PeterRS

Agreed. But as the No. 2 executive of a major airline stated unequivocally that it appears depending on the origin of the ticket, that has to be one reason. As hinted in the ChatGpt list.

I had heard about the possibility of the Rabbit card and the MRT cards being merged. But there was a problem in that seniors get half price on the MRT and the Skytrain was not prepared to accept that. I do have the half price card and understandably would prefer not to give it up.

Not sure of the situation now as this happened quite a few years ago. But it was the first time I had ever seen the initials on a boarding pass. On my return to Hong Kong i asked a friend who was no. 2 in Cathay Pacific. He told me it was almost certainly because the check-in staff had noticed the ticket had been issued in Bangkok which in those days was regarded as something of a security risk. It was a flight to LAX and my first flight originating in the USA.

Would Pattaya seriously be a good place for a beach experience, given that it is inhabited by generally a large number of older gay farang and you want to be primarily on your own? Thailand has great beaches elsewhere. In my view Phuket and Samui are overly expensive. Rayong might be a better bet. Further away, I always loved Khaolak about an hour north of Phuket airport - huge beaches, hotels very separated and not really a resort-type area. Eating in hotels was expensive but there were local restaurants on the beach with really good food at moderate prices. It's a bit of a hassle getting there as it is about an hour's drive north of Phuket airport, but once there there are lots of things to do. I appreciate the immigration status issue and hope there may be be some way around that eventually. The famous 'James Bond' island as featured in one of the movies Village on stilts

As an insight into Thai thinking, when the Rabbit stored value card was first issued there was a limit of Bt.4,000. Maybe the same now, I have no idea. But the reason given for having a passport copied was "to avoid money laundering!"

I wonder why it could get messy. Check-in staff and Immigration officers usually have the routing of passengers on the screens in front of them. I wrote before that once having had several stops in Europe on an RTW ticket that had actually been issued in Bangkok (where they were cheaper), I had SSS stamped in large letters on my boardng pass at LGA. The security lady then went through everything even to the point of taking belongings out of my bag and placing them on a desk so other passengers could see! I later learned that this stands for Special Security Screening and is not especially for those originating in countries the USA does not like. I did not like it, but I do not see how this gets messy. Slightly more time consuming perhaps but I still fail to understand why the USA does not accept that some passengers use their airports as transit points.

Thanks for these facts of which I was not aware, although I have noticed that what was always called the Observer now has Guardian at the top. And my apologies for omitting the link.

I write little about sex in Thailand now - certainly compared to the more than three decades prior to the mid 2010s - but only, as I have written several times, because I am partnered and neither my partner nor I feel the need or desire to experience the local sex scene any more. On the other hand, we both travel a bit and have an agreement that we can be free to indulge in our sexual desires if we so wish. The key to the arrangement is that we always explain later to each other what we have done and we practice safe sex. That out of the way, I had several longish relationships with guys from countries outside Hong Kong where I was based for much of my career. The first was a 25-year old Japanese a few years younger than me who taught me something I had never really encountered before - passion in a relationship. That can be unimaginably great when you are together and yet almost frightening when you are not. I could only meet him once a month, although he did come to stay with me for three weeks. I learned from his friends that his feelings for me were almost as strong as mine for him. But when we were apart he did play around whereas I did not. And the more often we were apart, the more difficult I felt. Jealousy, I know. Jealousy can be very difficult to overcome. As it turned out, while he was never jealous, he needed sex more than I and eventually hooked up with an older Englishman in Tokyo. I was mortified - but I had learned a lesson. The problem with this and other relationships was that I fell for too many guys who lived outside Hong Kong. Since I travelled regularly, sometimes that was not a problem. But that little germ of jealousy was never far away. And I suppose it was only when I was with a Taiwanese guy who really did not play the sex scene that I had my most successful relationship. Five years is not so long, but at that time it was for me. I have never been in a relationship with a bar boy. Some here have and are wonderfully happy. I wish yours will be the same.

Thanks to the movie, we all know how Alan Turing suffered and then took his own life after admitting he was homosexual. And thanks to years of campaigning, he was been given one of the extremely rare official royal pardons in 2023. He is admired today for his code-breaking skills which helped shorten WWII. His photo adorns the back of the UK's £50 notes. In today's Guardian/Observer, there is another somewhat similar, but very different, historical case of a civil servant being hounded to death. But this case remains an open sore. Sir Roger Casement was knighted by the King for distinguished Imperial Service in 1911. As was discovered in his diaries after his capture, he was also homosexual and proud of it. As the Guardian article points out, Casement remains a taboo subject, "A can containing too many worms." Born in what is now Northern Ireland, the British were adamant that Ireland as a whole remained part of its Empire. Learning of an impending rebellion in Dublin against British rule, Casement returned to the country in an attempt to get the organisers to call it off. He had reckoned without the British Head of Admiralty Intelligence, an eccentric and ruthless Reginald "Blinker" Hall. Casement grew to abhor Britain's imperial rule and eventually earned a distinguished record of service exposing atrocities in the Congo and Peru. He was eventually to be described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations." But he was also an Irish patriot and nationalist. After resigniing from the Foreign Office in 1913, he gave his time to fostering Irish Independence which set Hall against him. He travelled to Germany to win support and gain military aid, mostly by recruiting Irish prisoners of the Germans. He heard about an Easter Uprising against British rule due to take place over the Easter weekend in Ireland in 1916. He was deeply opposed. A cache of arms was sent from Germany but Casement set out at the same time to persuade the leaders of the Uprising to call it off. Landed by a German submarine in Ireland in avdance, Casement was suffering from a recurrance of malaria and too ill to meet the leaders. He could have been rescued but these leaders had insisted that not a shot be fired in advance of the Uprising in case it was discovered by the British. The Uprising took place. It was mercilously crushed by the British. Captured, Casement was accused of high treason, sabotage and espionage. During the trial, excerpts from his diaries were released to various sources alleging that Casement was also a "sexual deviant, fond of young men, especially teenagers, and usually paid for sex." Found guilty, he was hanged on 3 August 1916. Several investigations during the rest of the century came to the conclusion that the diaries may have been forged after his death. Yet that has never been proved. As Turing is regarded as a gay martyr in Britain, so Casement is being considered the Irish Turing. Yet Ireland is less willing to reopen the Caement issue, that diary being its main reason. Turing was convicted for having sex with one adult man. That Casement may have lured teenagers into his bed is not acceptable in Ireland. Was Casement a rebel or a traitor? We really do not know. All we do know is that he was gay and may have been officially murdered for that reason.

To me that is still not a valid argument! Passengers from 'suspect' countries are already singled out and sent to a separate queue for special screening. That even used to be the case for flights which originated in Bangkok until the turn of this century! My guess is that with most air travel being in, to or from the USA in the early days, no one even considered the possibility of connecting flights. Then Canada came into the mix. Instead of altering airport designs, some bright spark came up with the idea of installing US customs and immigration facilities at the major Canadian airports. It happened once in Europe when BA ran a 737 out of London's small City airport with a short stop to go through USA customs and immigration at Shannon. Personally I know of no others.

Good advice. Is there a reason why US airports do not permit international to international connecting flights like almost every other nation?

Seiji Ozawa ued to do this sort of stripping down once each year with his New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra in Tokyo. With the cast in costume, simple scenery, props and lighting in front of the orchestra, these proved very popular. He also did some of these with the Boston Symphony.

So true. And when we near the end of life, we often do not have the cash or the energy to complete the bucket list. So don't put experiences off. Enjoy life while we have it.

Doesn't that more or less say it all?

The problem for opera companies is that new productions take vast amounts of planning time - at least two years - and then equally vast amounts of cash to build newly designed scenery, create new costumes, props, lighting and other technical issues - and that is all before you add in a 3-4 week rehearsal period for everyone involved. including a very expensive orchestra. Most revivals can virtually be thrown on in a fraction of the time thereby saving a lot of money. That's not much help to those who have already seen productions, though. Recent decades have seen the collapse of the New York City Opera - a result of its idiotic Board Chair abandoning collegiality and hiring a controversial European Artistic Director who had demanded an annual budget of US$60 million. City Opera had never operated on more than $30 million. It crashed. Now the New York Met is in very serious trouble - and again primarily because of its Board. When its previous very savvy General Manager retired in 2006, it appointed a man who had never run any performing company, let alone such a huge one as the Met Opera, and had no experience of opera apart from selling programmes as student. But he was a pal of someone or other. He said he aimed to make opera more popular. All he has done is reduce audiences (fair point - covid did not help), reduce the number and amount of donations and drawn down roughly $100 million from the Endowment after promising the Unions he'd increase it by £200 million! Arts management professionals worldwide have called him a charlatan and clearly stated he should have been dismissed years ago, but he seems to have some hold over the Board who keep extending his contract. When he presented a Wagner RIng cycle by Cirque du Soleil's splendid director Robert Lepage early in his tenure, one of the horrendous problems that dogged this production was that no one, least of all Gelb, had realised that the scenery weighed 45 tons, cost US$16 million and was way too heavy for the stage structure. This then had to have an extra $1 million spent on it to support its weight. Idiocy!