macaroni21

There's a laundry shop on Saladaeng Soi 2. Google reference: https://maps.app.goo.gl/weKZVc9kEbGPiEsi8 Easy walking distance from the Raya Hotel. Their Facebook page has not been updated for a long time though.https://www.facebook.com/s.t.laundryandalterations/ Here's what it looks like from Google Streetview.

I don't know what happened in my brain, but when I read "introducing iPads to the seats", I pictured every seat being cushioned with absorbent anti-incontinence pads. Might not be a bad idea considering the client profile in some bars.

I wonder who inherits the X-boys now. It would be a shame if the bar changes its business model under the successor.

One more: whilst Prestige Massage's rooms are on the upper floors, they have a lift. No need to climb stairs. Prestige is on the pricey side though, and I'm not certain if all the staff are willing bodies.

The Avarin shop that is not next to Tarntawan Hotel has massage rooms on the ground floor just behind the foot massage lounge. Chaichana on Patpong Soi 1 has massage rooms in the basement, just one floor below its foyer. The stairs down aren't difficult. Prime has ground floor rooms in its third building, though Prime is not known for offering a milking service to conclude a massage. There is also one shop on Silom Road under Saladaeng station that has ground floor rooms but unfortunately I can't remember which one it is. But you could easily walk that 100-metre stretch and ask the boys out front of each shop if their rooms are on the lower floor. Further afield from Silom, Prince has ground floor rooms as does Jey Spa. The above is based on memory which may be a little faulty, so please double check my information with the shops themselves.

Trump's condolence statement on Truth Social (may God forgive me for even quoting it) was terse to an extent that it seemed forced and insincere. “Rest in peace Pope Francis! May God bless him and all who loved him!” Whereas other leaders referenced Pope Francis' values, none of that from the orange man. BTW, anybody watched the film The Conclave? Did you like the twist at the very end?

A one-hour look at the work of the Australian embassy in Bangkok and the consulate in Bali. This may interest especially expats living in Thailand.

There's a usually a long gap between production and upload to Youtube, and this one is no different. The 59-minute documentary "Fairytale Of Kathmandu | A portrait of a fallen idol and the murky world of sex tourism" was made around 2007, but only uploaded this month. It opens with a charming and cheery tone: the celebrated Irish poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh makes regular trips to Nepal. He loves the exotic and simple life there, and over the years he has acquired many young men as friends who dote on him. But as the film maker follows him around, she captures scenes that raise many questions. And like the ominously dark monsoon clouds that come rolling in over the valleys of Nepal from the south, the tone of the film changes. The Irish police undertook an investigation starting from 2006 (see https://archive.ph/20130217192154/http://www.independent.ie/national-news/boys-were-damaged-by-sex-trysts-with-poet-1286378.html) but nothing came of it. Apparently there was no investigation by the Nepali authorities since no complaint had been filed and all the boys were reportedly of legal age.

I too would believe that the Thai system will go relatively well, it is after all, not a complicated software to write or implement. As for mention of Cambodia, I am reminded of a conversation I had with an acquaintance last year. Involved in healthcare systems, he was in Cambodia for some reason and had an opportunity to interact with hospital and Health Ministry people. He told me how impressed he was with some software that he was shown. Only later did it make sense. The Chinese built the system for the Cambodians.

By all indications, the decoupling of US-China trade and economies is surely going to go the full distance and the economic pain on both sides will be bad. I would caution against underestimating how much disruption this will also cause to China, even though much of the media is talking about the costs to the US. However, the key difference is that China has a leadership that is good at planning. Like Canada, it has a people that is united about the external threat. On the other side, the US has an incompetent leadership and fractious internal politics. In the medium term, this difference in leadership will make a big difference even if in the short term, the pain and disruption are similarly acute on both sides. Yet, despite the looming costs to come, pro-Trump voters remain solidly behind him. MAGA is a sort of religious cult. As with most cults, members of a cult rarely allow empirical facts or logic to shake their beliefs. Also, suffering is seen as a rite of passage, easily explained away as due to persecution by outsiders, and never the fault of the cult's own teachings. So what lies ahead? We've been through this before! The next two decades look likely to be a reprise of the 1930s, with no single dominant power nor any global trading system. In politics and economics, the world was in distinct blocs. As a result there were countless points of friction, any one of which could blow up into military action as bloc-leaders sought to expand or defend their interests. I don't intend to sound alarmist, but let's not forget that World War II might not have flared up in East Asia in December 1941 (more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland) if not for the US trade embargo on Japan. Japan (which many people have forgotten was on the side of US-Britain-France in the First World War) felt in the late 1930s that it was being deprived of access to oil and other raw materials because of the embargo imposed by the US and its West European allies (then fighting Hitler), and so it sought to carve out its own bloc in East Asia. If the above was news to you, it may be because, like many westerners, you might have thought of World War II as a single war across the globe. Actually it was two different wars that happened to occur at the same time (with different initial sparks), but which happened to involve a few (not all) of the same players – the US and to a lesser extent Britain. France and the Netherlands were initially involved but soon disappeared from the Asian theatre after Hitler marched into Paris and The Hague. Many countries were only involved in one war, not both. For example, Germany, Italy, Canada and the Soviet Union were major participants in the European war but not in the Asian war (right at the end, after Germany had been defeated, the Soviet Union did turn its attention to the east, in order to grab some advantage). China, Australia, NZ and Japan were participants in the Asian war but not the European war....but I am going off-topic now.

To the OP: Thai attitudes to same sex relationships are social constructs; only loosely related to religion. You would find, for example, very different atttudes in other countries that are as Buddhist as Thailand. You probably come from a country where the dominant religion is that of an Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and societies founded on Abrahamic religions tend ot think (not entirely true) that the teachings of religion are or should be the source of social/moral attitudes. In particular the Abrahamic religions are more sex-obsessed than non-Abrahamic religions – they have a lot to say about sex. It may surprise you that about half the world's population do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion, and as a general rule, those other religions have little to say about sex or sexually-related relationships. Yet, these societies do have attitudes (and widely varying ones too) about same-sex relationships. And they may well have one attitude to male-male relationships and a very different attitude to a female-female relationship. It is a Western construct to see male-male and female-female relationships as somehow two eggs in the same basket. So whatever attitudes these non-Abrahamic societies have towards gay male relationships (I shall set aside what they think of female-female relationships) don't so much spring from their religion, but are hand-me downs from social conditioning. Another feature that is worth mentioning here is that Thai culture – as with all other traditional Southeast Asian cultures – see gender more than sexual orientation. If your lover is gatoey and you're a cis-gendered male, it is one thing. If both of you are cis-gendered males, then it is seen as a completely different kind of thing. Generally, southeast asian cultures tolerate and to a degree accept transgender identity and they are more familiar, from their socio-historical legacies, with relationships where one partner is transgendered. Doesn't have to be fully transgendered. Effeminacy is similarly tolerated. There are far less socio-historical underpinnings to attitudes towards cisgendered male-male relationships. Historically southeast Asian societies tended not to see these relationships so they haven't built a corpus of social attitudes towards them. What attitudes they hold today are of more modern genesis, which is to say those attitudes have a large dollop of Western influence if one is speaking of urban Thai communities exposed to contemporary Western culture. If one is speaking of rural or small town communities, or even of communities rooted in the shantytowns around Bangkok, then I suspect one may find quite different attitudes, due simply to less exposure to contemporary Western culture. Note: I speak of contemporary western culture. Large swathes of urban elite Sri Lankan society (also a predominantly Buddhist country) have also had their attitudes to cisgendered male-male relationships shaped by exposure to western culture, but in their case, they were largely shaped by western culture of decades ago, resulting in a significant degree of homophobia. Ditto with Korea which is about 50% Buddhist. Arguably Korea is more homophobic than Sri Lanka. Even among the Thai elite that have exposure to contemporary western culture, it is just one strand out of many that meld to form their beliefs. Bear in mind that perhaps half of the Thai elite in Bangkok are ethnically Chinese, and many of their social attitudes are deeply rooted in Chinese social expectations. And here, the strong belief in the traditional family and the responsibility of bearing sons for future generations in order to carry on the family name will likely override whatever crazy western ideas they come across about accepting homosexuality. I speak with some experience on this matter since I have over the years had many local Thai friends who are professionals and business leaders. There have been plenty of opportunity for them to educate me on the very complicated attitudes they encounter. I have no experience with Thai rural or small-town communities in this regard, so I really cannot say how cisgendered male-male relationships will be seen by them. There are some on this board who have boyfriends from Isaan or other small towns, and might have received a warm welcome from the boyfriends' families. However, I would caution that we shouldn't read too much into their particular experiences, since those farang-thai ex-moneyboy relationships are hugely coloured by economics. One characteristic of Thai society (again, nothing at all to do with Buddhism) that may obscure their honest opinions is the tendency to avoid confrontation – fights along Pattaya Beach Road and Soi 6 notwithstanding – and their acute awareness of the need to save face for all around. So even if one encounters a performance of gracious welcome and acceptance, one should always remember it could be just that: a performance. But perhaps that is good enough. If everybody around is placidly polite, does it really matter what they really think? By the same token, you will need to become "Thai" to receive this consideration. That means, you will need to learn to behave their way and not do anything that undermines "face". So you will almost surely have to restrain yourself from overt displays of same-sex affection; if you don't, you won't be seen as giving them due respect, and consequently, they won't feel obliged to return respect to you; which means their polite smile and silence will vanish in a flash, and you may be featured in the next viral video of a farang beaten up by irate Thais.

I am not speaking from all that much experience and I have never bottomed in a Japanese shop, so please do not take what I am about to say as the gospel truth, just as semi-educated gues: The agencies' websites typically display alongside photos (sometimes with faces blurred) what the boys will or will not do. I think you will find that the majority of them will top, and many will only top. The locations of shops' private rooms vary; sometimes a shop will have rooms in the same building, sometimes they rent rooms in nearby buildings. If in a room within the shop, you can assume the walls to be paper thin, Even in off-site rooms which are typically studio apartments in separate buildings, the walls can be thin. There was one time when I could hear the neighbour flush the toilet and run the shower. Muffled voices too. If you're the type who sing opera as you climax, consider wearing a mask when you're entering or leaving the building, so curious neighbours won't be able to see your face. Japanese places are very strict about the time. So if you have booked 60 minutes, it is 60 minutes from the moment the boy meets you. If you spend 10 minutes washing yourself, those 10 minutes would be counted within the session's overall duration.

@Moses When you have time, could you try a slightly different version? The boys need to be with much bigger eggs (maybe ostrich-sized). There are some size-queens here. 🤣

Gone off topic from the get go. 😁

As @khaolakguy suggests, this can be misleading: The blue infographic above (see @reader's post of 1 April) says that one has to present the emailed acknolwedgement of the submission at the immigration counter along with passport, etc. This means the submission must be made BEFORE arrival. Like in many other countries, it can be made up to three days BEFORE arrival date.