PeterRS

I think many of us have similar regrets, although both my grandfathers had died before I was born. My father, a doctor, enlisted at the start of WWII. He was sent with the 340,000 or so to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force in 1939. He was doubly unfortunate in that he had just got married and was soon to learn that my older sister was on the way. Then, as the Germans advanced in 1940 and Churchill realised he had to evacuate the British troops from Dunkirk, a small detachment was sent west to the port city of St. Valery-en-Caux where it was believed they could be more quickly evacuated. But so much attention was placed on Dunkirk that more than 10,000 at St. Valery had to surrender. They were all captured. My father then spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps, ending in one near Gdansk where he was liberated by the advancing Russians. Following his reunion with his wife and daughter, my brother and I eventually came along. But apart from a week-end reunion which he aways attended, we learned precious little about those four years. It was almost as though he did not want to talk about them. After his death in the 1970s, we assumed his memories died with him. But after my brother retired, he became much more interested in family history. Over the years, he has talked with a handful of fellow prisoners-of-war and others associated with that war. He has now amassed a very large collection, part of which he has privately published and which will all eventually become part of a book. As a doctor, my father was duty bound not to escape, He had to look after his fellow prisoners. But he did help quite a number escape by, for example, placing cuts on tongues and telling his captors that the man suffered from epilepsy. He even helped those who had been circumcised appear uncircumcised! It is a fascinating story. The sad thing is that like @traveller123's father and grandfather most such often heroic tales have gone untold.

Depite its advances in technology and payments systems, Japan remains largely a cash society. Carrying around large sums is not unusual. It is also an incredibly safe country where street theft is also extremely unusual. It seems someone should be advertising that such incidents are in fact far from uncommon in many other countries. (But I'll bet this is not something on the TAT's agenda 😵).

It's hard to believe that in a matter of hours in Europe the armistice following World War 1 will be officially marked. It's a time for remembrance - and yet sometimes I wonder remembering what? Unquestionably, the number of deaths and the tragedy of those who died in utterly horrible circumstances in the muddy trenches in Flanders, Ypres, Paschendale, the Somme and elsewhere in northeast France as competing armies fought for years over meters of ground. It was a war that wiped out almost a generation of young men, certainly from the UK. With many being first sons, it was to be one of the nails in the coffin of the entrenchant aristocracy. Do we mourn today at the demise of the 19th century Age of Empire? The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire all collapsed. The British Empire was so weakened it too died after a second World War. There was a new world order with two immediate effects. That order was to see the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, a result partly of the crippling sanctions placed on Germany by the Versailles Peace Treaty - a result never considered back in 1919. Then there was the rise of Communism which was to consume politics in Europe and the USA for nearly three-quarters of a century. But then that war in 1914 caught so many unawares. The hotchpotch of allliances formed earlier in the century was encourged by a Britain determined to maintain the balance of power thought to make Europe stronger. Yet within many countries there were simmering tensions that required resolution. The waning Austro-Hungary hated the Serbs; an ascendant Russia was determined to support them. Above all, everyone feared the rise of Germany under the Kaiser - the eldest grandchild of Britain's Queen Victoria. Austro-Hungary was a total mess. The last vestige of the 1,000 year-old Holy Roman Empire, its one-time alliance between hundreds of individual cities and small states had been reduced to one betwen Austria and Hungary. Like many Empires it was rotting from within. Its parliament operated in 12 languages without the aid of official interpreters. Its Imperial family was totally dysfunctional. Emperor Franz Joseph (1848-1916) was a determined reactionary who treated his children very strictly. In 1853 he had survived an assassination attempt on his own life. His wife Elizabeth was introverted, increasingly emotionally distant from her husband and travelled away from Vienna as often as possible to get away from the Emperor and their children. In this far-from-loving home, the couple's surviving son the Crown Prince Rudolf was a psychological mess. In 1889 in what has become known as the Mayerling incident, 30-year old Rudolf and his 17-year old mistress fled to the family's hunting lodge where it seems (but historians are divided on this) they committed suicide. This all but destoyed Elizabeth who then increased her travels and determination to get away from the Court. She was assassinated in Geneva in 1898. With their other son dying in 1896, Franz Ferdinand's nephew immediately became heir presumptive and Archduke. He was next in line for assassination - in Sarajevo in 1914. Then the dominos fell into place as the alliances screamed accusations at each other before war quickly broke out. By the end, the new Europe was never the same. As we remember the scale of carnage and destruction, I guess we should also remember the words of Graham Allison, the famed international relations scholar most renowned for his analysis of the Cuban missle Crisis. He made clear that for him, World War I’s most important lesson is that “despite the fact that there’s many reasons for believing that something . . . would make no sense, and therefore would be incredible, and therefore maybe even impossible, shit happens.” What a dreadful epitaph for four years of misery on an unbelievable acale!

You will love the breakfast. If not, I'l pay for one of them!!

@Department_Of_Agriculture has attemped to answer other points and, although having been asked several times, he has deflected his answers away from this particular controversial statement. It is time he responded to it.

Not so, at least according to the CNN article. It's a new widebody aircraft that can replace western made passenger planes. This one seats up to 370 passengers in up to 3 passenger classes. Somehow I have difficulty believing First and Business class or Business Class and Premium Economy would be offered for emergencies! Besides, as the Russian Government's own official website stated on 1 November, "The prototype of the long-range widebody passenger aircraft Il-96-400M has successfully concluded its miaden flight." Where did you get your information?

Ah, so that's what's wrong with you!! (Apologies - just a silly joke which your post seemed to cry out for 🙏)

No, it's not really fast track. It's the same entrance as for diplomats, APEC Business card holders and others permitted fast entry. You still need your passport, the special fast entry certificate which you get from the internet, have fingerprints and a face pic taken and you do get the entry stamp in the passport. To qualify for fast entry after one year, you need to check those entry stamps as they are requested on the web form. Since there are always few passengers using the line, though, it's fast and easy. However, if you use the fast track gates to exit, you do not get an exit stamp.

In the old days of the Soviet Union, flying on its home-made aircraft was sometimes a bit dodgy. My first was a Tupolev something on the Polish carrier LOT from LHR to Warsaw. Down by my lower legs there were bolts. During fight you could see the frost on them. Then there was the wide body Ilyshin Il-96 which I took from Athens to Moscow. Entry was by a door from the tarmac after which you climbed stairs to get into the passenger cabin. As I was on a multi-sector trip in business class, I walked up to the front. The flight attendant growled at me "Go back. You do not sit here!" I showed her my ticket whereupon she relented and let me take my seat. Lunch was the economy class meal brought to my seat, opened and sloshed on to a plate! Mind you, at least I made it to my destinations. Those on the supersonic Concordski (not the official name) were not always so lucky. The Tupolev Tu-144 had an unfortunate international debut at the Paris air show in 1973. Looking remarkably like the Anglo-French Concorde, it could not come out of a dive, broke up and spectacularly crashed. As Concorde's Technical Flight Manager Brian Calvert said, "The rush to get Tu-144 airborne exacted a heavy penalty later." That was borne out when of the 102 commercial flights (only between Moscow and Alma-Ata) lasting 181 hours of flying time - just one flight a week, the Tu-144S suffered more than 226 failures, 80 of them in flight. For those who actually did fly on the aircraft, cabin noise was horrendously high at an average of 90-95db. Passengers two seats apart had to scream and shout to be heard! The passenger service was cancelled after 7 months. But even when purchasing A-300s from Airbus in the 1990s, not all went well for the state airline Aeroflot. One flight from Moscow to Hong Kong crashed into a mountain range with the loss of all lives. The subsequent enquiry resulted in the alarming fact that the captain had let his children into the cockpit with his son and daughter sitting at the controls. The 12-year old boy sat in his cockpit seat. The boy then applied enough force on the stick to turn the plane and effectively turn off the autopilot. The plane went into a dive. The boy's body was later found still in the pilot's seat. Now, the airline has a good record, even though sanctions mean that obtaining parts and new aircraft are not possible and the number of usable aircraft is slowly dimishing. So Russia has built its own new 4-engine wide body long haul jet, the IL-96-400 M which has completed its first airborne trials. Designed to compete with the Boeing 777, it can carry up to 370 passengers. It is comparable to the “world’s best models due to the redundancy of the aircraft’s systems and its aerodynamic configuration.”according to the manufacturer. But why it should have adopted a gas guzzling 4-engine design beats me, although Russia presumably has no problem obtaining the fuel at cheap prices. Will I fly on it? Nope! No doubt many others will. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/russia-test-flies-new-homegrown-widebody-passenger-airplane/index.html

You missed the start? Huh? The start was many decades ago! Now it's virtually elections all year, every year. Or if not elections then raising the massive amounts of money essential to get elected in this paragon of democracy! A two-year cycle for members of Congress, a four-year cycle for Presidents and a six-year cycle for Senators - and that's before the elections for governors, state legislatures, mayors, states' attorneys-general, sheriffs, school boards - and probably also the managers of MacDonalds. And it all comes down to cash! No, not from politicians' own pockets. It's the mega-donors who influence policy, give a dodgy Supreme Court Justice or two all manner of luxury perks which he then hides instead of declaring them without any sanctions whatsoever, and those who hide behind fancy Foundations. People like the Koch Brothers - or perhaps I should just say Koch since one recently died but both actually gave mega-bucks under at least two different entities, George Soros, the gambling king Sheldon Adelson who has made a gazillion from his casinos in Las Vegas and Macao, Michael Bloomberg, and then the hedge funds run by largely unknown names like Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor, or by crooks like Sam Bankman-Fried. Did I mention lobbyists? On top of that lot there are the Super PACS which continue their fund-raising ways thanks to court rulings in 2010. Eliminate them? The largest political fund raising machines ever thought of? That has to be a joke. Freedom rules. Freedom to donate. Freedom to influence policy. After all, who came up with the list of potential justices for Trump? The right-wing Federalist Society and the similar Heritage Foundation, allied to the right-wing evangelical movement. Funny, though, how many of those evangelical pastors live in luxury (Kenneth Copeland is estimated to be worth US$760 million and all seem to own private jets), yet more than a few seem to have a habit of disobeying God's laws and then either crying for forgiveness on their mega-rich television enterprises (Jimmy Swaggart etc.) or end up in jail (Jim Bakker etc.) or in bed with another man (Ted Haggard). The list of 'abominations' - oops transgressions - is actually in the many dozens! Funny, too, how these "churches" ,"ministries" "cash cows", call them what you will, make tens of millions of fat profits annually yet are not subject to any taxes! Money rules! Don't worry @Kostik. The show is well and truly on the road. Indeed, it has never left it. Careful, though! All that popcorn may severely damage your health.

I used to find that, especially coming from BKK on the mid-morning flight. It always seemed to arrive just after flights from Seoul and somewhere in China. the latter requiring special paperwork. But as I mentioned some weeks back, anyone flying into Taipei three or more times in a year qualifies for fast track entry. I used that on my last visit in July and it was a breeze as there was only one passenger in front of me. The application form is widely avaiable on the internet.

The fee of US$35 has been widely reported. It is the official cost of a taxi regardless of how many passengers. Alternatively there is the bus which costs US$8 one way or $15 return.There is also an Airport Shuttle minibus for groups costing $15 but the price varies with size of group. https://kiripost.com/stories/cambodia-official-transport-at-siem-reap-angkor-international-airport#

Thanks for the photos. Hope you had a really great time. I was last there in 2018 when there was an estimated 160,000 in attendance. It was also fantastic weather. The numbers have steadily increased every year since my first Parade in 2011 when there were 50,000 taking part. But it was still a really fun afternoon. Only last year was there a drop, but that was hardly surprising given that Taiwan only opened its borders the month before following closure during the covid epidemic.

Don't you read? You quote what I wrote but in totally the wrong context. What I wrote was - But I totally disagreed with this comment of yours - As for the physicians in my family, some of whom were/are in general practice, that is for them to say - not for you to tell them!

For anyone interested, there ws a TV programme made about Backstairs Billy. It's a bit long but does stress that whereas Billy could have made vast amounts of money after the Queen Mother' death with intimate unpublished details about the Royal Family's backstage exploits, he kept all the secrets to himself.

I was brought up in the Protestant religion. Since my late teens, I have only been to Church for weddings and funerals. But when asked in forms about my religion (and a few still require that), I write Protestant. I imagine if someone has Jewish blood, it is impossible to state that he/she is anything other than Jewish - unless they have converted to another religion. You do not need to be a practising member of any faith to belong to that faith.

I cannot agree with your conclusion. I am not a physician but I come from a family that is almost exclusively members of the medical profession. I agree that giving kids candies basically to shut them up is not always good parenting. But I believe the vast majority of the millions and more marching and protesting about climate change do so because of firm beliefs - not how they were brought up. Thank goodness the younger generation are taking on this issue. It illustrates to me why there should be a maximium age for leaders of countries. That the leading Presidential contenders at present in the USA would be 83 or 79 when taking up office is, in my view, some form of madness! The median age of world leaders is 62-63. If individual workers have to retire aged somewhere between 62 and 67, why should any elected leaders be permitted to continue beyond that age range? The argument will no doubt be they have acquired a wisdom that can be extremely useful. To which I'd say: well them, make them official Presidential advisers, but not the Presidents themselves. Same with judges. The UK has a maximum age of 75. Fair enough. Judges are supposed to have more 'experience' and 'judgement'. At 75, the dreadful, lying, sexual molestor Clarence Thomas would be out in a matter of months. And yes I watched his confirmation hearings when I was working in Tokyo and I saw how Joe Biden stopped witnesses from testifying agsinst him in order to get the nomination approved. In his final 'defence', Thomas was clearly lying and did not answer the charges against him. Yet a man who should never have been near the Supreme Court is now its longest serving and most controversial member. Shame on that system!

With respect, I think it is not an overreaction. A Bhutanese is the national of a country. A German owning a restaurant is similarly the national of a country. Being Jewish is basically a religious identity. Would you say the Catholic who ran the Museum? Somehow I doubt it.

But did it actually mention and list the various gay bars/lounges which existed on the level above Screwboys and which were quite popular certainly in the 1980s and perhaps into the early 1990s? In my earlier post i had forgotten that the fetish ladies bar was located very near the Silom end of Patpong 2 almost opposite the luggage seller.

I would add "massively simplistic". I have repeatedly said you cannot regard the present/recent ghastly war without looking back at history, a position I know some other posters do not agree with. The treatment Israel, especially under its ultra right wing governments, has meted out to the mass of the Palestinians has been largely disgraceful. It continues to annex Arab lands to build their largely orthodox settlements despite this being against several UN resolutions. And who made the decision to prop up Hamas over more than a decade? Israel! Since its inception in 2006, the UNHCR has adopted virtually as many resolutions against Israel's actions on issues regarding the Palestinians as in the rest of the world combined. Israel has been no saint! The civilised world sees a two-state solution. Israel's politicians have stated this time and time again; yet their actions have proved the opposite. Yasser Arafat could have been a party to peace which seemed very close at the Camp David Accords, but pulled out because those present all agree that his aim was in fact a one-state solution. Now with other actors taking part in the conflict, notably the US and Iran, with Netanyahu's position finally extremely vulnerable and much of the world against what israel is doing in Gaza, Israel is in arguably the most difficult situation it has faced for decades. That is not to condone in any way the terror and outright murder of Israeli men, women and children by Palestinian terrorists. It is merely facing facts. It's really hard to see how Israel gets out of this mess without the war extending beyond the borders of Israel and Gaza.

China and Hong Kong have been guilty of kidnapping journalists and booksellers (among others) from countries like Thailand and countries/provinces like Taiwan. I believe the numbers are small but legal actions against such action seem to have failed. From The Bangkok Post 23 April 2023 Chinese tourist gets abducted at RCA, two suspects flee Thailand Another abduction case of a Chinese national has taken place in Bangkok, with police admitting the two suspects have fled Thailand. Deputy Metropolitan Pol Col Noppasin Poonsawat said the abduction took place on April 17. The victim, 28, is a Chinese solo tourist who went to an entertainment venue in Bangkok's Royal City Avenue (RCA). There she met a Chinese man who later invited her to an apartment he rented in the Rama 9 area. Another man was hiding in the unit. The suspects tied her with rope before seizing her mobile phone, cash and other belongings worth 427,000 baht. In the early hours of April 18, the suspects left the apartment for Suvarnabhumi airport and fled Thailand, said Pol Col Noppasin. https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2555026/chinese-tourist-gets-abducted-at-rca-two-suspects-flee-thailand

Did it ever even mention Patpong 2 even though it was located there? I was only there once and all I seem to recall is bits of history and people related to the original Patpong, although there was some information about a ladyboy bar. Certainly nothing about the early gogo bars of the 1980s on the second level of Patpong 2.

Does membership guarantee to keep hotel prices down?

Fortunately it rained quite hard a couple of hours ago in Bangkok. It seems as though the summer monsoon period is not quite over yet. Hopefully it will continue for a few days and reduce the particulate matter in the air.

I believe you are correct in writing our climate does change over the centuries. And there have been periods of global warming along with something like 5 separate ice ages. The geology of every continent on our planet is marked by the last ice age and its retreat, rather as present-day glaciers are not pure white but marked by trails of black and brown being the rocks underneath them being ground up like powder as the ice makes its slow journey downwards. But I find it very hard to believe that there are still people who deny the earth is presently undergoing some very major changes. Call it evolution if you will; most call it climate change. According to a recent Report - The climate crisis has pushed the planet’s stores of ice to a widespread collapse that was “unthinkable just a decade ago”, with Arctic sea ice certain to vanish in summers and ruinous sea level rise from melting glaciers now already in motion, a major new report has warned . . . The “terminal” loss of sea ice from the Arctic during summers could arrive within a decade and now cannot be avoided, it adds . . . “There’s nothing we can do about that now. We’ve just screwed up and let the system warm too much already,” said Julie Brigham-Grette, a scientist at University of Massachusetts Amherst and report co-author, about the sea ice. “That milestone has now passed so the next thing we need to avoid is ice shelf collapses in Antarctica and the further breakdown of the ice systems in Greenland. We can’t stuff the genie back into the bottle once they are gone.” . . . Greenland’s ice loss has already committed around 30cm to sea level rise. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/07/melting-arctic-sea-ice-summer-report Meanwhile, governments appear to be doing very little, if anything. Yet it is clear that places like Florida, London, Bangladesh, Bangkok, Jakarta, the Nile Delta and a whole host of other parts of the planet will become uninhabitable unless governments spend massively like Holland on sea defences. That country spent US$5 billion prior to 1997 and now adds €1 billion per year to keep the sea from its land. Apart from much of tha land being either just above or even below sea level, Holland's defences have held firm against not only rising sea levels but storm surges driving water down the North Sea towards the English Channel. As the Guardian article ends - “Rapid decarbonization is absolutely essential, it’s a moral obligation to the future . . . If we don’t accept that moral responsibility . . . it will be a human tragedy.”