Leaderboard

I was pissed last time in Sao Paulo since Art Museum MASP was only showing a second tier Brasilian painter in the basement. Main room was not accessible. This time, even though only part of the MASP was open, the gallery on the second floor was open. MASP was conceived by Italo Brasilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, respecting tough constraints (it was not accepted by the former owner of the land to block the perspective of avenue Nove de Julho), thence the steel structure to which the museums is suspended. Similarly the masterpieces are suspended in an open room of around 2000 m2 in which enters natural light. They seem to float and visitors wander among them. Lina had a "social" vision of exposing masterpieces : - the walls (of the museum) will be transparent as a compensation for the efforts of the people - the glass of the walls of the MASP are not the glass of formal walls. - the masterpieces are fixed to glass panels suspended to the ceiling with concrete blocks on the floor. Visitors can come as close as they want to the painting. Message of all this is "art must be transparent". - there are no indications of the names of painter on the front. She wanted the visitors to be "feeling" art and not to be influenced by the famous name of such and such artist (indication of artist and comments are visible on the back) ; - there is an incredible mixtures of styles, from Italian Masters of the 1500s, to various French schools, to very modern worldwide artists, to Brasilian artists or to primitive African statues from Nigeria ... - the initial name of the Museum was Museum of Ancient and Modern arts but Lina's husband refused such a segregation between arts and demanded that the Museum be called Museum of Arts. The transparency has not always being respected at MASP, since one of its former President, Neves, architect of many classical buildings in Sao Paulo decided to cover the glass panels and to divide the MASP into rooms. One of the reasons to do so was that masterpieces were suffering from direct light and sunshine. The steel beams have not always been painted in red. The corrosion of the grey colored beams gave opportunity to treat them and to paint them in red which was the initial idea of Lina.

My advice was to travellers only. But it wouldn't hurt if people contemplating move to another country permanently considered it as well and thought 'what will happen if my currency goes down by half and at the same time prices in my new country will go up twice". I understand your point about expats but those you describe are victims of lack of foresight , poor planning and bad luck. In most cases they have nobody to blame , even themselves, it's just circumstances did not work to their original specifications. Changing countries and environment always carries both risks and rewards and one who decides to move must expect first but at the same time hope for the second. Burning boats is good for a movies but very rarely works in real life. We tend to forget that with age our health is expected to deteriorate and day may come when we need somebody to make us tea and buy us bread, then that boat may come handy. So many now are paying price for having those boys in their bed for trifling cost as you said. Nobody was complaining before that having guy long time costs less than train ticket to the airport at home. Most of us are coming to Thailand for illusions, it turns out that some of those illusions are not what we hoped for.

From Coconuts Bangkok ‘Khlong Toei slum must be erased,’ official says Construction of government housing for nearly 100,000 people facing eviction was ordered accelerated this week to “erase” Bangkok’s Khlong Toei community, where most residents remain in the dark as to when they will be forced out. After visiting the so-called slum community Wednesday, a deputy transportation minister ordered the Port Authority to move up by two years construction of four 25-story condo towers that are meant to house a portion of the roughly 15,000 families that will be evicted to make way for a new mega mall. “I’m setting a deadline that, by 2020, the term ‘Khlong Toei slum’ must be erased from Thai people’s minds. We must transform it into Khlong Toei community or Khlong Toei village instead,” Deputy Transport Minister Atirat Ratanasate told reporters. https://coconuts.co/bangkok/news/khlong-toei-slum-must-be-erased-official-says/

There are reasons to be cheerful. These are the dying days of a rancid old order’ In the UK and the US, the political wind will soon change in favour of those demanding good government https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/11/there-are-reasons-to-be-cheeerful-we-are-seeing-dying-days-of-rancid-old-order

That’s so true Vinapu. But what about expats who have made their home in Thailand and have burnt their boats with their home country ?, They did their money sums before making the move, with pension income and probably with a lump sum from the the sale of a house, using an exchange rates that applied say from 2005 to 2015 ( in the case of the U.K. pound that would be between 70 to 50 Thai Baht) Now they are looking at 37 baht to a pound, a much larger depreciation than is the case with the USD OR EUR. perhaps they have a pension of say £1000 per month which produced in the past 60,000 baht - enough for a pleasant life particularly away from the resorts or BKK. Now it’s only 37,000 which means survival not living and the worry about medical expenses. If possible they should return to the UK, but perhaps connections with family and friends have been lost and the cost of finding somewhere to live has substantially increased. During my recent visits to Pattaya I have met several in the gay community who are in that position. Not for them the enjoyment of of sleeping with attractive money boys or racking up bar bills boosted by boy drinks. OK I can reminisce and complain about the exchange rate compared with when I first discovered Thailand (70 baht - £1) and a night in the gogos plus a boy in my bed was a trifling cost, but that’s nothing to the pain of many expats who are now struggling.

This is manny. If you go to Santo domingo he's the best guide there. He can pick you up from the airport in his modern, comfortable vehicle, drive you around and be your tour guide. He will also take you to the hottest clubs in Santo domingo and he has a long list of guys for you to choose from. This guy is AMAZING. he can actually set up an entire iteniary for you and take you to some of the most exciting places in Santo domingo. He speaks both English and Spanish. Hes a very nice trustworthy guy with lots of connections in Santo domingo. He will also drive you to punta cana if you'd like. If you hire him, ask him to take you to the house in the country with all the sexy guys eager and willing to please

Pix : travelling to Petropolis and taking off from Santos Dumont. Lovely Brazil !

There is no wrong on Thais cling to their culture not necessarily their culture is inferior to the Western culture ,We the Western have much to learn from the Thais for their respect to the elders, authorities and religious , their politeness and solidarity.

Is the "First" World so much better? We shoot each other in the supermarket and schools and drop bombs on cultures and nations we don't like. Unless car ownership-or in the US, assault-weapon ownership- is considered the summit of achievement, then we should welcome the fact that some people don't care for it. I've travelled widely over the past decades; there's nowhere I've visited, however poor, that hasn't got something to teach us. And that includes Thailand.

Boston could be nice for a day or two. It's a nice small manageable city. Some interesting historical walks you can take showing famous places in the history of the fight to overthrow the cruel British tyrannical overlords. I especially like to go to the tavern where, they say, the Revolution began because a British soldier failed to tip a tavern maid. Boston is nice, but you might find it a tad boring? Highly recommend Provincetown. Lots of ways to get there, including a ferry to/fro Boston. It's a quaint-ish old New England town that is just chock full of the gays. Very fun. You go there and relax for a few days. Lobster salad sandwiches by the harbor. Very open and welcoming gay scene. If you really want to get your gay on, you could go to Fire Island. You can get there by train from NYC. Fire Island Pines for glamour and pretty boys. Cherry Grove for less elitist gays and more lesbians. I don't know about hotel availability. Expect they would be expensive. You spend half your time on the beach, half your time tracking down an Ecstasy connection and the remaining half of your time dancing and fucking like a bunny. (Yes three halves, because, as everyone knows, time slows down on MDMA.) People really love Philadelphia (and you can get there by train from NYC). The Maine shore is lovely, to drive along. As a gay you would be required to visit Ogonquit harbor. But unless you want soulful selfies of yourself with ocean waves crashing along the rocky shore in the background, not sure all that interesting.

Summary of this trip. I like very much asses and dicks and I love nice (smiling) faces and beautiful eyes.

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.

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.

I cannot see the logic in having a 12 - 18 hour stop over whilst flying for 12 - 24 hours in total.It must be torture!I I would consider not less than a 24 hour layover...and a decent hotel...but 12 hours...no way!