PeterRS

Almost every type and all premium brands. As good is their champagne, wine and dessert wine selection. The airport at Doha has a large duty free alcohol section but I have never checked prices. The Doha business class lounge is huge with three restaurants and other casual eateries. Again virtually all types of alcohol are served.

Apologies! In the 3rd last paragraph above, I should have inserted inverted commas after 'final days' in line 5. The remainder of that paragraph are my comments. The quote from Susan Yu restarts in the next paragraph.

Having had more than a dig at the USA in a recent thread, it's time I wrote a bit about my own country's major historical errors. One was colonialism which was at the time was thought of as Britain doing parts of the world a tremendous favour. Of course, it was nothing of the sort. It was purely for trade and bleeding countries of their natural resources. I was reminded of this yesterday when I received my copy of the magazine of Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club of which I remain a proud member. It contains a series of articles from those who remember the negotitions leading up to the events of June 30/July 1 1997 when Britain handed back Hong Kong to Chinese rule. The 25th anniversary of that event took place litle over a month ago. Why it took place was a result of one of the strange quirks of history. Having roundly beaten China's army in the first two Opium Wars, Britain and its opium traders forced China to hand over to it in perpetuity Hong Kong Island and then a large chunk of the Kowloon Peninsula. Later, following China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5, Britain started gobbling up more of the Chinese mainland. It wanted to expand its holdings in Hong Kong. Accordingly it entered into negotiations for the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula and the much larger New Territories behind. Given that Britain then had the rest of Hong Kong in perpetuity, why did its negotiators, now in an extremely strong bargaining position, not insist that the New Territories also be handed over in perpetuity? Well, you can perhaps blame the Germans, for in April that country had negitiated a 99-year lease for a naval base in the Shandong Peninsula. A shorter lease had also been given to the Russians. So when it came time for British diplomats to negotiate Britain's terms, leases were the flavour of the month. So Britain went ahead and agreed a 99-year lease, no doubt never expecting this to cause any problems in the future. Fast forward to 1978. The businessmen who basically ran Hong Kong needed time to make good - often excessive - returns on their investments. With no idea what might happen 20 years later, many became nervous about further investment and made their feelings known to the Governor, Sir Murray Maclehose. In any case, by this time the New Territories was providing much of ever-growing Hong Kong's need for agricultural produce. Maclehose had spent time in the Embassy in Beijing, spoke fluent Mandarin and knew some of the leadership. He was to become the longest serving Governor of Hong Kong and one of the most respected of them all. He decided the time had come to raise the matter of the 1997 lease with the government in Beijing. So in early 1979 he made a visit to Beijing to meet with Deng Xiao-ping. On his return, Maclehose painted an upbeat picture - one, as I found out yesterday, he did not believe. He said that Deng had told him Hong Kong's investors should "put their hearts at ease," adding "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse." "Black" and "white" were interpreted as meaning "capitalist" and "communist". But Deng was deliberately being opaque. He, probably more than anyone else in Beijing at the time, wanted all of Hong Kong back. Britain's Margaret Thatcher arrived in Beijing to start formal negotiations. Maclehose had by this time retired and been replaced by another former civil servant with a vast knowledge of China and its leadership, Sir Edward Youde. Thatcher's position was made perfectly clear. Britain knew what was best for Hong Kong. Britain would not give back Hong Kong under any circumstances. When informed by Youde and her own advisers that Hong Kong could not survive on its own without the New Territories and without water, most of which was now being supplied through pipes from Guangdong Province, Thatcher's response was that she would moor large tankers in Hong Kong waters, these having been adapted to hold water instead of oil! Throughout, Thatcher's arguments were almost exclusively economic - how Hong Kong's continued prosperity under British rule would aid China as it developed its own economy. Before flying to Beijing, she insulted Deng by telling the world's media that the Chinese would have no clue how to run Hong Kong. Deng's arguments were equally simple. The Chinese had to right historical wrongs whatever the cost. Restating China's sovereignty over all of Hong Kong was more important than any economic argument. While Youde and the key figures in Thatcher's team understood the Chinese view, Thatcher never did - and she never wavered in her view. The one group left out of the negotiations were the people of Hong Kong. Until, that is, fear raised its spectre. Aware through leaks that the negotiations were at an impasse, Hong Kong people started to panic. Several senior Chinese who were members of the Governor's unoffical "cabinet" flew to London to warn Britain of impending disaster. They were totally ignored and humiliated. There was a run on banks and one major one collapsed before being taken over by what is now HSBC. The Hong Kong dollar slowly at first collapsed against the US$, at one time losing 10% of its value in one day. It was quickly pegged to the US$ at 7.8 and that peg has remained to this day. As we know, Thatcher was finally persuaded that she could never win. So she caved. Britain would hand over all of Hong Kong once the New Territories lease expired on June 30 1997. It has always been assumed that the wily, highly experienced Maclehose had been pleased as a result of his meeting with Deng in 1979. In the issue of the Foreign Correspondents' Club magazine I read last night, this was far from the truth. Then the Managing Editor of a news feature programme on Hong Kong's ATV, Susan Yu covered the handover. She writes - "I interviewed former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Mandarin Oriental. She was brimming with pride that Great Britain had done its utmost to secure the best for Hong Kong. But my interview with Hong Kong's longest-serving Governor, Lord Murray Maclehose [long after his retirement], struck a completely different tone. He was contemplative and subdued. He recalled with great clarity his 1979 meeting with Deng in Beijing . . . Maclehose [also] had a very dim view of Britain's highly politicised management of Hong Kong during its final days (when for the first time ever Britain under John Major placed a self-serving politician, Chris Patten, as Governor instead of a former civil servant as had always been the case in the previous 150 years). Although he was locally very popular, Patten did an enormous amount of harm to Hong Kong and its future under Chinese rule. It has even been reported that John Major, seeing all this, tried to recall him. Patten refused. "15 years later I bumped into a British former diplomat who had been a key member of Britain's 1997 negotiating team. I asked if he had any regrets. There was a long pause. With a deep sigh, he said, 'We could've done more. We should've done more.'" Sadly, while Hong Kong flourished for almost 15 years under Chinese rule, the events set in motion by Patten were merely simmering under the surface. When they finally exploded in 2014, Hong Kong's Chinese appointed leader had no idea how to handle them. Some years later President Xi had had enough. He broke international law and put his own people into Hong Kong. It is now a very changed city. And that has directy led to much greater complications for Taiwan.

Another from a more recent socially distanced show.

Yes. And it is not only premium alcohol brands. It offers substantial snacks for those who don't want a meal. Qatar also has a bar at the back of its A380 biz class. But it is smaller, not as good and there is economy seating behind it. Emirates only has the galley behind its bar. This is the Emirates window seat in the upright position. And part of the bar at the back - and this the window side Q suite layout on Qatar's 777s. I find the Emirates window seats just as good as QR's Q suites if you take a Q suite backward facing window seat. One plus is QR offering four main courses for most of its long-haul flights and then serving meals at the time of your choosing. Unlike Emirates which plonks most of the meal on one tray, QR serves course by course.

I do not get British television and so only knew her from her films, which - as she has a habit of telling everyone she meets - included the performance in the Harry Potter movies as Professor Strout. But I do recall her earlier fine performance in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence with Daniel Day Lewis. In Thailand we were able to see her in The Real Marigold Hotel, a series based on the movies of roughly the same name, this time about groups of British pensioners spending 4 weeks somewhere in Asia to see if they would find it suitable for retirement. I know she was in the first of the series when they stayed in Jaipur. A second series titled the Real Marigold Hotel on tour saw her in places like Kyoto, Chengdu, Havana and I believe also St. Petersburg. She certainly tells it like it is. While her language may sometimes be a little crude, on those TV series she livened up procedings no end when they sometimes began to flag. It is claimed that she was the first person to say "fuck" on British television. That may be true but I always thought it was the acerbic theatre critic and writer known for his sadomasochistic sexual fantasies, Kenneth Tynan. What made that less of a shock and somewhat amusing was that Tynan had a stutter. So 'fuck' came out more as "f-f-f-fuck!" Interesting, I thought, that the producers of that Marigold Hotel series spent quite a bit of time letting her talk about her life as a lesbian. Yet another of that group in Japur was the equally gay former Royal Ballet dancer and choreogapher, Wayne Sleep. We learned little about his gay life apart from a video phone call to his partner from the Taj Mahal. It was almost as though they wanted viewers to become more aquainted with older lesbians.

Living in Bangkok and with family in Europe, my only long hauls now are an annual 11-12 hour trip between the two. I would no longer dream of flying economy as long as I have ways of obtaining a business class seat. Besides, I need little to spend on at either end. Unlike @macaroni21 I enjoy the food and alcohol served nearer the front of the plane - but only if I am hungry and it is near a regular meal time. It's one reson I enjoy Qatar Airlines. Apart from the privacy of the Q suites, they serve your selection for the meals when you want them. I can't think of one meal which has been anything other than extremely good. While I don't drink much on a plane, QR's wine selection is particularly fine and I will usually enjoy a couple of glasses. Veering off topic slightly, on one first class round-the-world trip (my travel agent had alerted me to the fact that instead of the business class ticket I had reserved on CX, BA and AA, he could get me on first class if I switched to SQ, Swissair and Delta at the same price). That meant a couple of detours but I had no hesitation in changing. From London to New York, I had to fly Swissair to Zurich and pick up the late morning MD11 flight to JFK. It was one of the first aircraft to have installed video on demand. Lunch was superb and I enjoyed a movie as I dined. Two weeks later, that very same aircraft crashed into the Atlantic off Halifax just six miles from shore on the return to Switzerland. That accident resulted from a fire just behind the cockpit which had started in the wiring for the new video on demand system. Could the fire have started on my flight, I have often wondered? I wonder how many others have had a similar sort of near miss?

I did qualify my remark with "seem" 😵. Obviously I have no statistics. But I was talking about a very small group of possible tourists who would be using the services of an agency that covers travel, hotel and other general travel costs for trips to two or more countries. I suspect the number that a small tour company could handle in a year would not be more than a few thousand. While the majority of gay tourists will inevitably have suffered as a result of covid and now as a result of higher prices, there must be a group from various countries spending pink dollars who are considerably wealthier than the rest of us and who like the idea of a company doing much of their travel planning for them. At least that's my hunch.

Most of the treasures come from The Forbidden City. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, museum managers packed the most important and valuable items into around 20,000 crates. These spent 14 years travelling around China to keep them away from the invaders. They were moved by train, truck, ship and on the backs of porters. Following the end of World War II, the crates ended up in Nanjing before being sent back to Beijing. Not one article was destroyed. I was incorrect in saying all the treasures ended up in Taiwan. Only three shiploads with 3,284 crates made the journey. The National Palace Museum just outside Taipei was constructed to display them. The remaining 16,176 cates were returned to Beijing where their contents remain to this day. But it is generally agreed that the Taiwan part of the collection has some of the finest artefacts. Being mostly in the Forbidden City with its 999 Palaces (having visited three times I have no idea where most can be found), I doubt if any would have been destroyed during Mao's time. Even during the Cultural Revolution, the Forbidden City was basically out of bounds and the revolutionaries never went inside. This site explains the journey of the artefacts rather simply. https://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/2179879/treasure-odyssey-of-palace-museum/

How dreadful! The more so considering how young some of the deceased were. Even at this early stage it seems perfectly clear that the fire department - or whichever one is responsible for ensuring fire regulations about materials used inside public premises meet fire safety standards - completely failed in their duty as far as granting premises a license to operate is concerned. Anyone who has been in the entertainment business knows only too well that cheap insulation material can be highly flammable. Sadly TIT! As has been said before, the fear for the gay community must continue to be Silom Soi 2. If there is a fire in DJ Station or any of the other venues in that soi, its tiny entrance is certain to cause panic if large numbers are trying to get out. It will be worse if, as was discovered some years ago, DJ Station's one back exit was padlocked shut!

I wrote the above in relation to an earlier post from @kjun12. I have since received a courteous PM from him with a generous comment. I clearly overreacted in my response above and openly send apologies.

Seegasm is a different form of porn site. It seems to be run by one guy who features as the top in many dozens of vdos. He's either training cute naked young guys in different forms of sexual pleasure as a bottom or just giving them a good time. He records each vdo from 2 or 3 angles and then releases them individually. Initially quite interesting but they do tend to be pretty repetitive.

I also hope and pray that calmer heads will prevail. Yes, I totally agree it's a beautiful island (a few photos below from a round-the-island trip i did a few years ago), the people are warm, friendly and kind, and the men sure are hot. That's one reason I always go to a hot spring on my visits - and hot does not mean hot from the really hot pool! I think one of the reasons so many of the guys are hot is a result of that military service. Many of the guys in their 20s have great bodies. The museum is stunning. Extaordinary that it can only show a tiny fraction of its treasures at any one time. Yet as I am sure you are aware, those treasures were actually stolen from China by Chiang Kai-shek when he fled to Taiwan. They had been crated up during the Japanese invasion of China so they could be moved around for safety. It was therefore relatively easy for Chiang to have the crates shipped to Taiwan.

I have been very spoiled. From the mid 1980s I have worked for companies in Asia which allowed me to travel in business class. For three years in the early 90s, one of those companies alllowed me first class travel for long haul intercontinental flights, of which I took about a dozen a year. Travelling so frequently, I amassed a very large number of air miles each year and these enabled even more business class trips for vacations, often for annual visits to friends in Sydney and once for a trip to and around South America. Intercontinental first class in the early 1990s was not much better than business class in most airlines now. Only two real differences - a lot more space and mostly very fine cuisine and wines, especially the latter. In the years since then, I have been upgraded a few times and find the difference with business class getting even closer. Since semi-retirement, I have had to pay for most of my own travel and the mileage bank is close to empty. I'm medium height and now 88 kg. I have still only done 2 longish-haul returns in economy class. First was LHR to Chicago on BA in mid-2015. Hated it. Outward trip I was seated in the middle of about 30 girls who had been at some hockey tournament in Israel. They were as high as a kite. The flight was miserable. On the overnight return, I declined dinner but said I would like breakfast. Assuming this would at least be juice, coffee and a bacon roll or something lilke that, little did I know how desperate BA's economy catering had become. Breakfast was tea or coffee and a tiny hard wrapped slab of fruit cake that was all but frozen! At the other end of the scale JAL's economy class 787 on the BKK/Tokyo route in 2018 was extremely good. Comfortable window seats and the best economy menu I have ever experienced. This had been created by JAL chefs especially for economy passengers.

I am sorry if I misinterpreted your post, but it certainly read as though you were quoting the Guardian article to make a point. At least we share one thing in common. I had a Taiwanese boyfriend for five years and we have still been meeting up regularly on all my quarterly visits to the island. I believe I have a pretty clear idea of how the average Taiwanese view China and what they want. Much that I agree with. But if 57% voted for a party with a form of independence as its platform, that means 43% or did not agree with everything on the platform of which that form of independence was the main plank. Yes, 57% is a majority. But that surely also illustrates there were 6.23 million of the electorate who did not want the key plank on that party's platform. Am I not correct in thinking that constitutional change in the USA requires a 2/3rds majority? The people of Taiwan are very clearly divided on how to proceed. It is quite wrong to put forward the view that there is little or no opposition to a form of independence. I realise other posters do not agree with my views. But I have not had any response to a point I made earlier and it is one I find difficult to accept. Pelosi, after making her error about congratulating Taiwan on the way it handled covid (the country's borders are still closed, for goodness sake!), basically stated that the USA would not abandon Taiwan. What precisely did she mean by that? I have stated before that the USA will not enter a war should, heaven forbid, there be serious armed conflict emanating from China. The people of America will never agree to yet another war in Asia when it is against a China that is as powerful as it now is. Laos, Vietnam and Vietnam were poor counties - and the USA still lost those wars. So what will the US do re Taiwan? If it is not prepared to go to war, why risk giving China the impression that the US is diverging from the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act? And surely it is also interesting that the one Asian country most dependent on the USA did not put out the red carpet for Pelosi. The President of South Korea did not even interrupt his holiday to meet her, even though it has been reported he is actually in Seoul. As most political commentators have stressed, he was not prepared to send out the wrong political signals.

Since @kjun12 contributes virtually nothing of value to any discussion, he only needs 10 words!

Why should I do that? There is no regulation which states you need to read anything I write. Have you criticised other posters for lengthy posts - e.g. @reader who posts a great many longish comments from news outlets, many interesting? Your comment borders on an insult!

Much more informative for those who have actually visited Bangkok or stil live here is Alex Kerr's Bangkok Found. It delves under the surface to explose more of the city's background, historical and architectural influences as well as its culture and all the influences which have shaped that culture. There's even a section on nightlife - although this has obviously changed somewhat since the first edition was published in 2010.

I have tried consistently to make that point whenever there has been a discussion about Taiwan. But with respect you have quoted from that Guardian article incorrectly. It does not state that the people of Taiwan consider Taiwan an independent country. What the writer actually states is the following - "The Democratic Progressive party, which emerged from Taiwan’s democracy movement, holds power. It currently advocates for maintaining the status quo, (which means the ambiguous position where Taiwan is de facto but not de jure independent) . . . Most Taiwanese people seem to support the status quo too, with only tiny minorities wanting full independence or unification with China as soon as possible. The full picture is hard to ascertain since there are arguments that the Taiwanese would be more firmly pro-independence if there were no threats from China." Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen ran on an independence platform in 2020. She won the election by 57.13% of the vote - a significannt majority but far from a resounding vote for independence. Siginifcantly the Kuomintang Pary which advocates closer relations with Beijing increased its share of the vote in that election with actualy majorities in 6 of the administrative regions. My Taiwanese friends just want to be left alone without interference from either China or the west.

Just look at history! And then consider the present situation of Xi XInping. Then you might consier talking to some people who actually live in Taiwan. No, not the politicians. The men and women who live there and who have seen how China reacts whenever anything to do with independence or dependence on the USA comes up. Ask their feelings about that. Take the tourism industry for a start. China opened its doors and let floods of mainland tourists visit Taiwan from 2009. Hotels and other parts of the tourism industry benefitted from a very large influx of tourists. Many new hotels opened and many more flights were added. Initially only mainland groups were permitted to travel from China to Taiwan. Then from 2011 Chinese could travel individually, many of them spending considerable amounts of cash according to Taiwan statistics. Roughly 4 years later with the prospect of a new Taiwan government openly talking about independence, China's open-door Taiwan policy was all but abadoned and many Taiwanese suffered as a result. In 2015 when the open door policy was at its height 41% of all tourists were from mainland China - 4.2 milion compared to just 329,000 in 2008. As with all tourism revenues, the benefits were not merely to the tourism industry. For the island as a whole they were very significant. You should also take into account the fact that historicaly the two main markets for tourism to Taiwan used to be Japan and the USA. But soon after the mid-2000s, both those markets started to contract. Tourism to Taiwan has traditionaly come from just 20 world markets. These have shown almost no geographical variation. So the drop in total revenues from 2015 are very significant. We know covid has killed most international tourism to the island and that the Chinese are just not going to return given the position of both governments. With heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait, others will understandably become more nervous. Is the USA suddenly going to make up the difference for all the lost tourism revenues since 2015? It happily sells the island advanced weapons but these don't help the budgets of the average household. But the tourism screw has been turned. China has other screws it can turn. And turn them it will.

Breaking what I had earlier said about not adding more to the debate, there is one issue which came up on a news programme yesterday before it was certain Pelosi would be going to Taiwan. There are three parties in the present "dispute" over Taiwan. Only one will suffer for some considerable time as a result of Pelosi's visit - the people of Taiwan.

I was not referring specifically to Thailand. Travel pricing depends on a host of factors and there is no reason to believe that, as in the past, high prices are here to stay in the long run. Re air fares, of course they are higher due to much greater than expected demand after covid, oil price, high inflation rate, finding new staff fast, peak summer demand etc. But airlines have been through similar price hikes before and prices have eventually come down. Remember when oil was almost $150 per barrel? That was in 2008 and 2012 and was followed by predictions of doom and gloom for the travel industry. By 2016 it was down to around $60. Just yesterday alone there was a cut of 12% in the price of jet fuel.

@belkinDC is an invaluable asset! Just one question about an unlikely event. A friend in Australia used to fly extensively on Ansett which went bust in 2002. At the time he had almost 350,000 Ansett miles. Although Ansett was part of Star Alliance, he lost the lot. How likely is this to happen again in the 2020s if another airline goes bust?

I have taken up enough space to make my case (even if some has not been totally clear) and so will not take up more. I merely add here two points. 1. You again call Taiwan a country. I think the vast majority around the world including the US administrations do not agree. I suggest the term used by the British during its administration of Hong Kong is more appropriate. Hong Kong was a "territory". And in international law there is zero doubt that Hong Kong and Kowloon were indeed British territory much more than Taiwan can be called an independent country, even though they formed a greographical part of mainland China. Why the British colonial powers negotiated a 99-year lease for the administration of the New Territories when there was nothing preventing their negotiating the transfer in perpetuity, is one of the quirks of history. Had it negotiated the transfer in perpetuity, there would have been no 1997 issue and perhaps no Taiwan issue. But we cannot say for sure that others would not have arisen. 2. In talking yesterday with a good friend visiting Bangkok who is far more expert in China and Asian issues than I - his degrees from two top universities in the US and UK were in Asian studies, he bascially disagrees with many of my comments, even though he agrees the Taiwan situation in international law is relatively clear. He hopes Pelosi will visit Taipei and basically call Xi's bluff. Like me, though, he agrees there is little the rest of the world can do if China decides to invade Taiwan by force. Western powers may support Taiwan as they have been supporting Ukraine. But war with China is not an option. What will be left of Taiwan and how it will adapt to its new reality would be the big question. And is this one reason which may prevent China from using force?

Wonder what heppens when the tunnel gets flooded by heavy monsoon rains LOL