Leaderboard

And the pic below gives a good idea of atmosphere and lights during the soft shows in GEH in Bogota

Thanks. I just booked them both and will decide on one of them a week before our arrival. They both look great. OK thanks guys I'll try to find a nice apartment for rio. I don't see any that I fancy that are located at IPanema beach front. But I'll look more throughly as it seems that there is quite a consensus regarding hotel's strict policy of hosting in Rio. Thanks again for taking the time to write.

This thread brings up 2 questions 1) What do your guys do with your luggage when at a stopover airport and you decide to go for a few hours downtown? You leave the luggage at some storage facility at the airport? 2) If you need to go to the toilet when downtown where will you go? You can't go to your hotel which you don't have! You just go into a nearby shopping mall when the need arrives? These kind of logistical problems should be discussed in this thread else the most important aspect of deciding to leave the airport for a few hours is not even discussed.

I doubt anyone will be able to give you s better insight than @Tomcal's above. You should take it and forget about hotels.

Re the Tokyo online Host boys I should have added the price list. 70 minutes in your hotel room will cost 13,000 Yen - thats about $120. You usually pay the boy but some host bars request advance payment by credit card. No tips are expected. If public transport is required to get to your hotel you may also be asked to pay for that. But it will be peanuts. You can go to the bar and hire a room there if you wish and that sets you back another $10 or so. In addition to the list below, there are overnight rates. But given that the cheaper hotels in Japan have very small single beds, I would not recommend it unless you book a much more expensive double room. Besides, overnight rates are much more expensive! The websites also give information of when each boy is available each day and that information is posted several days in advance..

This isn’t foolproof. When I have booked through AirBnB recently in Ipanema and Copa near Ipanema Beach, I encountered quite a few listings that restricted visitors. Of course, I did not stay at any of those places! The best advice is to, before booking: (1) review the house rules of each rental, and (2) contact the host to confirm the visitor policy. My personal policy is that if the visitor policy is not liberal enough for me, I won’t book.

Some of the boys from GEH The pics below show boys who are performing or were performing in GEH in Bogota. Of course not all boys are in the pictures since some boys do not want to have their picture taken. The boys inside the blue circle are the two who were the tops during the live sex shows I saw.

Petropolis Worth visiting. Just a few hints on Grindr there. BYOB (bring your own boy). I went there wit V. I had met a year ago in 117 and am meeting regularly since then. V. is great looking. Muscular natural body with a tribal tattoo on his left arm. Big dick. Manly face. Nice smile. Long eyelashes. Very easy going. Perfect latin lover. We left at 10 am. Buses to Petropolis leave from Rodoviara. We need to go to Central metro station then take a Uber to Rodiviara (Bus depart from center within a walking distance to Carioca metro station but we lnly found out on our way back). 1h30 minutes to reach Petropolis bus terminal outside of town (27 R$) then transfer to local bus 100 to reach town center (4 R$) or Uber (12 R$). Petropolis is in the mountains. Rather cold at night. Things to see : Museu imperial *** Catedral Sao Pedro de Alcantara *** Casa Santos Dumont * Trona Fatima * Disappointing. I was hoping to see spectacular view of the city from this mirador, but city is hidden by trees. Great view on the cemetery though ! Where to eat and stay Tradicao Mineiro *** Majorica Churrascaria *** Casablanca Center Hotel *** V. was great company. Easy going, fun, witty. Great sex. Never ending French kisser. Lot of laughs together eg - when we saw the only picture of young Reina Cristina, he said that he looked like a man. "She would fit in the 117 shows" answer make us laugh as college boys. - when we saw the strange amount of fine to park along the cemetery : 127,69 R$. We agreed on paying 127 R$ cash and the remaining 69 through sex. Laughs.

Money given in sauna ot at hotel for 30 minutes to one hour session has been discussed thoroughly. What is given for longer stay ? It is clear that travel expenses, food and drinks as well as costs of visits (museums, ...) are paid by customer. But how much is given to boy eg for 2 days and a night of for a complete week end (friday evening until sunday evening ie 2 nights) ? What about a whole week ? Any input will be appreciated. Thks

Xperiel, I read your post yesterday and hesitated to respond prior to those members who've visited Rio and Sao Paulo more than I. My response would have been the same as the men who've previously posted. The hotel in Rio that we used and that did not frown upon our receiving guests (announced or unannounced) was not luxurious but comfortable. But, during the past six or so years-- its policies have been altered; thus we visitors have rented a variety of apartments.

If you want to stay at a reasonable higher end hotel in Sao Paulo, stay at the Intercontinental or Renaissance, both in the Paulista area and convenient to shopping and the subway. If you want to bring in guests, plan on having the guests register at the front desk and be sure they have their Brazilian national ID card or drivers license to present as there is security in both of these hotels in the lobby who will direct guests to the front desk to register.

Here's a nice interview with k. Noh about his translation of Sunthorn Phlu's poems. Poems from the Buddha's Footprint

From Nikkei Asian Review Found in translation: Thai literature reaches West New translators lead contemporary authors out of the global margins BANGKOK -- For years, the Thailand sections of Bangkok's English-language bookstores have been dominated by a colorful yet shallow mixture of popular and academic history, travel guides, coffee-table cookbooks and expatriate-penned thrillers that amplify the country's less-savory aspects. What they have sorely lacked, in other words, is Thai voices. Slowly, however, that is changing: From an earthy bildungsroman to an unremittingly lyrical love story, contemporary Thai literature in translation is making its presence felt as never before. "Bright" and "Arid Dreams," by Duanwad Pimwana, one of Thailand's most acclaimed female authors, were released in English in the U.S. in April. Both were translated by Mui Poopoksakul, a Berlin-based former lawyer who is also behind cult author Prabda Yoon's two English-language short story collections, "The Sad Part Was" and "Moving Parts," which were published by the U.K.'s Tilted Axis Press in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Together with two-time Southeast Asian Writers Award winner Veeraporn Nitiprapha's "The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth," released by Thai publisher River Books in late 2018, these titles have brought the number of translations of Thai novels in the past two years to a grand total of five. While that figure might seem modest, it qualifies as a milestone for a country that readily gives itself up for foreign consumption in fields such as cuisine, tourism and film but has proved oddly inert in exporting literature. According to the University of Rochester's Translation Database, which tracks original works of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in English translation, Japanese literature leads the way, with 363 books since 2008, followed by Chinese, with 254, and Korean, with 141. Even Asia's laggards fared better than Thailand: 18 Indonesian, 12 Hindi and nine Vietnamese books made the list over the same period while Thailand, prior to the release of "Bright" and "Arid Dreams," had none. "Our main challenge in putting it together was that Thailand lacks good [translators]," said editor Pariyapa Amon-Wanitsan, a cultural officer at Thailand's Ministry of Culture. To overcome this lack, she and her co-founder, British editor James Hatton, came up with the BKKLIT Translation Prize, an award that offers a modest cash prize. "We wanted to dig translators out of the woodwork -- and it worked," Hatton added. "We met a few through the competition that turned out to be really good. Two of them had never even tackled literary works before." Their discoveries include Thais, such as Noh Anothai and Wichayapat Piromsan, and non-Thais, such as Dylan J. Hartmann, each with their own niche spheres of literary interest. Together, these releases are introducing English readers to some of the characters and narrative strains that have populated Thai literature in recent years. Inhabiting a heightened tropical realm of the senses, "The Blind Earthworm" is a feverish love story that only Thailand -- and a writer highly attuned to it -- could produce. By contrast, Duanwad's "Bright," about a young boy whose father has abandoned him in a tenement housing community, strays into raw social realism territory, as do the 13 stark tales of the working class that comprise "Arid Dreams." The Bangkok Literary Review, meanwhile, is steeped in the playful postmodern surrealism that Prabda popularized in the country; its short stories introduce us to shape-shifting ravens and couples who swap lives, among other uncanny characters. Noh, who won a BKKLIT prize for his translation of Chiranan Phitpreecha's tightly metered poem "Firefly," said one of the biggest challenges "is the way a character's choice of pronoun encodes so much information about how he or she views him or herself in relation to the world, and how little articles can completely change the tone of a passage." And then there are the politics of translation to consider. "You can complicate matters even further," he added, "by considering the relationship of the source text and receiving language, the positionality of the translator relative to the original author, the text's place within a particular canon or tradition, and the ethics of representation." Chicago-based translator Noh Anothai Continues at https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Arts/Found-in-translation-Thai-literature-reaches-West

I'm not surprised by this theater news at all. When I first heard the decision to cast her, I immediately felt sorry for the producers. I have always thought Faye Dunaway was a one-trick pony. She had a moment but could not sustain it, especially after terrible cosmetic surgery. The woman is grossly insecure, probably with good reason, but an insecure actor is a nightmare to work with, especially when they can't remember their lines. Dunaway is Dropped from Playing Hepburn

Important security issue you should all be aware of : your password is not encripted on this site, so Michael and any other person who has access to the database, can read it. In other words : any hacker will have access to your email / password combination. How is it possible in 2019 to take such risks as website owner ? Not sure at all I will remain member.

Stijntje is right. Websites that store actual passwords are not secure by today's standards. Anyone at the hosting service where the database is stored can access the passwords of everybody using this site. So can anyone who knows how to hack into the hosting service, and there are plenty of those - see the frequent headlines. Yes, you can mitigate the risk following z909's recommendations (I certainly do!) but even so, someone hostile (and there must be many people who disapprove of this site) could use your credentials to impersonate you here. Best practice "industry standard" 2019-style requires that at a minimum, any site with password access should store not the password but some kind of cryptographic hash of it. When you log in, the system computes the hash from your password, discards the password and compares its hash with the hash in the database. The password itself is never stored anywhere, and if anyone steals the database they cannot easily reverse the hash to recover the password. The fact that the site is SSL secured is irrelevant here - that protects your password against eavesdroppers as you log in, which is good, but it does nothing to protect the password database itself. (Incidentally, SSL hasn't been best practice for the last decade or so, having been replaced by TLS .) Emailing a forgotten password is also anything but best practice, since email is totally insecure, and messages could be read by anyone with access to any of the many routers and switches the email passes through. Bottom line: Any site that can tell you your password if you lose it, can tell anyone else too. Any site that tells you your password by email has also told an unknown number of other people. That's why if you forget a password, most of the sites you interact with today will email you, not the new password but a link to an HTTPS connection to create a new password. They don't tell you the old password, because they don't know it.

Have we all forgotten that it was not much more than 12 years ago that the Thai government egged on by IATA wanted to close down Don Mueang and push all air traffic through Suvarnabhumi? Don Mueang was even closed for a few months before it was decided to tart it up and reopen it for low cost carriers. Last year DMK handled almost 41 million passengers and BKK remains massively overcrowded. Can you imagine what BKK would be like now if DMK had actually been demolished? I cannot believe a third airport will open in the lifetimes of most of us. When you take into account all the corruption that will be involved with politicians and their cronies buying up all the land for the airport and its approach expressways and then reselling to the government at vastly inflated prices, the corruption surrounding the bids for runway and terminal construction, the usual delays as committee after committee investigates this, that and the next thing, but especially the vast cost overruns, changes in government which in turn mandate design changes and so on, it just is not going to happen. After all, it took 33 years from the purchase of the first piece of land for a new Bangkok airport until BKK finally opened. Thailand is so predictable!

I cannot stop watching this.

Actually a pretty good summary here, with examples & history... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluttony

I kind of refuse to go to mainland China. Hong Kong is a place where I've transited several times. I've also managed a layover of about 24 hours there which is enough time to see a couple of things and/or get a massage. The train from the airport is fast. I like Seoul, but ICN is a long way from the city. Even on the "express" train it takes at least an hour. I don't mind connecting at NRT but I've never had more than a couple of hours there. As noted it's a long way from the airport to Tokyo. Some airlines will allow you a free stopover of a more worthwhile length. I think Korean Airlines has restricted or curtailed the practice but I've used their free stopover a couple of times. First time for a week. And on my trip over this fall it will be 10 days. I'd check to see if Cathay or EVA or China Airlines (Taiwan) allows it. I think Qatar Airways allows a stopover too if you're dying to see Doha.

check out this thread! https://www.boytoy.com/forums/topic/31701-my-thirteenth-trip-to-brazil-recife-and-fortaleza/?

In my own little experience, any airbnb in a strip of 300/400 meters from the beach in Copacabana or Ipanema will be safe and you will be able to have visitors without answering any questions. All building usually have 24 hours staff, your visitors will be announced to you if you do not bring them, with no issues.

Lagoa is scheduled to reopen December 1st in a new location not in the same neighborhood where it is now! but things change so just check prior to leaving for SP! Again look thru Airbnb listing in the price range and style you like. There are two individual homes i use in SP. both great neighborhoods one has 3bed/3baths the other 2, i found them in Airbnb 2 years ago...and no i i am not giving out the info on them! did that once in Rio a couple years ago and couldn’t get the place when i wanted it because someone on this site had already booked it! so you are on your own!

Lagoa will not be where it is now by the time you get there!" they are closing(lost there 20 yr. + Lease) December 1st. i think you will have more of a problem then you think bringing grindr hookups to high end Rio hotels...IMHO! that’s why over the years many of us long term Rio Travelers choose airbnb and prior to 2010 stayed at lower rated hotels.

Bravo! Great report. I fondly remember the vivid descriptions of his Thai adventures that he was kind enough to post on this board. If any members have recent experience in Brazil, sure would enjoying reading about them.

A new gay voice has published his first novel to wide acclaim. From the Wall Street Journal Magazine Ocean Vuong: America “Has Amnesia” About Tiger Woods How do we salvage an Asian-American identity that has been erased by the media? Poet Ocean Vuong poses the question about Woods as part of his acclaimed novel, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’—while also examining the experience of immigrants in a culture that conflates conformity with survival The 30-year-old Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong structures his semi-autobiographical debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as a long, devastating letter. It’s written by the narrator, Little Dog, to his mother, who is still shattered by the Vietnam War and living unmoored in America. Little Dog serves as a translator to his mother, who is illiterate. “I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours,” writes Little Dog. The character wants to be seen, and he wants his mother to be seen, so he tries to make sense of their lives as refugees by writing down their story, using words she may never read. Vuong, the author of the shattering, tender 2016 poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, brings the same magic to his prose. WSJ. spoke to Vuong by phone from his home in Northampton, Massachusetts about both the danger and importance of being seen as an immigrant in America, and why “cancel culture” isn’t the best way to make strides in literature. WSJ. Magazine: Tell us the differences between publishing a novel and poetry. Ocean Vuong: Any poet would tell you that you’re happy just to have a book of poems out into the world so you can tell your mother that you’ve done something with your life in the past ten years. Publishing a novel is a bit more like a parade, and I’m not a parade person. But I know it means that I did my job as a writer, that I made something that seemed interesting beyond my own gains. How much do you talk to your mother about what you do, and how much does she know about the book? I try to tell her but she’s not interested. To some extent it’s a relief. She’s very practical and a lot of the publishing world is almost beyond her imagination. She gets that I do these things; she doesn’t know why. She gets readings. She likes going to them. In fact, she can’t understand the words so she sits adjacent to me and looks at the audience. She says “I like what your words do to their faces.” I love how in the novel Little Dog describes to his mother what writing feels like for him. Little Dog really hopes that his mother would be able to read it, but still he can only say some of the things he says to her in the letter because he knows the chances are slim. It felt like the crisis of the moment for me: As Americans we often ask ourselves “Does my voice matter? Do I have a voice? Does my vote count?” These are obvious concerns on the political level, but it also feels potent on the private, domestic level. What happens when the person we are closest to doesn’t hear us? What happens if we spend our whole lives inches away from somebody and our language fails us, or rather we fail language’s potential? The protagonist is told from a very young age that being Vietnamese means he shouldn’t draw any more attention to himself. It’s a survival mechanism. He’s trying to write, so he’s trying to make himself known while his mother tried to erase him in order to protect him. The urge to blend in and be invisible is very common among refugee, immigrant communities. There’s an old Vietnamese saying: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Conformity as a means of survival is a part of an intergenerational clash in the diasporan experience. Do I say I’m Vietnamese or do I hide it? He realizes that he can only be Vietnamese-American, that it’s not even a choice. Little Dog refers to Tiger Woods as another product of this world that both you and he inhabit. What led you to Tiger Woods? I always knew Tiger Woods had roots in the Vietnam War. His father was a soldier there. How come we don’t hear about Woods’s origin? It’s an American phenomenon, as a culture, that we’re often wary of talking about someone’s pre-history. Because if we go pre- enough we’ll arrive at slavery and American genocide. So understandably, those in power, and those looking at this country in review, have amnesia. The same goes for isolated sports figures and celebrities. They are better as individual phenomenons that exist within the context of the sport. An interesting thing about Woods is that he often has his mother and father standing beside him on the green. That’s rare. We don’t see that in football. But few people have asked about them. How do we salvage an Asian American identity that has been erased by the media? The novel is one of the great places where that can happen. The more I learned about Woods, the more I saw parallels to my own family: the mixed-race identity, veterans coming through trauma after a war. Tiger Woods became more American to me after the research rather than just being a two-dimensional icon. You’ve talked about how you’ve studied writing and now you teach it, and how we can admire the dead white men of the canon of American Letters but also build on their legacy. As a teacher, I get this question a lot: What should we do? Should we cancel everybody? I get the impulse to cancel people because it’s a powerful, sweeping gesture. We can take often racist, often problematic writers off our syllabus and feel that we’ve reclaimed a space for someone else. My concern is that I don’t think that stops Whitman from appearing on the desks of school children for the next hundred years. Rather than elimination, we should focus on being more thorough. Instead of saying “this is the gold standard” we should say, “this work revolutionized American letters in some ways, but there are other places where the thinking fell apart.” Whitman created an incredible poetic line according to the King James Bible in an attempt to preserve the union side by side with Abraham Lincoln. Incredible! Whitman was also racist. We can hold those two truths simultaneously. I see the canon as a very well-curated list of white folks, but when you take the monoliths down into another sector, you can start to build the next sector for yourself. We can look at the canon as a list of white folks, but then we carry on. It’s a less combative approach. I never saw writing as something I had to fight against. I’m fighting against so much in the world. When it comes to writing—the moment where I have the most agency and the most control—I would like that space to be as collaborative as possible, even with the most difficult subjects and the difficult writers who came before. That’s also my approach to history, particularly with negotiating the Vietnam War. Because it was a civil war there was a polemic of polarity, but in fact when you look at the actual lived lives on the ground, it was incredibly messy. Some folks fought for whoever was closest. Some folks fought for whoever gave them food. Some folks fought because their fathers did. The political schema never quite fits into the reality of life on the ground in Vietnam. But the classroom and the page is where we can go to be back on the ground. It’s where we can say “Where does this narrative go wrong?” https://www.wsj.com/articles/ocean-vuong-america-has-amnesia-about-tiger-woods-11559662495?mod=WCP_magazine&reflink=brd_obamp_mag

FloridaRob I met in Rio in 2002, and against all odds became my best friend, and is the one who talked me into checking out Merida! I went to visit him, and literally met a guy 10 minutes after arriving while we were walking to bar owned by a friend ours there. He does know me best...but has a propensity to exaggerate! A lot! LOL

I sense that @floridarob may be a modern version of Edith Wharton with a clear-eyed vision of @Tomcal‘s progress through Mexican society