PeterRS

It is one of the great contemporary dance companies in the world with a corps of stunning dancers. The men are young, tall and with incredible bodies. I have seen several performances of the Cloudgate Dance Theatre now celebrating its 50th anniversary. All have been quite wonderful. For those in London, there is another chance to see them at Saders Wells Theatre in Rosebery Avenue from November 30 to December 2 with performances of Lunar Halo. One of The Guardian newspaper's weekly video picks this week is the streaming of another Cloudgate production Rice on Marquee TV. This includes music from a variety of sources including Hakka Traditional Folk Songs, Bellini, Saint-Saens, Richard Strauss and Chinese composers. This is a dcumentary made about the company's brilliant founder Lin Hwai-min for the 40th anniversary.

As if anyone ouside the Palestinian/Arab world would even consider that a possibility! WIth such entrenched positions on all sides of this ghastly war, who would keep the peace?

Many of those boys look stunning!

This must be something of a sentimental return since it was a joint venture with SAS that helped get THAI off the ground internationally in 1960. SAS itself started flights between Copenhagen and Bangkok in 1949. Then the flight time was 36 hrs with stops in Zurich, Rome, Damascus, Karachi and Calcutta. As in @reader's post, the west-east routing with the new service will be 10 hrs 35 mins with prevailing winds making the return slightly longer. The aircraft will be the Airbus A350 with business, premium economy and cattle class! Economy is in the 3-3-3 format. Another New Scandinavian Airline to Service Bangkok A new Scandinavian budget airline, Norse Atlantic Airways, is also due to start ferrying tourists to Thailand from Oslo starting today with 2 flights per week using Boeing 787-9 aircraft. The schedule will increase to 3 perweek during the period Dec 19 - Jan 13. Cheapest round trip outside the winter season seems to be around US$700 return but you pay for nearly everything including the seat you prefer, meals, drinks, earbud headphones etc. One reviewer of a flight from Paris to New York was pleasantly surprised but found the baggage weights were strictly applied with substantial additional fees if you are overweight. The aircraft has 64 Premium Economy seats in 2-3-2 configuration. Economy is the usual 3-3-3 layout.

Although we're a bit off topic, since it has been raised I'd like to pose another question: how effective are border walls really for those determined to get to the other side? The world is today witnessing the ghastly murders on both sides of the Israel border with Gaza. I have nowhere seen mentioned the fact that israel spent a great deal of money and warded off another batch of international criticism when it started work on its huge border wall. Already over 400 kms have been completed and work is underway on another 58 kms. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, it is the most complex project israeli defence officials have ever built. The 65 km section separating israel with Gaza is more of a massive iron fence, but it is equipped with cutting edge technology designed to detect any security breach. It also includes an underground barrier and is equipped with hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. There are guard towers positioned at every 500 feet. Yet the Hamas terrorists still got through with relative ease. According to the Israel Defence Forces, the wall was breached in no less than 29 places. If the state of Israel, always on the front foot when it comes to defending its security, cannot build a secure wall, how effective or therwise is one between the USA and Mexico likely to be?

So yet again an idea is floated long before the relevant department/s have even considered even the short-term implications of the plan. This is soooo Thai!

Solid gold toilets and beluga caviar on tap 🤣

Yes, "lists" is correct. Not content with just a list of the ten best places to visit, Lonely Planey outdoes its competitors with five separate lists. The Best Travel 2024 list has no less than five different categories - Countries, Regions, Cities, Sustainable Travel and Best Value. Results are in many cases surprising. Best Country is Mongolia. Now I wonder if that country is even included in any other list! Best Region is Western Balkans Trans Dinarica Cycling Route. Well, and what if I don't fancy cycling? You'll probably prefer #5, Southern Thailand. Best City is Nairobi. Huh? Not for gay travellers. it ain't. Homosexuality can be punished by between 5 and 21 years in jail. Stick to #2 which is Paris - as long as you can avoid the bedbugs LOL Best Sustainable Destination is Spain. This is largely because of the country's efforts to expand renewable energy and bring tourism to hitherto emerging areas. I totaly agree with £2 on the list - Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia. Sorry if this is repeating photos, but I utterly adored my trip there way back in 2010. Torres del Paine National Park with great views from the mega-expensive Explora Hotel Guanocos are watching you! Perito Moreno Glacier Best Value is the USA's Mid West. Well I suppose if you take a gun with you, maybe so. The blurb stresses the cities of Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit. Huh? Chicago is cheap? Not when I have been there! https://edition.cnn.com/travel/lonely-planets-top-places-to-go-in-2024/index.html

True. Boy bars in Japan have very strict time limits and extra payments if you go over. No doubt that's because they were waiting for you to invite them for a meal at your 7-star Foodland restaurant 🤣

That will add another A380 at BKK to join those from Qatar and Emirates. By dropping its first class and not including a premium economy cabin, one Emirates daily flight has a capacity of 615 passengers. I wonder if we will ever again see a sight I saw on arrival at HKG a few years ago with 3 A380s in adjacent bays.

I know nothing about the effect of these drugs, but the presence of a knife and puncture wounds to the left of the neck might just possibly have been a suicide. Slicing through the carotid artery would result in death in minutes. The seeming absence of theft, even of the drug, would also seem to suggest this. Just a theory while we wait for official notification.

There are some elected politicians who make me cringe every time I see then on television, even before they open their mouths because I know what is coming. This morning, though, on CNN, the awful Senator Lindsay Graham took things to a ridiculous level. He stated that had Trump been President Russia would not have invaded Ukraine and Hamas would not have committed its atrocities in Israel. It reminds me of an old joke originally about a different group of people but let's assume for a bit of fun that they were the three senator amigos - the weird friendship between Graham, John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. The three are on a park bench and discussing the state of the Middle East. McCain: I had a dream last night and in my dream I saw God who said to me: "John McCain you are a true Christian and I believe your views on Israel are correct." Lieberman: How strange! In my dream I also saw God who told me: "Joe, pay no attention to John McCain, Your views on israel are the only ones that matter." Graham: What did I say?

The atrocity of the massacre in israel was horrific in the extreme. Those murderers and terrorists deserve extreme punishment. But the actions of Israel in Gaza, most recently the bombing yesterday of the refugee camp and the deliberate murder of 50 or more innocent civilians, takes punishment way beyond the meaning of the word. Sad to say, Israel has in the past shown a habit of over-reacting to atrocities. The 3-day massacre in 1982 of several thousand Palestinians and Lebanese citizens in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps is perhaps the most notorious. At that time the stated aim was to eradicate the Palestinian Lberation Organisation. It didn't work. It strengthened the PLO. Attempting to get rid of Hamas will not work, either. Yet how many thosands more civilians will die, have their homes, towns and cities destroyed, and their lives made utter misery for years as a result of Israel's actions? I fail to understand one thing. Israel has also been extremely successful at tartgeted individual strikes. After the Munich Olympics massacre, Israel took a great deal of time to assess the situation, build a task force of experts and then set them loose to go into the world and kill the terrorists. To the best of my knowledge, very few - if any at all - civilians were killed in the assassination of the terrorists. All this was later brought to world attention thanks to Steven Spielberg's film Munich. Has Israel had no agents operating in Gaza for years whose specific aim has been to obtain details of precisely where leaders of Hamas are, or are likely to be, or where and how they move around? I fully accept that Hamas has no qualms about hiding amongst civilians and in places like hospitals. But murdering many dozens of civilians to kill one Hamas leader in a massive bomb strike has to be seen as a war crime. It appears to me part of a deliberate attempt to wipe out a population rather than take out one man. Every time an israeli or US politician talks about it being necessary as part of the bigger picture makes me feel sick. As Palestinian casualties rise exponentially in the days to come, the anti-Israel demonstrations around the world will surely only increase, in my view. War is ugly and all wars have their seemingly inexplicable atrocities. The Blitz, the carpet bombing of Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and the unbelievably horrific rape in Nanjing and other cities in WWII mostly targeted civilians. I do believe that these occurred during the currency of wars between countries. Many will criticise me, but the massacres in israel and Gaza are between large groups of individuals - and this makes it quite different.

Maybe Taiwan LOL

I just noticed this reply. In my quite long experience, one-line reviews on sites like Tripadvisor are generally not to be trusted. The Dandy Da-an is a 3-star hotel. The Courtyard Downtown is definitely 4-star. And since you like a good breakfast and have mentioned that at Le Meridien in Bangkok, you will get that and more at the Courtyard. You will get nothing like it at the Dandy Da-an unfortunately. If you decide to stay at the Dandy, I'd find a good nearby 4- or 5-star hotel nearby and just go for breakfast there. I just booked the nearby 4-star Park Hotel for late February. Never stayed there before but got a very good internet rate for a deluxe room.

Australia has pulled out of the bidding for the 2034 World Cup. That leaves Saudi Arabia as the only other bidder and the almost certainty that it will be the host, given that FIFA has already stated the tournament would be held in either Asia or Oceania. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/67271423

I think a lot of people do not use their sense of smell very acutely. I recall a flight from Amsterdam to Hong Kong in economy class. Until the doors were about closed, I thought the seat next to me would be empty. Then a tall Dutch guy entered and sat in it. Unfortunately he then took off his shoes. I cannot tell you how awful was the smell emanating from those shoes and his socks. Mabe I should have said something, but I endured that flight and hated almost every minute of it. One reason I enjoy being with Chinese from the southern regions of the country is the rather sweet skin smell which comes from a diet heavy on rice. This is not so prominent in the northern Provinces where rice is not as common in the diet. Oddly I do not get that with Japanese and so there must be some other food helping produce that smell. On the other hand, Japanese rice is very different from Chinese grown rice. Having lived in Hong Kong for 20 years I became very accustomed to that.

Boeing was no doubt thrilled that it would get the contract to build the replacement for the US President's Air Force 1 747-200 aircraft. Well, actually, it's two aircraft, one the mirror image of the other. The new ones will be modified versions of the last of the 747 line - the 800 series with the additional extension to the upper deck. Normally with military projects, the Air Force would be charged on a cost basis plus an agreed profit margin. Thanks to Donald Trump's intervention (I suppose we can at least thank him for one positive decision), he objected to the extimated cost of $4 billion per plane. As a result Boeing agreed to reduce the price to that from the Government Accountability Office of $3.2 billion. Now the company is ruing its obeissance to the President-elect. Cost overruns mount year after year. This year $482 million was added to the loss, bringing the total to more than $2 billion. As Boeing's CEO Dave Calhoun stated last year, "A very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken." Boeing is still reporting losses on its commercial businesses - in all but two quarters since early 2019. Last week, it was another $1.1 billion, worse than that predicted by analysts. It still pins its short-term hopes on the 737 Max and the 787 with the much-hyped 777X still further delayed. With design started in 2011, Lufthansa became the first alrline to place an order for the 777X: for 34 of the aircraft. By 2019 it had reduced its commitment to just 6 aircraft. Commerical introduction was originally planned for 2019. That is now not expected until 2025 at the earliest. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/25/business/air-force-one-boeing-loss/index.html?dicbo=v2-ZNebZ1y&iid=ob_mobile_article_footer_expansion

Speculation totally dismissed by virtually every expert knowledgeable about events in Beijing. As @reader suggests, it was a flimsy, unbelievable excuse covering up something a good deal more sinister.

As the economic woes of China's property giants Country Garden and Evergrande continue to get worse, Xi Jinping and his cronies will surely start to feel much more heat from apartment owners who paid up front and now have nothing, contractors who delivered materials and have never been paid and local authorities which had banked on both land sales and property sales' income seeing bankruptcy at their doors. Now another potentially more dangerous event has made his rule more complicated. On the surface, it's a simple affair - the death of former premier Li Keqiang of a sudden heart attack. Li was a reformer and much loved throughout the country during his 10-year premiership. Xi will no doubt be thinking back to 1989 and the death of another popular senior party figure and reformer, Hu Yaobang. Hu had risen to the post of General Secretary of the Party. In 1987 he was forced to resign by hard-liners for siding with student protests which had arisen countrywide. Yet with Deng Xiao-ping as his protector, he remained a member of the ruling Politburo. In Hu's place Deng placed another reformer, Zhao Ziyang. The student protests were quelled - for a time. Hu died on 15 April 1989, like Li Keqiang of a heart attack. He was 73. Li was even younger at 68. So why should this be a worry to President Xi? Allegedly with his last words Hu had asked that he be buried simply without fuss, in his hometown in Jiangxi Province. Following his death there was a small scale demonstration urging the government to reconsider his legacy. It was virtually nothing in the wider scheme of things in that country. Yet a week later on the day of Hu's official funeral in the Great Hall of the People, word had spread and around 100,000 students marched in Tiananmen Square outside. They came to petition the government and handed a letter addressed to the hard-line Prime Minister Li Peng. The letter had no effect. The protests in Beijing grew and then started in other parts of the country. What began as mourning for a popular leader soon morphed into grievances about student accommodations, serious inflation and increasing corruption The leadership was shaken and uncertain how to react. As the numbers in the Square continued to increase, on May 19 Zhao Ziyang himself came into the Square and using a megaphone begged the students to disperse. He knew what the Politburo was planning and he knew he was powerless to stop it. During part of that visit he was seen to be in tears. His address to the students was later smuggled out of China. His speech included the following excerpts - "Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask for your forgiveness . . . You are still young, we are old, you must live healthy, and see the day when China accomplishes the Four Modernizations. Unlike you, we are already old, and do not matter . . . We were also young once, we protested, laid our bodies on the rail tracks; we never thought about what will happen in the future back then. Finally, I beg the students, once again, to think about the future calmly. There are many things that can be solved." Zhao bowed and then walked off. Most of the students applauded and many themselves were in tears. But they did not heed his warning. They were unaware that that very day Zhao had been stripped of all his posts. Within days, the Tiananmen massacre - or 'incident" as the Chinese leadership continues to call it - occurred. Zhao was put under house arrest and never appeared again in public before his death in 2005. Fearing another outburst of protests, Zhao's funeral was held among the tightest security. Now comes Li's death. Already socal media has been awash with tributes. There have been public displays of grief, particularly in Li's home Province of Anhui. But today's censors are far more savvy than in 1989. Instructions have been given to ensure that mention of Li makes no mention of his advocacy of political or economic reform. The media has been instructed to stick to the party line when eulogising Li. Public mourning has been discouraged. I guess there is not much else Xi can do, given that the ideas of reformer Li who was appointed at the same Party Conference as ultra conservative Xi were quickly replaced as Xi concentrated all power in his own hands. It is tempting to wonder what might have happened had Li become President rather than Xi. I suspect China would today be quite a different country. But we will never know. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/china-seeks-to-stifle-public-grief-for-former-premier-li-keqiang

So very sad. But again, it was surely was your friend's responsibility - although that is never easy to admit. I do not know the limits of his medical insurance but surely one of the essential aspects of any insurance policy is that you insure yourself for lengthy treatment of some grim illnesses. Your friend's policy may have reached its limits in Thailand. Surely it would have done so much earlier had he been seeking treatment in many European countries.

I do it just to keep myself clean and feeling clean, as well as not to give off any farang odours in parts of the world where farang are less common. Apart from odours expelled during excessive sweating, we all tend to smell of what we have generally eaten.

Apologies, should have mentioned the Basilica is in Arezzo. And I was not nearly as interested in world affairs in those days!

There is just so much to see south of Florence - stunning scenery and the fascinating towns of San Gimignano, Montalcino, Siena, Pienza, Montepulciano and, if time permits, also a couple of hours to take in the Basilica of San Francesco with its stunningly restored frescos of the master of the early Renaissance, Piero della Francesca. Yes, the Campanile collapsed in 1902 but I don't remember it clearly 😁

Seems you haven't travelled much in South East Asia. These old fashioned toilets can be found in most countries. The only toilet in Bangkok's Nature Boys was this model - at least until a few years ago, although it may not have changed. I have also come across them in public toilets and some in more private accommodations in quite a number of other towns and cities elsewhere in Thailand, as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and even in Singapore. I have seen some in China over the years. After all this was the way most Asians did their ablutions until relatively recently. I loathe them because it means crouching down and sometimes it's difficult getting pants out of the way 😵 But expecting all Asians to act and behave like westerners is in my view rather ridiculous unless they are given specific instructions. A bit like those Japanese toilets. With English instructions, they'd be easily used by everyone. Even though I came across my first one in Japan nearly 20 years ago, I still am unsure which buttons to press apart from those which have a little diagram. If the Chinese owners of that restaurant in Chiang Mai had instructions how to use a western toilet - which i have seen in quite a few on my travels - I suspect that the number of those attempting to use them the old way would be reduced.