macaroni21

That was exactly my thought when I read what emiel wrote. And not only waiters, I would not use mamasans or papasans when negotiating offs with the gogo boys either.

In all the discussion so far about Phuket on this thread, no one has mentioned the taxi mafia yet. Perhaps we should forewarn 12s12? @AlexThompson were taxi prices as ridiculous n 2018 as I remember it from several years earlier?

This is quite common in East Asian countries - and Turkey. If it's not a bench, it's a stool. Millions of people across these countries wash themselves sitting down. It also makes it easier to wash one's feet thoroughly. Like the bum gun, westerners can learn quite a lot from these countries.

I have "outed" myself as the blogger time and again since more than ten years ago, but few people seem to notice, 🥲ha ha ha. It's a little deflating, I must say ... By the way, the latest two posts are about Tawan - one recent report and another from 13 years ago. Compare the two and weep!

It does sound like an attractive alternative to flying, but how badly do I want to go to Koh Samui? The answer isn't quite a Yes. I also notice that it is a roll-on roll-off ferry and I tend to get a bit nervous about these vessels. There are stories of doors that don't close properly or broken, leading to sinking. Many years ago, I was on one that hit rough seas and while the door looked well secured, water still managed to seep in quite noticeably. OK, maybe it wasn't that well secured, but I am not qualified to judge. It didn't take long before about 5 - 10 cm of water sloshed around the car deck, and car owners were visibly worried, as were us ordinary passengers. Fortunately, the ship rounded a cape not long after and the sea was much calmer the other side, and anyway we soon reached port. But I told myself: think twice before I take such ferries again.

They may not be numerous but there are. In Pattaya, the cabaret shows at The Venue and Castro draw decent crowds. The difference is that these bars position themselves as showbars and the clients go there wanting/ expecting that. I think their prices are also much lower than the boyticeria prices ( haven't been in lately) so they achieve a high-ish level of customer satisfaction. The boyticeria, on the other hand, charge customers for their shows when customers are looking for sex and do not care much for their shows. It's like @Gaybutton's example of some hotels making all their guests pay for Christmas dinner whether they wish to participate or not. And as @emiel1981 reported above, even if the show price is jusifiably built into the first drink, why is it also in the second drink?

Once again, @emiel1981's observations match mine - this time about Tarntawan Hotel. It is habitable, but it's getting really old. The dark wood of the heavy furniture is the one thing I remember most. I found it made the room gloomy, and that's not a mood I want to be in. I also have a personal dislike of bathtubs. A modern shower stall is important to me. preferably one big enough for two. So, except for maybe 2 visits perhaps 10 - 12 years ago, I have not been back.

That was true in July too. Credit to Hotmale. If only more bars followed that example. By the way, did you pay 350 baht or 400 baht for your first drink there? They certainly have, but the role of shows in the bars' business model has changed to dominate the business objective. This makes the boy hunter feel neglected. His interests are not well served. But first, we need to distinguish three types of shows: They are (a) live porn, (b) fancy dancing by boys (or, more often than not, hopelessly amateurish attempts at fancy dancing), and (c) fake singing by fake women (I think someone will rap me for being politically incorrect). Live porn and some degree of fancy dancing goes well with a boyticeria; it complements the business well, since it interests the same kind of customer, heightens the erotic quotient in the bar and lengthens the time he stays in the bar. Fancy dancing should not dominate the show programme otherwise the programme starts to slip into non-erotic mode. Fake singing by fake women is actually counter-productive for boyticerias. Customers aren't in the bars to watch women, real of fake, why waste their time demanding that they watch? The ladyboys tend to be overdressed and the performances are more like cabaret. The nett effect is to lower the erotic quotient, replacing it with bright lights, voluminous costumes and deafening volume. My memory from the days of Twilight and Barbiery in the 1990s was that live porn dominated their show programmes. There were some numbers by fake women, but not enough to seriously alter the tone of the bar. Then Extreme Bar came along (Soi Twilight, early 2000s?) and they introduced fancy dancing. They did not flash anything from under the belt in the entire programme and within a couple of years, the bar went out of business. But the damage was done. The other bars began to "improve" their shows. More fancy dancing, usually with real dancers brought in for the evening to do 2 or 3 numbers (nowadays we still see that in the "B-Boys" break dance numbers), and when bars needed to fill an hour-long programme, more diva items were added. Then, from 2005, Thailand saw huge increases in visitors from Asian countries and Russia. What happened next to the business model of the bars and to pricing is described in my latest post 15 years of price rises. These new visitors to Thailand, while middle-class enough to travel, weren't big spenders like Westerners. Offing boys might have been too costly for most of them. In any case, as I wrote: 6 - 7 years later, these Asian tourists were no longer surging into the Soi Twilight bars. My blogpost tries to explain why. But more damage had been done. Firstly, the shows had been bulked up; they were now too long in duration and too heavy with gatoeys (ladyboys) and secondly, drink prices had gone up to levels that were off-putting for customers who were primarily interested in the available boys and booking one of them out. Worse, as @emiel1981 also noticed, the book-able boys are mostly hidden away during the show. In short: Shows in the form of short bursts of live porn add value to the bars businesses; shows in the form of hour-long wanna-be cabaret subtract value.

@emiel1981 Thank you for the report on Jupiter. Your observations are exactly like my assessment in 2018 or 2019, and I have not had any interest in going back since. From a mix of mamasan whispers and my own observations, the hetero women's behaviour don't mirror gay men's. They get more "head over heels" and generally tip better than the men. However, they hardly ever take the boys off - partly because they often come into the bar as a group for entertainment, not to hunt for physical sex (see quote below). Unfortunately, from the gogo boys' point of view, if tips are generous enough for sharing 10 or 15 minutes with women - and anyway their natural interest is in women - there is less and less interest in accepting offs from men, where they will have to WORK for their money. This partly explains the tendency to ask for more and more. Here's a good description from Magic Men: 7 major differences between male strip clubs and female strip clubs. The article references hetero strip clubs, but they equally describe what happens in gay strip clubs and the behaviour of women in these same spaces (as in Jupiter and BoyzBoyzBoyz). Let me quote a key passage: Jupiter (and Moonlight) are taken in by the style of fashion shows, where the "models" do runway walks, often at quite a fast pace with unsmiling expressions. I wonder if somewhere in the psychology of women, they like this kind of thing.... They are also mimicking the shows of the Thai bars e.g. Fake Club. Not that I've been to them, but I have seen videos. They get a good (and mixed) crowd, and their shows too are often like runway fashion shows. I won't be surprised if the Silom-Surawong bar owners and managers think that this is the route to success. But these are show bars, not sex-offing bars (according to my Thai friends). At least in the above video, it was a guy, not a woman, who was invited to the "chair dance". The next video is perhaps their full show for an evening (or most of it). But places like Fake Club are show bars where friends go in groups to enjoy a night out, not sex-offing bars. And frankly, from the videos, Fake Club does a better job of shows than any Silom-Surawong bar. The problem is this: If we had to choose between going to a show bar with no realistic chance of a satisfactory off and a sex-offing bar with no show, which would we go to? I would choose the latter with no hesitation, and I think many members here would too. Yet the Silom-Surawong bars keep investing in shows with gatoeys and loud music. That shows you how much the bar owners understand their market.

Thanks for those details. It's already interesting. When I was there in late July, about 5 weeks before you, the drink price was 350 baht. You are now reporting 400 baht. The crowd size you saw was better than what I saw. I think the peak crowd when I was there was about 25 -30 people.

Wow, so many replies within 24 hours. I used to choose hotels in or close to Boyztown, but one trip, the noise level annoyed me. Ever since, I have chosen to stay in Jomtien Complex, even though I hardly ever spend time in the Jomtien Complex bars (they do nothing for me). Only the Boyztown bars hold any interest for me. Not even the Sunee bars (RIP). So why do I stay in Jomtien Complex? Proximity to the beach. There are really two things on my agenda when I am in Pattaya: boys (gogo) and beach. When I stayed in Boyztown to be near the bars, I had to commute every morning by Songtaew to Jomtien. Now, I stay in Jomtien Complex to be near the beach and commute every evening to Boyztown.

I have seen those coach loads. They would not be taking them to the Agate but to the Blind Massage place next door to it. I mentioned a coach in my report from 2020. See: https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2020/04/07/blind-optimism-blah-outcomes/

I'm sure you will have a blast. Enjoy!

I think these are interesting times seeing how slowly or rapidly Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket recover from Covid-19. In my July visit, I noticed some instability in pricing. I saw a few instances of price reductions in bars' desperate attempts to get customers. I have a feeling that prices in September will be different from what I saw in July. If you could report on bars' prices each time you walk into a bar, it will help me assess their business recovery. Personally, I am a collector of details, but it would be presumptuous of me to expect the same of anybody else, but if you're happy to help out, we can compare notes regarding: - price of drink (there may be different prices for second drink and boy-drink) - off-fee. Most of us do make a mental note of how many boys available, but it would also be interesting to note - how many customers in the bar (need to make a note of time too) - ratio of Asians to farang; - ratio of female customers to male (a rough measure of how gay/straight the audience is) And if you could take a close look at the doors of Lucky Boys, Screw Boys and Bangkok Massage (all on Patpong 2) for any signs of re-opening, e.g. interior clean-up or remodelling. And yes, the bar with the big tank at the end of Soi Twilight was Classic Boys.

I mentioned Indonesia. There's a film called The Act of Killing (full movie with English subtitles available on Youtube) in which the killer Anwar speaks to camera and re-enacts what he did. The WIkipedia page says that "The film focuses on the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 in the present day. The genocide led to the killing of almost a million people, ostensibly for belonging to the local communist community. When Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, following the failed coup of the 30 September Movement in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry in Medan (North Sumatra) were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. They also extorted money from the ethnic Chinese as the price for keeping their lives. Anwar is said to have personally killed 1000 people."

Not a crazy story at all. This really happened to millions of Cambodians in 1975 - 1979 after the Khmer Rouge took over. I don't see any embellishment at all in the story he told you. The horrors in the histories of Southeast Asian countries are many. Indonesia in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, the 25 years of Vietnam wars, the japanese occupation and brutalities during the 2nd World War (do visit the River Khwai bridge and cemetery), and the decades of atrocities suffered by the Rohingya and other minorities in Burma, just to name a few examples.

So true! What a waste of lovely brown skin. And that ties in with @bucky13's use of the term "peer pressure". The boys make these silly choices largely because of this. First there were silicone dicks, but many of these victims have since moved out of sex work. Then in the decade 2000 -2010, half the boys kept moustaches, but at least these could be shaved off when the fad passed. Now we're at tattoos which, like silicone dicks, are permanent. I don't know if this is really a change from before. In this oldest profession, certain survival strategies were honed many generations before us. But, to stay on olddaddy's point - how are moneyboys different from 20 years ago - let me give you one memorable incident from the early to mid 1990s. It was in Barbiery Bar ( a handful of us may remember that bar quite fondly) and one evening I was quite taken with a particular gogo boy. I got him to sit with me for a while and then asked if he was available for short time. I remember his exact words to this day: "I am expensive," he said. "1,000 baht." Indeed, that was expensive, for at the time the going rate was 600 - 700 baht. So I tipped him 20 baht and let hm leave. These figures may leave some of the newer members of this forum gasping. On the subject of inflation, I kick myself for not having kept good records of my expenses from the 1990s. But I do have notes from the period 2005 - 2010, and I am drafting a post for ShamelessMack2 showing how prices have leapt up since that period, especially when compared against Thailand's much more moderate increase in the Consumer Price Index. Coming soon....

That's not quite the way I hear it. It sounds more like "ke-lid-mart". to me, and the first time I heard it, (which was literally decades ago, but hasn't much changed) I ended up thinking the speaker was saying "climax". It was most unnerving that the speaker was a female hotel receptionist.

I watched the entire show a few weeks ago. Not once did it remind me of Magic Mike (not that I've been to see the real Magic Mike show, but I've seen videos of it). It had a combination of lip syncing putting-on-the-pounds gatoeys and (biggish) boys half obscured by tattoos and masks. In nearly all the show items in which boys participated, erect appendages were the centre of attention, not their "dancing" skills à la Magic Mike of which there was none -- by the 4th such act, it got really old.... The worst part was the screaming by the women who made up 40 - 50% of the audience, and the loooong (80- 90 minutes?) duration.

Prepare yourself... wherever you choose to sit, its not possible to be inconspicuous in a room the size of a kitchen 🤣

Ya, I too figured that Tomm42 was referring to the massage parlour in Sukhumvit Plaza, except that I couldn't recall the name of the place. Thanks, Vinapu, for filling the gap. I loved that place, though the physical line-up could be quite intimidating with up to a dozen guys looking expectantly at you to be picked. With the clue from the name "Uniman", I revived my old reports from 2009 and 2010. Reviewing the reports, the place changed hands between those two years and was called B&N before it was Uniman. As you can see, I had really happy times there. Go to www.shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog

Um, actually there is no need to factor in the duration of stay. My calculation was very simple. 11,000,000 visitors (from China) in a year divided by 365 days = 30,137 persons arriving each day. What I did assume was no significant seasonal variation. If one was hoping to estimate how many Chinese tourists would be in the country at any given time, then yes, one would have to factor in duration of stay. A week or so ago, I saw somewhere (can't remember where now) a figure of 5 - 6 days as the average duration for a tourist from East Asia. So, if we use 5 as the multiplier, then at any given time, there would be 30,000 x 5 = 150,000 Chinese tourists darting around Thailand.

Airbnb.

In 2019, about 11 million Chinese visited Thailand. That's about 30,000 a day. If we assume 200 passengers per plane, it means 150 flights a day.

In gogo bars most will not bottom, in massage parlours, about half will not. So, to avoid disappointment or unpleasantness later, it's important to settle this question beforehand. Do note that nearly all boys, even when they agree to bottom, will insist on protected sex. From gogo bars, all will do short time, but some cannot do overnight (commitments early morning, for example) so if you're keen on long-time (overnight), ask first. As for fees, some of us settle that in advance too, but some other members leave that unsaid. As a newbie, it may be better to settle that question in advance too at least until you're surer about the going rates.