PeterRS

It seems there are several vineyards now appearing in the Kingdom. Visiting the famous Dansai Ghost Festival in Loei Province some years ago, I was surprised when our minibus passed quite a large vineyard. I was informed it was the first vineyard in Thailand and that the elevation, soil and hilly region made it ideal for making wine. This is a description. I did taste one of the wines - can't recall now which one. Pleasant and drinkable but certainly nothing special. Over the years I am sure they will improve in quality. Chateau de Loei The Chateau de Loei winery is situated at 600 metres above sea level in the province of Loei, some 500 km north of Bangkok, and 60 km from the provincial capital, Loei. The first wines were vinified in 1995. Thus Chateau de Loei is the first winery in Thailand. With 130 hectares it is 60% bigger than the PB Winery and more than eight times bigger than the GranMonte Winery. Here, too, the Shiraz and Chenin Blanc grape varieties, which thrive best in the tropics, are cultivated. The winery offers a large selection of different wines. The inexpensive wines are cheaper than at the previously visited wineries. But these also cost THB 450 (CHF/USD 14.50) per bottle due to the high alcohol tax. Some of these wines are drinkable, but they were not a pleasure. Since the Chateau de Loei produces a large quantity of wine, there must also be enough Thai buyers who have become accustomed to these wines over more than 20 years. Near Chiang Mai there is also an amazing tiny distillery that makes liqueurs from Thai fruits. I visited with a friend around a dozen years ago as his nephew runs it. Both are Austrian. I thought the quality both original and quite stunning. As the output is so small, almost all is exported. But you can occasionally find a bottle or two in one or two of Bangkok's really top hotels.

Now there's agreat idea! Forget @fedssocr, with respect! GIve me an airfare, hotel accommodation and introduction to some gay venues and I'll start next week. I'll even take photos to prove my findings! 👌

Apologies in advance if this has already been covered for I have not read the full thread. But in the case of the provision of sexual services, in Thailand a tip is indeed just that - a tip! At least in terms of the law. The provision of sexual services for cash or other gain from an establishment like a gogo bar, host bar, spa or other such venue is illegal. If a bar was to pay a boy a living wage and then rent him out, that in the peculiar Thai way of logic is prostitution. Paying a bar fine is not because it denies the bar of the boy's time to dance or whatever. Negotiating a fee in advance between two people for sexual services is technically an agreed advance payment and is therefore prostitution. Tipping a boy or a girl at the end of a session is technically not payment for sexual services! But I can't imagine any of the boys in blue who get their monthly commissions are going to be too fussy about it LOL!

As I have to fly to the UK at least once a year, I did take BA once. The daytime 777 was filthy. My seat had not been cleaned and the toilets disgusting. That plus the 8-across business class seating made the entire round trip miserable. I vowed never to use the carrier again on the BKK/LHR route. I later learned that the three 777s that BA rotated on the BKK route were indeed three of their first deliveries. The old days when BA ran 747s as an extension of the SYD/LHR service were vastly better. Instead I took to flying to HKG where I could either take CX or BA's A380. The ticket price initially was cheaper until demand must have eased off for the non-stop service out of BKK and BA started lowering prices.

Having contributed to several Asian-based Boards over about 15 years, I have come across and engaged with a couple of trolls. In Thailand one contributed so many posts to two of the Boards that it took the combined action of several posters to get him banned from one. In one based in another country in the region that had a much younger membership, the troll admitted he was a near eighty year old and pretended he was a member to give advice to young guys. Cross him and inform him his advice was nonsense and he would rant and rave calling those posters all manner of crap. After being temporarily banned several times, he was finally booted off. Each time, I got really pissed off. I hope I have grown up since then. Trolls crave attention and I am sure @joizy is correct. Most, if not all, are sad, bored older men who need a fantasy personality to gain attention and give some meaning to their dull existence. Psychopaths? I'm not sure. Schizophrenics? Almost certainly! LOL

Hah! Too true! One of the perks of being based in Asia for so many decades was that Bangkok was merely a short flight away - and often just a short stop-over to another city in the region for business meetings. Perhaps it's the old rosy-tinted spectacles thing allied to general ageing but I find the changes have not been for the better. No doubt, too, the economic development of the country equally has had quite a major effect.

I wonder how often it has to be repeated that there is no such thing as a going rate. A tip is a tip is a tip. It is up to the customer to decide. There are no doubt parameters. Those who are perhaps better off financially than others may decide to offer a higher tip than those who are less well off. Also not everyone intends to off a boy every night of a visit for some visiting bars etc. live here. Irrespective of financial status, I always felt that performance played a part in whatever I tipped. And unllike many, I never once negotiated in advance. What @TotallyOz offers is his business, same as what @belkinDC offers is his.

A year ago it was virtually a dead duck. The A380 was the wrong plane at the wrong time, even though it was extremely popular with the flying public and I just loved it. Thankfully it used to extend one of its Dubai/BKK flights to Hong Kong. Since my first flight in 2010, I must have taken over two dozen round trips in its upstairs business class (relatively very inexpensive at 14,000 baht round trip including extra baggage, lounge access, seat selection, flat bed seating and the most extensive in flight entertainment in the air). I took two friends - separately - on trips to Hong Kong. They went crazy about the aircraft, especially the bar at the back! Apart from Emirates, most airlines dropped the aircraft when covid struck. It was too big and too expensive to operate. Now, though, with demand for travel much greater than anticipated, 9 of the former 14 A380 operators have brought some of them back into service. Emirates is even retrofitting 67 of the aircraft to incude a Premium Economy cabin which looks spacious and certainly worth trying. Some operators no doubt feel it is cheaper to operate than attempt to sell since the market price for a 10-year old A380 during covid had dropped to just $30 million. I took these photos at Hong Kong airport around 2015. Three A380s at adjacent bays. I wonder if we will ever see that again. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/a380-superjumbo-comeback/index.htm

Please remember that Bali is not Muslim. It has its own long-adapted version of Hinduism and almost all Balinese boys are uncircumcised. Those whom you meet who are circumcised are likely to be boys from neighbouring Java, often money boys.

Of the many good points in the @TotallyOz post, I think this is one most of us rarely think of. In 1979 I gladly tipped 500 baht short time and it always seemed equally gladly received. That was then worth US$20 and seemed to be the general rate. The inflation rate in Thailand in the following two years was pretty horrendous - in 1980 was 24.56% and in 1981 10.32%, but my 500 baht tips did not increase. In fact, I don't think I increased it to 1,000 baht till around 1990. After the Asian Economic Recession in 1997 it moved up to 1,500 and then later 2,000. Between that first visit in 1979 and the start of 2020 prices in Thailand have increased 361.7%. The value of my 500 baht is now 2,308.69 baht. But core consumer prices are now once again in a period of inflation. Inflation in July alone was 7.6% higher than the same month last year with food prices showing the highest increase. So if the working boys looked at offical rates (which I agree is unlikely), either I was overpaying in 1979/1980 or I should be considering a short time rate of at least 2,500 baht by the end of this year. At today's rate, that would still amount to less than US$69. So when considering any form of comparison, I sggest the above should not be disregarded. https://www.worlddata.info/asia/thailand/inflation-rates.php

And the klongs are supposed to be cleaned regularly specifically to avoid this. I suppose as long as people in Bangkok continue throwing all manner of rubbish into the klongs, nothing will change.

How many times have we heard this question posed? Fact is: every time there is a major rain storm and parts of the city are temporarily flooded. Everyone knows that we are entering the period of the most intense monthly rainfall. Yet drains are always blocked, flood gates and pumps are not working properly, and so on and so forth. We are still at least 10 weeks from the high tide in the Gulf of Thailand. So that cannot be blamed this time. Apart from Jakarta, few other Asian cities that are low lying or have substantial low lying areas - Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, for example - seem to experience flooding on the level of Bangkok despite prolonged bursts of heavy monsoon rains. I can remember a time in the 1980s in Hong Kong when flyovers became raging waterfalls and small streets became canals. Hong Kong invested a great deal of cash in massive underground holding tanks on the north shore of the Island into which water coming down from both the hills and the sky was drained and redirected through tunnels to the sea on the south of the Island. Flooding is minimal now and is drained away quickly. I understand the 9.7 km long SMART tunnel which opened in Kuala Lumpur around 2010 has partly solved what used to be the disastrous flooding problem in the city centre. Singapore has rain for most of the year. It has a sophisticated system utilising many ways of getting rid of that water including pumps, catchment tanks and canals. It is still subject to occasional flash flooding but not nearly as bad as Bangkok. Yet Bangkok and other low lying parts of Thailand have seen little improvement in recent decades. Successive governments have acknowledged the problem and do virtually nothing about it. I recall durng the dreadful 2011 floods that one Minister seriously suggested assembling long-tail boats across the Chao Phraya river with their engines at full power to push the water from the north back upstream! Such is the intelligence of some who rise to Ministerial level in Thailand!

Let's all hope that the dreadful flooding of 2011 does not return in October. For those new to Thailand, this was a time when monsoon rains in the north over several months resulted in very full rivers flowing to the sea. This was made worse by the need to open up several dams and more than a few broken floodgates. These coincided with the annual high tide in the Gulf of Thailand when waters flowing up the Chao Phraya are higher. Sometimes this results in a small degree of flooding in the city. That year those waters coming down and up met in Bangkok and just to the north of the city with disastrous results. Parts of the city were flooded for months, including Don Mueang Airport which had to be closed for 4 months. The ground floor of one friend's house was under at least 3 feet of water for 3 months. It was not just Bangkok which suffered that year. 65 of the coutry's 76 Provinces were declared flood disaster zones.

Not at all. I think it is important to distinguish between types of meal. About 3 years ago, I called various hotels who advertised "high tea" and asked them what the cooked dish was that day. Even the chefs seemed not to know that high tea is not the same as afternoon tea!

I really shouldn't comment as I have not been in a bar for some years. However, I did also have this happen maybe 7 or 8 years ago. It turned out that the man my boy turned to was a regular at the bar, had offed the boy before at least once and was known as a good tipper. At that point, I had not even tipped my boy my usual 100 baht for sitting and chatting to me. I have no idea if your boy knew the other man but suspect that he did. I did not make a fuss as the last thing I wanted was a boy sitting next to me who really preferred to be with another guy he knew to tip well. My view is that buying a drink for a boy should give you some proprietorial rights unless another has told the mamasan he wants to take the boy out. But I don't think logical thinking is ever at the forefront of bar behaviour. Certainly making a scene would just make you look stupid in the eyes of all the bar workers. They'll mark you down as a trouble maker which could affect your enjoyment of any future visit you make.

The Health Minister is a joke and desperate to take over from the PM.

I can't wait for Japan to open its borders. The ¥ is at its lowest for years and any trip will certainly be cheaper than pre-covid.

This may be a political ploy but for 42% of the covid patients in Bangkok hospitals to be seriously ill and showing life-threatening symptoms is surely more than worryng.

A time without the slim, elegant, beautiful skating of Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu seems strange. He has been a part of our lives for virtually 10 years ever since he won the first of his two Olympic Figure Skating Men's Gold Medals back in Sochi in 2014. For me Hanyu has the perfect body for a men's skater - medium height, slim, lithe but not muscular. His progress over the ice was always serene, almost magical, his immersion in the music better than almost any other skater I have seen. His short programme in PyeongChang skating to a Chopin Ballade was definitely the finest skating I have ever seen. He himself was the perfection of beauty - although others naturally have other favourites. Now a series of injuries has forced him to retire at the age of 27. No more will we see that infectious smile, those long legs and pert little butt! Below a few memories including that mesmerising Chopin Ballade. For years there have been rumours that he is gay. He trained with the openly gay former skater Brian Orser in Canada and many of his costumes were made by a gay designer. There was even talk of a romance with another of Orser's students. As arguably Japan's most popular athlete with more websites dedicated to him than any other, hopefully he will now have more time out of the limelight to live the life he wants to lead.

13,000 taking part in the Pride event and 15,000 in the anti-Pride protest rally across the Square? It seems South Korea still has a very long way to go before the LGBT community is accepted. But then that country has always been something of an enigma. A country where the macho image of a man remains the ideal for the vast majority, where every male (with rare exceptions) must undergo almost two years of military service whatever their jobs and professions, where the salaryman leaves for the office every day and returns every evening, letting his wife manage the household finances. It's a country where the new President recently told the husband of the USA's Vice President, "homosexuality can be treated." Yet this same country is the centre of the K-Pop worldwide phenomenon, an entertainment which amost demands that its particpants undergo plastic surgery so thay all look more or less identical and where the boys look incredibly handsome. This in itself is all so new. When I was visiting Seoul many times in the 1980s and early 1990s, I saw no one who looked anything like a K-Pop star. Virtually all young guys seemed boring - at least to me. It was one of many Asia countries I just did not enjoy visiting. A recent Washington Post article underscores the generally homophobic nature of South Koreans. Despite the little progress that has been made recently, homosexuality is still a taboo issue in most households. Look back into Korean history, though, and it was certainly not always thus. During the three main Korean dyasties, homosexual activity was far from uncommon at Court. During the Silla Dynasty, King Hyegong was known for his adventures with other men. He was even described as "a man by appearance but a woman by nature." One group of his elite warriors were called the Hwarang or "Flower Boys", so called because of their homoeroticism and femininity. During the later Koryo Dynasty, King Mokjong and King Gongmin had several male lovers.When his wife died, Gongmin even went so far as to create a Ministry whose sole purpose was to seek out and recruit young men from all over the country to serve his Court. His sexual partners were called "little brother attendants!" King Chungseon is known to have had several long-term relationships with other men. In the Chosun era, it was members of the mobility which frequently engaged in same-sex relationships. As in Japan, travelling theatre groups developed providing various forms of entertainment. Often these included under-age "beautiful boys" and their entertainment included graphic representations of same-sex coupings. All finally came to an end in 1910 when Japan invaded Korea and imposed its often brutal and repressive regime. After those years and the years of virtual American occupation when it restored to power the loathed President/dictator Syngman Rhee, perhaps it's not surprising that, as in China and Japan, so many in the country have now forgotten their homosexual-acceptance pasts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/11/south-korea-gender-lgbt-rights-president-yoon/

This has been a fairly regular topic in this foum and I could not agree more. Didn't we read relatively recently that all the TM6 arrival/departure forms had been moved to warehouses because there was nowhere to store them? When I go to Immigration in that vast barn of unused hideously expensive air-conditioned space at Chaengwattana, I see mountains of paperwork at every officers' desks. Because Thailand insists on pasports being carried at all time (although some use photocopies or laminated copies), the UK government is little better because to renew a 48-page passport it now insists that I have to copy every single page, have them couriered at my expense to the UK and have the new passport couried back again at my expense about 3 months later. But we are advised we can not use the passport during that 3-month waiting period. As one who usually travels vidtually every month, this is ridicuouos. About 10 years ago, all I had to do was take the passport to the Consulate in Wittayu and the new one would be ready at a fraction of the cost in a week. Our bureacratic world is going mad!

I am even more blown away. 13.1 billion light years away. Only 700 million years after the Big Bang? How does one actually measure that? How long has that light taken to reach the telescope? What was the Big Bang? I was always taught that if something inflates then it must do so into something - like a balloon inflating into the air around it or a ship displacing the water it sails in? What existed prior to the Big Bang? Into what did that monster explosion of matter expand? Try as I have, I just cannot get my mind around it!

I am totally blown away when I try to think of space, the big bang and how it is that we come to be living in such a vast universe. I simply cannot comprehend what happened and continues to happen 'out there'. So I am staggered by the early photos from the Webb telescope. That these images were taken just a few hundred million years after the big bang is to me just unbelievable. Images: NASA, BBC, CNN

Since you specifically mention Iraq, I assume you are referring to the USSR's assistance to the Iranians in its 8-year war against Iraq in the 1980s. But that was nowhere near the Putin era. For the period of most of that assistance Gorbachev was in charge of the USSR. Putin was not to appear of the horizon until Yeltsin picked him as his Deputy in 1999. Prior to the present war in Ukraine, Putin has been responsible for 3 wars - the second Chechen war, the war in Georgia and the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014/5. We should also remember that the ghastly Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq when Hussein invaded Iran believing it to have been severaly weakened after the fall of the Shah. There was no love lost between the USSR and Iraq. Then again, this became all but a proxy war during the Cold War with the west supplying vast quatitites of armaments to Iraq. After all, there was no love lost between the west and Khomeini. If this is the wrong war, perhaps @tassojunior can let us know to which one he is referring amd provide a documentary source.

That glut is going to continue. We were told some years ago that the new mega-construction project 'One Bangkok' covering a large part of Rama 4 (and which has resulted in the demise of the old Dusit Thani Hotel) will include five luxury hotels!