thaiophilus

Note that on older ID cards his date of birth will be shown in Buddhist Era, not AD/CE so you will need to subtract 543 from the year. You might want to memorise the relevant number before setting off for the bar Also, the name on the card may be only in Thai script, but whether it is or not, you won't recognise it. In most situations Thais use and are known by a short nickname, which is usually unrelated to the formal name on their ID.

or 3x100 for prize money

In gogo bars they generally aren't wearing enough to conceal the loot and in host bars, as others have said, this isn't usually a problem. You are more likely to lose money through confusing red 100 and purple 500 baht notes in a dimly-lit bar, or even by forgetting you gave 1000 and receiving change for 500 - which is why waiters often make a point of telling you what you handed over, to avoid arguments later.

No, nothing like that. The atmosphere in Nature Boy is a little less formal than the Twilight (now Patpong) style bars. There was a conversation (paraphrased) (I have already invited near-naked boy over from stage and bought him a drink) Me: you sa-moke me? Boy: Here? Me: Here. Boy: OK but you pay bar same same we go room. (All this was of course in the interest of trying everything once. So now when anyone says "have you no shame?" I can truthfully answer "no" )

That doesn't follow . At Nature Boy a few years ago, you had to pay the bar the equivalent of an off fee if anything more than mild groping took place on the premises. Also, the bar gets the money for the boy-drink, and the boy is only unavailable to serve other customers for a relatively short time.

I can't imagine the company that manufactures the cards will be too pleased by this loss of revenue...

The UK is not united (now there's a surprise) on this topic. In England you get the cheap & cheerful postal occult-blood screening test (non-invasive, you take samples over three days, scrape on a special card, seal the envelope well , post back to the lab) starting at 60 and every two years thereafter. In Scotland I believe screening starts at 50, for Wales and N. Ireland I have no idea. It's only a screening test and only detects blood, but that's what screening is about - low-cost, low-risk, imprecise, but if it catches even a fraction of potential cancers early it will save lives. Of course the literature that comes with the kit includes advice about seeing your doctor if you have any other symptoms that might indicate cancer.

Definitely a bad idea. But there are any number of good reasons why someone might be interested in these things. Not pollution, not worries, knowledge! It might be an interest in the history of "our" community. It might be curiosity about changes of bar style or policy. It might be any number of things. And there's an old saying about those who don't study history...

oops, somehow the last message was posted twice. Please don't think I think my words are so important they need repetition

I wouldn't think so. A friend of mine (British, white, male, 50s) was seriously hassled by Canadian immigration a couple of years ago, basically because he had (in their view) too many Thai stamps in his passport. And he was only proposing to spend one night there between flights.

I wouldn't think so. A friend of mine (British, white, male, 50s) was seriously hassled by Canadian immigration a couple of years ago, basically because he had (in their view) too many Thai stamps in his passport. And he was only proposing to spend one night there between flights.

Same name, or a new venture? I remember its previous incarnation as the "Cocobanana", in tribute(?) to the Copacabana (as it then was) down the soi.

Others have answered the rest of this, seriously and otherwise, but here are several possible answers, also of varying degrees of seriousness, depending on nation, culture and century: 1) Mail was not delivered, people collected it from the post office. See "Poste Restante". 2) In smaller communities, the postman knew where everyone lived (not the address as such, just how to get to the house in question). 3) Only the rich could afford the post, and everyone knew where they lived. 4) In feudally-structured societies, the overlord extracted taxes and raised armies from his underlings in exchange for not killing them. His tax-gatherers knew exactly where they lived. There was no "government" or "citizen" and hence no need for them to communicate.

That's what was confusing me. I wouldn't have thought of the Malaysia's "superior" (that's the lowest grade) rooms as "VERY small". Their website claims 22 square metres (which I believe) and they have enough space for two beds (one double, one single), bedside table, desk, chairs, TV, refrigerator, plus a separate bathroom. The pictures here give a fair idea: http://www.malaysiahotelbkk.com/superior-room.html I recall in the distant past they used to have a few "standard" rooms which were smaller and cheaper, but those are long gone. And on one occasion they messed up my booking and I spent a night in a very small room in the "Malaysia Guest House" which used to be opposite what is now the Lido restaurant off Soi Sri Bamphen.

Which hotel? the conversation in this thread has jumped around several countries ... (hint: click on "Quote" below a post to supply context )

You can always email them (despite the websites I've never booked them any other way): info (at) malaysiahotelbkk.com should get a reply within a day.

Historically I think their prices were considered low for what they offered, so maybe there has been some catching up in recent years. As for refitting, not in January - they had freshened the paintwork, but nothing you'd call a major refit of the "superior" (meaning standard) rooms. But if I try to book via their own website for 25-26 December (representative of high season), it's offering a "flash sale" superior room for only B800, or 900 with breakfast. If you assume the "sale" is an early-booking discount of 20%, the price is no different from a year ago.

Ah. Yes, I see the difference. The OYO branding is new. It's difficult to determine the real room prices now, with so many booking site "special deals", but when I stayed there in January 2019 the rate was B1090 for a "single superior" room. Rates I have paid (for early January of the year noted): 2007: B688 2008: B708 2009-2012: B808 2014-2016: B868 2017-2018: B950 2019: B1090 I don't seem to have records for 1996-2006, when my bookings were probably made by fax (and there were real multipart airline tickets!).

The Malaysia recently celebrated 50 years of ownership by the Ma family with some redecoration and mildly increased prices, but I don't believe the owners or their policies have changed.

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.

There were far fewer families and straight couples back then. It's only recently that Pattaya has been marketed as a "family" destination. Also Jomtien was less developed, and didn't have all the hotels and condos that populate the beach today.

I don't know how you can say that. After all, they have done it no less than 20 times since 1932

My experience too, though most people (anecdotally at least) report having more problems in the opposite direction.

Don't hold your breath. When I reported an error, it took several months for them to move Na Kluea from the Big Buddha to its true location. And looking just now I see the Big Buddha is currently "Gran Buda".

Do they normalize by the number of aircraft the airline owns, number of passengers carried, passenger miles travelled? If not, those figures may be facts but what you can infer from them is very limited. Even if normalized, they are still not very useful. Fatal crashes are rare events (at least for airlines visiting first-world destinations, or the regulators would ban them pretty quickly :-) so statistically they are outlying near-random noise on the tail of the distribution. Serious accidents usually only happen when more than one thing goes wrong at the same time, and often procedures are changed as a result of the accident investigation, so the same combination of events won't happen next time. On the other hand, some lessons learned are then forgotten, so a "safe" airline may become less safe through complacency. Also, 20 years is a long time in corporate terms, and the management of today's airline may have nothing in common with what it was 20 years ago. Simple example: airline A makes two daily long-haul flights per day and has had one fatal crash in the last 20 years, airline B has 500 regional flights a day and has had two fatal crashes. Does that make airline A twice as safe as B? Then consider Airline C which has had none at all. Are they "infinitely" more safe than A or B? Or are we just looking at events that are so unlikely the statistics have no predictive value?