macaroni21

It was mentioned in a previous thread that one of the reasons the Chinese and Japanese have fewer hangups about public nudity is because these countries have a tradition of public baths. The Chinese tradition is to have baths that separate the sexes, the Japanese put everybody together. The Thais traditionally bathe in the river while keeping their sarong on. Here's a photo-essay from Shanghaiist about Beijing's oldest public bath. A peek inside Beijing's oldest bathhouse

Date stamps are very important when you have to prove that you were in or not in such and such a country at any point in time. You never know when you can be caught up in some investigation and you need to prove your whereabouts.

I can vouch for that photograph taken at the airport of the queue leading to the queues at exit passport control. Yes, people had to queue approximately 45 minutes (that's what a man nearly reaching the head of the queue said out loud to anyone who cared to hear him) to reach the gateway where a few silly girls check that you have your passport and boarding passes before they allow you to enter the screened-off area. In there you join another set of queues (30 - 35 minutes) before reaching the immigration officer. Many people were shocked when after reaching the head of the first queue they went through the gateway only to see that they had to join another queue. Tempers flared and basically all Thai staff fled rather than deal with hostile situations. That afternoon, no more than 2 in 3 passport desks were operating which is the maximum I have ever seen in use. I have never seen 100 percent open. As for why exit passport control is so slow, from my observations, it's simply because the computer system they use is slow. It gets slower when traffic is high, which is exactly when queues build up. It is possible -- this thought had come to me before -- that one reason they never open all desks is that if too many immigration officers try to access the computer system at the same time, it would crash. Due to the delays at passport control, the air-side of Suvarnabhumi was an athletics contest. Half the people were running, skidding and pushing their way to the aircraft gates, hoping not to miss their flights.

Oh, I meant Thais going as customers in their own right, not as farangs' dates/rental for the evening. In show-less bars, when you said you saw a few single Thais, how do you know they are Thai? Could they not have been other Asians, e.g. Malaysians, Koreans, Singaporeans?

Pattaya's gogo bars rarely see more than 2 or 3 Thais in the audience. They don't even see many Asian tourists -- one of the reasons why they are struggling, a brief high season notwithstanding.

The world over, pop band groupies tend to be female of the screaming hysterical kind. You may wish to hold back on your relocation plans

While the word "reconciliation" has been used, neither side in the present conflict is serious about it. Both sides feel they are under existential threat if they even compromise with the other. Then don't use the word. It smacks of royalist propaganda to label the red shirts as mobs. As foreigners we should try to stay out of the conflict. We should certainly follow the news, we can even offer analysis and opinions, but it's not necessary to echo any side's propaganda. Best to use neutral descriptions. If it's a rally, call it a rally. If it's a procession, call it that. The lead story in the online Bangkok Post, 24 January 2011, seems not to be the Red Shirt event, but the upcoming Yellow Shirt one with expected numbers that are far smaller. Now why does Abhisit think the Yellow Shirts are a greater concern? Bangkok Post, 24 Jan 2011: Abhisit stands firm in face of joint rally Three-sided protest arises from border spat Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is insisting the government will not bow to pressure from the People's Alliance for Democracy, Thai Patriots Network and the Santi Asoke sect ahead of their planned joint rally this week. Mr Abhisit said in a televised address last night that the government would not submit to the groups' demands, particularly the revocation of the memorandum of understanding signed by Thailand and Cambodia in 2000 governing the two countries' border disputes. The PAD is calling on the government to revoke the memorandum which they say puts Thailand at a disadvantage in its dealings with Phnom Penh. It also want the government to force Cambodians from every disputed area and to cancel Thailand's membership of Unesco's World Heritage Committee. "[The PAD and Thai Patriots Network's] actual goal is not to push for the revocation of the memorandum, it is to oust the government from office," Mr Abhisit said. He insisted he would not allow a repeat of the 2008 yellow shirt PAD seizure of Government House, when the pressure group targeted the Samak Sundaravej government. A member of a security team led by Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban predicted yesterday that the number of PAD protesters tomorrow would be relatively small at between 3,000 and 3,500. "But the PAD's capability cannot be underestimated," the source said. The PAD, the Thai Patriots Network and its ally, the Santi Asoke sect, might appear to be at odds, but "the three groups remain unified and their supporters have the capability to hold and continue with protracted rallies". The Thai Patriots Network and Santi Asoke are already encamped outside Government House to try to force the government to alter its stand on its dealings with Phnom Penh. A team of advisers to the prime minister also said they were concerned about the demonstrations. They believe the ultimate goal of the rallies is to ensure there will be no general election later in the year. The security source said the government must explain to the public its position on the border dispute, especially the middle class in the capital who represent a strong PAD support base. The leaders of the PAD could again convince members of the middle class to support the yellow shirt movement, which played a key role in the ouster of the elected Thaksin Shinawatra government in 2006 and succeeding Thaksin-backed nominee administrations in 2008. "If the government fails to curb the PAD rallies, the red shirts are expected to cry foul over double standards and they too will mount pressure on the government," the source said. PAD spokesman Panthep Phongphuaphan said yesterday the rally planned for Makkhawan Bridge on Ratchadamnoen Nok Avenue tomorrow would go ahead and would continue until the group's demands were met. But he denied the PAD was seeking to overthrow the government. Mr Panthep was confident the PAD, the Thai Patriots Network and Santi Asoke would unite at the mass rally tomorrow. Santi Asoke leader Samana Photirak stressed his sect's rally would be peaceful and they would make the ultimate sacrifice by going on hunger strike. Link: Bangkok Post Abhisit stands firm in face of joint rally

1. The use of the word "handsome" is problematic. You will have a hard time pleasing all or even most customers. 2. I have a feeling that dancing nude all night won't work. There is too much exposure. It loses the tease element. 3. Why should drinks be priced more? If one gets a formula right, the volume of customers will be more than enough to beat the competition.

The Red Shirts have promised to hold rallies twice a month in Bangkok. The above is today's protest procession on Ratchadamri Road, the second for January 2011. They are heading to the Democracy Monument where I suppose the main rally will be held this evening. The Red Shirts started forming at Rachatprasong intersection in the forenoon and the procession began around noon. This picture was taken three hours later, and as you can see, vehicles filled with Red Shirts supporters were still flowing through.

Do you have luggage with you? I just saw two overweight farang women struggle with their equally overweight luggage through the stairs between City Line Phaya Thai and Skytrain Phaya Thai.

As I suggested on a different thread recently, most gogo bars in Bangkok are manifestations of rent-seeking behaviour of well-connected officials. They are not exemplars of entrepreneurship. Don't hold your breath expecting them to think or act like businessmen in service industries. They don't know the first thing (nor are they even aware that they don't know) about marketing, brand building, customer satisfaction, cost/benefit analysis (e.g. the mamasan issue) and any number of Business 101's.

Eh? The very title of this thread indicates it is meant to be about nostalgia. And as far as I can see, we've not been talking about Pattaya. Very strange. I think you may have to stick to Jupiter. I may be wrong since things change rapidly, but all the other bars can't seem to go nude without going into fuck mode. It's called obsessive-compulsive behaviour, I believe of which I have some experience.

You mean there were ever great cabaret shows? I've been visiting Pattaya since the early 1990s, and I don't remember any. That said, Copa's present show is particularly dreadful (Boyzboyzboyz might be worse but since I haven't suffered it for years now, I should hold my tongue). From unreliable memory, the differences between the Throb show and Copa's are: 1. Throb interspersed its lipsync acts with items that only had boys doing masculine dance movements. Copa has virtually all its items as diva-style lipsync. 2. Even then, Throb's lipsync acts had a higher energy level in the dancing. The choreography for the boys gave them more masculine moves, whereas Copa's choreography uses the boys in androgynous ways. There was even a time when Throb had a surprisingly acrobatic fat "girl", wasn't there? 3. Throb's dancer boys were more minimally clothed than Copa's, whose present dancer boys tend to be dressed in sequinned vests and frilly collars. Indeed, Copa's crowd is a far cry from Throb's. Copa looks relatively full on some nights only because its seats are spaced much further apart than Throb's. I'm not sure though whether the thinning crowd is only due to the show quality. Two other factors must surely be important. Throb had over 20 (25?) boys for offing. Copa can barely muster 10 of which at least 5 are past sell-by date. Then there is the general slowdown in tourism to Pattaya. The Nation reported last December 29 that tourist numbers in Pattaya fell 9 percent over the past five years. I suspect the fall in gay visitors was greater.

I have no data either. Generally speaking the Thais and Malays are a lot shyer than the Chinese, Koreans or Japanese when it comes to nudity, but then when I start to think about the basis of this very statement, I realise my experiences are limited to all-male settings like saunas. Even in saunas, though, the Thais are distinctly shyer than their East Asian cousins. I therefore wonder. . . if the Thais already start off as shyer in all-male settings, and some of you have observed that they have become even shyer in gogo bars of late, might it be related to the increasing entry of female customers to bars?

Unless there is hidden data I haven't discovered, the rates quoted are the standard rates charged by the massage parlours; they definitely do not include the expected tips. There are no freelancers listed on this site; all masseurs shown are listed against one massage parlour. Look carefully at the phone numbers and you'll notice that they will go to the massage parlour, not directly to the boy. I'm not even sure that every boy listed is available for "home delivery", I guess it depends on the massage parlour's policy.

When you guys speak of "nude" and "natural" being appealing, do you mean nude with a softie or must it be a steelie (which usually implies a tourniquet)?

Crackdowns occur from time to time, and in this instance it does appear that they are acting on residents' complaints, perhaps due to noise, drunkenness, fighting .... I am surprised to see the mention of 12 midnight closing time, though. I thought it was 1 a.m., or maybe 2 a.m. in selected places like Pattaya. One small possibility (and I stress small) is that as Abhisit dusts off the popular policies of the Thaksin years and copies them to win votes, he might recall the Social Order Campaign spearheaded by then-Interior Minister Purachai. Don't forget, there was a large section of the population that supported the campaign then. I wouldn't want to see it come back, but I cannot totally dismiss the possibility that at some point, Abhisit might mount something similar, if probably less heavy-handed.

I had a similar experience coming in on a full-service airline (I'm almost sure it was Cathay Pacific). It parked against an airbridge, but instead of walking through the airbridge into the terminal, we were directed to walk OUT OF THE AIRBRIDGE down a flight of metal stairs into busses! Until now, I have no idea why it happened that way. Suvarnabhumi in my opinion is less an airport than a railway station. It is designed to be impressive but ultimately finds itself having to move tens of thousands of people every hour, sometimes in well-thought-out ways, other times with make-do arrangements. It's not particularly bad -- I've seen worse places (Heathrow anyone?) but it's not up there among my list of pleasant experiences. The things I hate most about Suvaranbhumi are: 1. Lack of seating. I get the feeling it is deliberate to force you to patronise a restaurant, which might not be so bad if not for. . . 2. Lack of reasonably priced cafes on the air-side 3. Long queues at immigration -- and still many booths remain closed. 4. No free wi-fi. I can also imagine that if I were not such a frequent visitor to Bangkok, I might find the airport's layout too confusing, and signage lacking. As for the satellite terminal, I think the 2015 completion date is far too optimistic. They have to build a subway under the parking apron to the new satellite terminal. Think of the chaos that it's going to cause and the difficulty in getting it done. At Kuala Lumpur, they built the subway and satellite from the start.

I doubt if any internally coherent program has been enunciated by the Red Shirts. This may sound like criticism, so I need to expand on it a little. Of the Red Shirts, one has to distinguish between what I'd call Tier 1: the leadership (of which there are subgroups, I'm sure), Tier 2: the committed organisers and mid-level activists, and Tier 3: the mass base of supporters and sympathizers. It does look as if for tier 1, you are right -- the assumption of power is the end in itself. Many of them were turfed out after the coup and banned from participating in politics from the dissolution of the Thai Rak Thai party. It is totally understandable that reversing their political exile is their chief objective, and to do that, they have to regain power. Tiers 2 and 3 very likely think like most supporters of ideologies anywhere around the world. They don't ask searching questions of their own leaders with respect to programs/manifestoes. Instead they extend their trust, believing that the leaders have their interests in mind and will do "the right thing" when they come to power. I know this sounds awfully like the characterisation made of Red Shirts by the establishment's propagandists (that Red Shirt supporters are gullible, have been duped, etc), but this same characterisation (trusting/faith) can be made of Yellow Shirts, of supporters of the French Socialist Party, of the millions of Filipinos who voted strongly for Benigno Aquino, of tea-party supporters of Sarah Palin, etc. It's just a universal phenomenon. The difference is that in a free democratic setting, there is the independent media, non-aligned academics etc, who take on the role of asking searching questions and critiquing party programs. Having to respond to them is the chief reason for politicians explaining themselves. The trouble with Thailand now is that that space for a non-aligned independent free media is much reduced. The tenor of the times forces everybody to take sides. Censorship closes more doors. The politics of civil debate have been squashed leaving only the politics of megaphones and the street. Nowhere in the world are manifestoes explained clearly in the politics of the street. Thailand is no different. It may well be that there are intelligent, serious people among the Red Shirts organisers (tier 2) who are asking precisely these questions - so what shall we do after we have won? - but they probably feel that open debate among themselves might give the impression of disunity at a time when they are facing daily threats. So either the discussion is held behind closed doors or it is postponed till after they have gained power. Again, while it may sound like criticism, let's be fair: Is any US presidential campaign all that different?

Oh dear, I wasn't intending to open a whole new discussion on China when I made the brief mention of the Empress Dowager What I really wanted to do, but I guess I was too subtle and so the message was lost, was to point out that one has to be careful when thinking about royal succession. One cannot assume that when a king passes on, a crown prince fully takes over. Bob for example, said in a different thread that: "Perhaps someday there is a new monarch who for whatever reason wants to promote his own agenda - which might even be a surprising turn to more true democracy and reduction of rampant corruption." History never totally repeats itself, that is true, but the twists and turns of other people's pasts can remind us there will be twists and turns in the present and future. History itself can suggest the different possible outcomes should we find ourselves in an analogous situation today. One outcome that Chinese history has suggested is that it's the dowager who may be the more important person to watch as the linchpin of the future, than the crown prince. Empress Dowager Cixi totally overshadowed her own son, the new Emperor. She maintained control of the state; he was neither interested nor capable of doing so. And yet, maintaining control of the state is not the same as getting one's way. Taking on ruling powers means taking on all the problems of ruling a country. Even the Thai army knew this: Look how quickly they wanted to relinquish day-to-day control back to a new constitution and elections after General Sonthi Boonyaratglin seized power in September 2006 -- elections which backfired when it returned a pro-Thaksin government. What I also wanted to suggest by mentioning Empress Dowager Cixi's example, was that there are forces of history greater than any government's control. This is especially true when a palace faction seizes power with the intention of resisting reform. Whereas in Japan, the Meiji Restoration launched a reform process that created the first Asian industrial economy and military power that could stand up to the encroaching Western powers by the turn of the 20th Century, the contemporaneous rule of Cixi, resisting reform, only led to the further weakening of China. The outcome was greater misery for its people and a more violent series of revolutions as history caught up. Khor Tose said in that other thread that: "economics, while still an important factor, is not the principal motivating issue behind the democratic movement.. What I see is the real core of this democratic movement is a strong desire to have a real voice in their government, and greater control of their lives." Exactly. There are forces in motion that too many upper-middle-class Bangkokians don't seem to be fully aware of, as can be seen by what Fountainhall has reported -- that in Bangkok, all he hears are slanted viewpoints. Well, that was all I wanted to suggest by mentioning Chinese history: that nothing may change even if a new king emerges and thus the stalemate can continue for a long time. And yet at the same time, change continues -- in the form of pressure building up inexorably until it blows. Like in China. Like in Imperial Russia of the same time period. Like in Iran 30 years ago. Like in Nepal very recently. Or then again, not. Has it blown in Myanmar yet? In North Korea?

Did the mamasan mean packed with boys or packed with customers? Were you in Hero on a Sunday? If you were, one possibility I can think of was that both boys and customers avoided the Phloenjit and lower Sukhumvit area because of the Red Shirt demonstration planned for the same day. My experience too, and perhaps the chief reasons why Hero is doing well. Business can be very simple, but many places forget these basics - integrity, reliability and value-for-money. Hero's priorities are correct: dominate a niche, maintain staff discipline and hygiene of the premises. Instead, some massage parlours go overboard in designer chic interiors or flashy websites and then neglect the basics. Hell, Hero doesn't even have a website. I thought it was 600. Did they reduce the normal price or did they give you a discount because you booked two boys?

Exactly. Like newspapers giving away content for free on the internet and now unable to make money on their print editions, the bars have given away so much nudity they debased the value of it. The problem they face: how to get out of the pit they stumbled into and go back to the tease model.

In the major Chinese cities and in Singapore (I'm not so sure about Hong Kong), the state funds the construction of mass transportation systems, though the actual day-to-day operations are the responsibility of a corporation. The result is that the state has control of master-planning and connectivity, and through arm-twisting bus companies, have implemented common ticketing systems. While I haven't fully understood the systems in Bangkok, Manila and Kuala Lumpur, just by looking at how things are run, one suspects that the model being applied is vastly different. In these three cities, it looks like the state awarded projects completely to commercial parties to build, operate and run (but doesn't the govt of Thailand have a stake in BTS and MRT?) and these commercial entities did their own route planning and construction. Rather than working synergistically with each other and bus companies, they compete against each other, unlike in the more authoritarian states where through the "guiding hand" or "master planner" that is the state, they work synergistically. I know that in Manila it was a huge scandal when the company awarded the right to build and run the MRT-3 line went bankrupt. The company had to bear all the cost of construction and operations, but the government (to please its voters) controlled ticket prices. When the company went belly up, there was a real risk that the trains would simply stop running, and so the government had to nationalise the company and take over all its debt. Needless to say, the now-govt-owned MRT-3 line loses money every minute a train runs. The stations are filthy, the ticket-dispensing machines don't work, the queues in front of ticket windows stretch 50 persons long during off-peak hours, and the trains rattle your bones throughout the journey. Bangkok, KL and Manila are characterised by the absence of good connectivity and lack of through-ticket systems. It is the result of a political decision to put as little government money as possible into urban rail projects; which in turn means the government has little planning control and little leverage when it comes to getting all the companies to work together.

It's gotten worse than that. The wasteland has since been sold and is now a huge construction site all boarded up. So commuters arriving at KL Sentral on the airport express and wanting to get to the monorail (why?) have to take a long detour around the perimeter of the construction site. Going across the wasteland as in the old days, on hindsight, seems so much better!

Whatever happened to the Airport bus service? From Don Muang, there were 3 or 4 express bus services, to Silom hotels, Sukhumvit hotels etc. When Suvarnabhumi opened, I vaguely recall there was the same bus service, but have they been discontinued? Eons ago, I used the service once - it took forever to reach the hotel I was in, having to wind its way through several hotels before mine - and never used it again. But I used to see the airport buses coming down Silom Road or Sukhumvit once in a while. I guess the service has stopped?