great need for explicitly stated information about offerings, limits and costs. The Thais and frequent visitors to this country (and expats) seem to have no need for such explicit information. They do need some clues (and have learned how to spot the clues) but they don't need to have all the T's crossed and I's dotted. In the moment itself, they work out what's possible and what's not and how to navigate their way to what they would desire. The older ones among us who used to cruise in parks and alleyways in the pre-internet age were masters of unspoken context, body language and signals to figure out a situation. Perhaps the newer, younger members of this board never developed such skills for lack of learning opportunties?

This video is about the bunch of Italian exchange students who caused a furore earlier this month. I am putting it here because the narrator explains very well the huge cultural gap (not just on the part of the kids, but the teachers too) that laid the ground for the incident. For about two minutes from 16 minutes 30, the narrator puts it succinctly. Thai culture is a high context culture, whereas most Western cultures are low context cultures. As a result, Westerners do not learn, when growing up, to read social and situational context the way Thais and many East Asian societies do, or give these readings the weight that is required. This is inseparable from the issue of giving face, which I discussed in an earlier post on this thread (9 July).

Well said! Sometimes, attention seekers are great fun too, such as those who like to hang over a balcony with their arse out in full view, while being jackhammered.

Back to the original topic about ncreasing homophobia in Islamic countries (maybe other countries too), here's a news story about Indonesia from Channel News Asia, dated yesterday: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/lgbtq-indonesia-defence-policy-national-security-threat-6255191 How a national security threat label has reignited Indonesia's LGBTQ debate Indonesia last October classified the "spread of LGBTQ culture" as one of the country's non-military threats. A series of developments thrust the provision into the public eye this month, sparking a debate. For more than eight months, a provision tucked away in an Indonesian presidential regulation on national defence drew little public attention. In an appendix to Presidential Regulation No. 111/2025 on the General National Defence Policy signed in October last year, the government classified the "spread of LGBTQ culture" as one of the country's non-military threats. The clause, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer culture, appeared alongside a range of other threats deemed capable of affecting national resilience. They included illegal trafficking, natural resource theft, terrorism, atheism and radicalism. A presidential regulation is a legally binding regulation published in the State Gazette, while General National Defence Policy documents are highly technical and usually attract little public attention outside government and defence circles. But a series of developments thrust the provision into the public eye this month, sparking a debate on the place of LGBTQ issues in state policy and the extent to which social issues should be framed within Indonesia's defence strategy. The issue quickly spread beyond social media into mainstream Indonesian media with national outlets including Antara, Kumparan, and Tempo examining the regulation and prompting public responses from senior government officials. Some observers and activists say the clause could heighten discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in society, even as Indonesian ministers have defended the regulation while saying the government has no intention of curtailing the fundamental rights of citizens. "As Indonesian citizens, LGBTQ people are entitled to education, employment, healthcare and other public services without restrictions, segregation or discrimination," Indonesia's Human Rights Minister Natalius Pigai told CNA in a phone interview. But he added that Indonesian society is not ready to accept the LGBTQ community, even as the state remains obliged to respect, protect and fulfil every citizen's rights to education, employment, healthcare and public services. "The time has not yet come to formally recognise them as an official group because society is not yet ready to accept them," he said. --- read more via the link; there's no paywall. It's a long article.

I haven't been back to Phuket for ages so there's no recommendation to contribute. But I have an indelible memory of overcharging by tuktuks, with one of the worst cases involving a trip between Patong and Karon. Unless the situation has vastly improved, how does one even get to a restaurant at a different beach without being scalped?

What file? Not safe to assume that that there is a file or that they can retrieve it. There was a report a year or so back that, if I remember correctly, the system ran out of memory and all that business of pressing your fingers on that glass gadget generated no store-able record. Apparently the people at the top knew about it, but either didn't bother, didn't understand, or had no budget to purchase more memory storage. But the pressing of fingers on glass continued because that was the STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, which one shall not depart from. Either that, or it was too embassassing to stop doing so because that would be an admission that their much-vaunted hi-tech solution ("Thailand is a state-of-the-art first-world country", remember?) wasn't working.