PeterRS

So you are saying he did not misreport me!

I just finished watching the movie Close. Like many, including critics, I found tears flowing. The story line is partly explained above, how the often intense and innocent friendships we make in our early years are thrown away as puberty hits us and we try to fit in with a different crowd of older boys and girls. The extraordinary thing about this movie is that the two 13-year old boys who are the main characters had never acted before. One, Eden Dambrine, gives a stunning performance as Leo, one which I consider better than that of Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name when he was nominated for an Oscar. Eden has the most beautiful large eyes and it is three close-up shots in particular where they fill the screen and we know eactly what he is thinking behind those eyes. The first is when his friend Remi is playing the oboe at a primary school concert. The adoration in those eyes is remarkable. Then, after they have moved to a secondary school and the bullies and the girls have had a go at them about being gay (but that is never explained as fact and they were probably too young at know it at the time) and not fitting in, when Remi is discovered not to be on the bus returning from a field trip to a beach, those eyes betray the horror Leo fears has happened. Finally, whereas the opening shots of the movie have the two boys running together and laughing through fields of beautiful flowers, the final one has Leo alone in those fields a year later. When he turns and faces the camera, we know that while he has grown more into a teenager with other friends and interests, the eyes tell us he still longs for Remi. The blame he long felt and did not acknowledge for pushing Remi away and thus perhaps causing his suicide has finally gone - but not the memories. The vdo below is of the 10-minute ovation given to the movie by the audience when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. The interesting part, to my thinking, is when the director Lukas Dhont takes a microphone to dedicate the movie to all the friends that he pushed away during his early life. It is very moving, and probably is something we all experienced and indeed is what the movie is basically about. Please just start at 10'00 minutes in. You need only watch for 1'20".

What a nonsense sentence! You misreported me - or are you now saying you didn't? What you said was a stupid!

With respect the Minister stated, as we have heard before, that a surcharge will be added to cover things like medical costs. Thousands of tourists turning up each bearing an insurance policy from their home country in a foreign language is likely to defeat the less than bright Immigration officers.

I was in Singapore for 4 days around 10 days ago. Took SQ for the first time in more than a decade. Daytime flights on A350 aircraft. I was actually surprised that the meals were so tasty! The odd thing is they are served in cardboard boxes. Yet the food was plentiful and way better than I have had recently on CX and China Airlines. Service certainly was way below what I remember from a plethora of earlier SQ flights. Apart from one really handsome steward, all the FAs are now considerably older and seem to have forgotten how to smile.

Why not also look at the conditions for "acts of war"? Fuel sortages can be for a multiple reasons as I outlined earlier, but most insurance policies specifically rule out anything resulting from an act of war.

My post in answer to yours clearly referred to the small subsidiary of Lufthansa - not to Lufthansa itself. That Lufthansa CityLine operates 27 small feeder planes with maximum 90 passengers from and to Frankfurt and Munich. It is the parent airline Lufthansa that is cutting the large number of flights over several months.

I rarely pick up a bible and don't recall the Noah story well. Did the Lord above warn him of a flood that would cover the whole earth? That is massively unlikely as in those days the earth was surely regarded by those living in it merely as a tiny area of our planet. A flood, if one happened, no doubt covered just that minute area and not the far larger regions about whom those living in the time of Genesis had not the slightest clue.

As well as a lot of politicians using their corruption gains to buy them.

That was a small subsidiary Lufthansa CityLine that was due to be closed down anyway in 2027.

There used to be a Louis Vuitton store in the lobby of one of Hong Kong's top hotels, The Peninsula. On many days of the week you simply could not get inside the store and there would be a queue of young Japanese office ladies waiting to get in. Some Japanese tour operators organised luxury shopping tours to Hong Kong where these types of luxury goods were a good deal cheaper than in Japan. Many of these Japanese shoppers reckoned they saved more than the cost of their air fares and hotel rooms because their purchases were so much cheaper in Hong Kong.

It may well be. I did include links which I think mentioned this fact and presumably some reasoning. It's just that I know little about the luxury market. I have foreign friends who bought an apartment in the tall Sukhothai Residences (across from the now dead Babylon) about a dozen years ago when real estate in that particular property was the most expensive in the city. Much more recently the far smaller building on the left at the top of Witthayu One 89 Wireless was regarded as the most expensive with prices for ultra luxury apartments selling at around Bt. 500,000 per sq.m. This now appears to have been equalled and in some units overtaken by Scope Langsuan. Look at any site dealing with Bangkok luxury apartments and you see that many have been and are still being contructed and sold with prices in the Bt. 250,000 - 300,000 per sq.m. range. I suspect many are snapped up by Chinese, Russian and other mega rich in countries where they might wish to hide their wealth. Some of these will no doubt be the people targetted by the ultra-expensive Thailand Privilege Visas. https://bangkokresidential.com/bangkoks-12-best-luxury-condo-developments-in-2025

Japan always had some crazy prices. I remember one time staying wth friends near Roppongi Crossing. Nearby was a booze shop. It was selling bottles of Dom Perignon champagne at prices cheaper than Duty Free at any airport! On a first visit in the early 1980s, I noticed in the window of an uparket retailer a bottle of Remy Martin XO brandy at ¥50,000. Expensive then at around US$200. By the time I ceased working there and returned to Hong Kong, that same bottle was in the same window at exactly the same price - yet in US$ terms it was over $410. I asked the manager why the price had not been brought down to around ¥25,000. He said that Japanese people perceived the value of a product and if he brought the price down it would be regarded as inferior! Odd!

Ownership of the Spratley Islands is disputed by several countries including China, Vietnam, The Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei. The islands are really not islands as such - more like ocean reefs, although China has built bases and outposts on several. But they are important both as major fishing grounds and more because of the reserves of oil and gas assumed to be below the surface. China's interest also arises because it is part of the shipping lane in the South China Sea with Taiwan at its north end. @jason1975 is correct that the last really major skirmish between China and Vietnam was in 1988 when 64 Vietnamese soldiers were killed. But occasional skirmishes still break out. The irony is that all the other countries are closer to the Islands with China being the furthest away. China's claim to them dates back to maps purported to have been drawn up 500 years ago, and also the 1945 Treaty at the end of the War in the Pacific which seems to have had a clause giving them to the government in Beijing. But since the Americans basically wrote that Treaty, it seems like this might be yet another case of American interference where it has only resulted in major non-American regional disputes. https://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/china/

With Trump pulling out of talks on reopening the Straits of Hormuz, the jet fuel situation can only get worse. Some airlines have already increased fuel surchares. Cathay Pacific started this last month. Since April 1 there has been a second round of increases. All tickets irrespective of class now attract an additional 34% surcharge. Round trip flights to Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Europe, Middle East and Africa now have a US$500 surcharge. Inter-Asian tickets now add US$100. On long haul flights this represents a 174% increase in little less than one month. The carrier has also stated it will review fuel surcharge amounts every two weeks. Singapore Airlines has already raised fares but I can not find out by how much because the airline merges fuel costs into the basic ticket price. THAI has said it plans to increase by 10%-15% which seems pretty low compared to the hikes by CX. As I wrote yesterday, there are still some deals to be had with Qatar now offering limited business class seats from Bangkok to London at Bt. 99,000 for the next few weeks. But with Doha having the USA's largest air base in the Middle East and already targetted by Iranian drones, the chances of last minute cancellations must surely be quite high. 19 of 20 major airlines have already cut capacity. Lufthansa is cutting 20,000 flights over the next 6 months. United plans to cut 5% of capacity and the airline's CEO has stated that fares may have to go up by 15%-20%. Air New Zealand has slashed flights for May and June. https://milelion.com/2026/03/27/cathay-pacific-hikes-fuel-surcharges-for-the-second-time-in-two-weeks/ https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/flight-cancellations-airlines-lufthansa-united-easyjet-jet-fuel-shortage-b2964033.html