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ARRIVAL I've been flying business class on my outbound journey for years. It's quite a long journey from Europe, and I love arriving in Thailand refreshed. This way, I can immediately dive into the sodomy that is Patpong, full of energy. I also find that by flying business class, the holiday begins during the trip instead of only when you arrive at your destination. Another advantage: you can use priority lane at immigration. After all, the lines at passport control can sometimes be very crowded. While boarding my 2nd flight/leg in Doha, I spotted a well-dressed, well-built guy. The kind you know right away is gay. A shirt that was way, way, way too tight around his muscular torso. But I did have something delicious to look at and fantasize about. And who did I meet on Grindr hours later after arriving? Of course... This guy. Haha. I chatted with him for a bit and admitted to him that I find him very attractive. But he's attracted to everything I'm not (younger, muscular, etc.), so unfortunately, nothing came out of it. But... It's a small gay world. Photos from his Grindr profile, his head cropped for privacy reasons. The first photo shows his style on the plane. Then you'll understand the gaydar that tripped me up. The second photo, just because it's hot, him shirtless. Just before leaving, I realized I'd made a mistake in the booking dates for my first hotel in Bangkok. As a result, I had a hotel for nights 2 and 3, but hadn't yet booked the first night. The last-minute prices for the luxurious Meridian Hotel, where I'd treated myself to two nights to kick off my vacation, were very high. So I decided to look for a cheaper option in Silom for one night and then move to the Meridian Hotel on day two. I found a very good deal on booking.com for Squirrel House, a relatively new hotel in the building that used to house the BBB Inn. I often prefer newer hotels. They still look fresh, are often clean, and have a modern, bright interior. I remember several other forum members having stayed there as well. See: I found old photos of the hotel on Google Maps when it was still the BBB Inn. It's funny to see that they advertised the hotel back then with a photo of a staff member lying on a hotel bed. I wonder if any members here ever found a staff member lying on their bed back then? The location is, of course, ideal. Within walking distance of all the bars and massage shops in Patpong. At least, within walking distance for most of us. @Olddaddy would definitely take a motorbike taxi... I think someone on this forum already mentioned the hotel's lack of an elevator. And of course, lucky me, my room was on the third floor... I had to lug my heavy suitcase up the stairs. The room is very basic. The bed is a bit too firm for my liking. And it's quite noisy. I hear a lot of noise from others walking in the hallway, from other rooms, and from slamming doors. The renovation of the adjacent (former) Take a Nap Hostel is currently also causing noise pollution. In short: it was nice to try a new hotel, and thankfully it was only for one night, but I won't be booking this one again.

ขอให้เที่ยวสนุกนะครับ 😊

I'm saying that CNN writes for essentially largely an American audience. Lots of non-gay non-Chinese websites are not accessible in China without a VPN. It seems you did not read the article properly. It states - a source familiar with the matter told CNN that it appeared to be related to compliance issues This is stated twice. And after the fuss has died down some apps will reappear as has been the case in the past. Blued, the huge international site founded by a former Beiing policeman, has a Chinese state company as one of its investors. Would China permit a state enterprise to invest in a company which it wanted permanently out of the way? I have gay friends in various Chinese cities. They have no particular desire to march in or attend gay pride parades or even use apps to meet gay friends. That's the western way. They quickly develop their own circles of friends. If you are a one-time or just occasional visitor and you don't like the status quo, don't go. Simple as that. I am delighted to visit.

I've been going to Thailand every year since 2012. There were two years I even went twice. I know, I can't quite match some other forum members here in that respect. Like @vinapu, who suddenly shows up unannounced in Bangkok about every two months (I like to exaggerate). But I'd still call myself a seasoned Thailand-goer. For the first two years, I was amazed and disbelieving by the shows full of nudity and sex, and the ease with which you could select and "buy" boys to go with you via a number tag on their underwear. But those days are long gone. You don't surprise or shock me that easily anymore. I also think the shows have become less explicit in general. Of course, there are still plenty of "big dicks" on parade during showtime. But... I don't encounter a nude underwater show or the acrobatic fuck scenes where the boys hang in rings live on stage in the trapege anymore. But I still enjoy visiting different boy bars and looking for the nicest, most handsome guy who's also into the things you're looking for. In short: I'm back in Thailand! First a week in Bangkok, then a week in Pattaya, and then another week in Bangkok. I'm going to try to write an interesting trip report

Well, the bottle specifically states (as do most condiments) "Refrigerate After Opening." Both bottles have "Best By" dates which are over a year from now, so it's pretty safe to say they'd be good for another year, though perhaps less after opening. When buying something at a 2 for 1 discount, and the "Best By" dates are well over a year into the future, what would be wasteful would be not to accept the free bottle.

Yet another anniversary. This time the 40th since what was to become the winner of the Best Oscar was first shown, director Milos Forman's adaptation of the Peter Shaffer play Amadeus. On the face of it, the movie is about the rivalry that existed between the conventional and somewhat boring Viennese Court Composer Antonio Salieri and a young composer brought from the Court at Salzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the movie, that rivalry leads to near hatred with Salieri responsible for Mozart's early death at the age of 36. Salieri then goes mad. Like several other issues in the play and the film, that is dramatic licence for there is no evidence that Mozart's death was caused in any way by Salieri. That the two thoroughly disliked each other initially is fact. That Salieri was intensely jealous of Mozart's extraodinary talent compared to his own much more modest accomplishments is mostly fact. That Salieri blamed God for giving such gifts to such a silly and uncouth boy is another truth. Mozart may not have been quite as childish as shown in the movie, but he was no young saint. He enjoyed visiting the taverns in town, he wrote scatalogical references in many of his letters and even penned a series of musical pornographic canons (a canon being a musical device). One starts with the line "Lick me in the arse, quickly, quickly!", basically an 18th century verson of "Lick My Ass". Not shown in the movie is that Salieri on the other hand was equally no saint as attested by his wife, eight children and mistress. And the rivalry can not have been that serious given that Mozart entrusted the musical education of his son to Salieri. In today's BBC website, there is a long article about the movie and especially about Milos Forman's return to communist Czechoslovakia to film most of the movie in Prague, the city where Mozart spent several years and where several of his major works received their premiere. It even suggests that certain elements in the film reflect communist society before glasnost started to tear the Soviet Union apart. The writer even suggests - Forman's aim for Amadeus can be seen as radically different from a typical biopic, and that was to use a fictionalised version of an epic clash between musical composers to allegorise the defining global rivalry of the mid-to-late 20th Century: the Cold War. Put simply, the film may have played fast and loose with 1784 because its real preoccupation was 1984 . . . The Soviet allegory can certainly be applied to Amadeus. Perhaps Forman was less concerned with hewing to biographical facts as he was with presenting Mozart as a beleaguered type of ecstatic genius who, hostage to patronage, is stifled and finally crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state. Joseph II, absolute ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, is advised at court by a clutch of prudish sycophants who undermine Mozart's achievements and smear his reputation. Whatever its loose correspondence to the late-18th and early-19th Centuries, this critique can be read as a stab at the USSR – a debilitatingly centralised bureaucracy hostile to insurgent ideas and innovation. What is true is that after Forman saw the play, he persuaded Peter Shaffer to reimagine it in a slightly different way for his film. They spent four months cloistered in a farmhouse in Connecticut where they basically rebuilt the narrative with a "fresh palette of political references." Many major actors lobbied hard for the main parts. Kenneth Branagh almost landed the part of Mozart until Foreman decided on a largely US cast (with the honourable exceptions of the superb English actor Roy Dotrice as Mozart's father and Simon Callow as the theatre owner Emanuel Shikaneder). Mark Hamill undertook several auditions for the part of Mozart. For Salieri Al Pacino, Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland and Burt Reynolds all lobbied for the part. Both were given to relative unknowns in the movie world. It is, I think, also interesting that today when much classical music around the world is suffering from major financial constraints, the music in the movie was selected by the conductor Neville Marriner and performed by him and his Academy of St. Martin's in the Fields orchestra (St. Martin's referring to the name of the Church in London's Trafalgar Square where they are based). At a time when most movie music was performed for fees, Marriner elected instead to be put on a royalty. The film's huge success resulted in a bonanza for the orchestra which enabled it to build its own completely new rehearsal studios. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240926-could-amadeus-be-the-most-misunderstood-oscar-winner-ever

Please delete.

I thought Golden Cock closed years ago?

Oops, sorry, I had Waiting for Godot in Theatre and Drama Studies, not English lit. For English lit I had a Shakespeare history play (easy), James Joyce (hard) and Larkin and Hughes. For some reason Chaucer or any of the more "popular" or "fun" texts wasn't offered at my school that year.

Exactly, The Knight's Tale, I think. Conrad, Austen, Ben Jonsen, Keats, Pope, Shakespeare, naturally. Missed out on Beowolf!

You probably had something more contemporaneous of your generation, like Chaucer. 🤣😂😅

more of this and soon Bangkok will be just place to change planes for guys going for vacations in Vietnam or Cambodia . Already combing for fun Grindr in Siem Reap or Phnom Penh I see avatars familiar from Thailand

I suspect brown envelopes won't cover private dances, etc. In the old days, at Golden Cock, Nature Boys, and others, as soon as you went in, the boys would whip out their cocks for inspection, and immediate use! That was very popular, and I assume that it was clamped down on?

High or low?

while I like idrea of private dances I hope no bar will follow this pricing . 2 or 3 dances at 500-600 as suggested amounts to 1000-1800 baht for 20-30 minutes of semi or 3/4 fun. It doesn't compare well with 1500-2500 ST tip IMNSHO

In my syllabus we did not get anything as exotic as Beckett!

I don't know about the others but I offed quite a few very decent guys from Banana bar

my impression from narrative above is : you are buying too much stuff, leading to described waste. Maple syrup in the fridge ? That's novelty for me

A-level English lit.

thank you, approved

Are you saying the CNN is wrong: the apps mentioned in the article are still available and gay pride events have not been cancelled? I am glad you had good experiences, but that does not mean it is universal.

Could be bad news. But hopefully the lure of brown envelopes will change things.

Another one?

my apologies for defamation

Kissinger?