Originally published via Armageddon Safari: “Horrendous” also applies here, but I didn’t want to oversaturate the headline with adjectives. (Tucker Carlson’s “more verbs, less adjectives” mantra is the best writing advice perhaps ever dispensed.) Often, in East and Southeast Asia, picking out the Chinese based on purely physical features is more of an art than a science. Related: My Gold-Standard Expat Memoir: Back and Better Than Ever With the Second Edition While it’s true that, as a rule of thumb, compared to their Southeast Asian peers, Chinamen tend to have lighter […]

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Louis Potenziano, also known as Bangkok Louie, is an American expat who has been living in Bangkok for over 6 years. He owns O’Leary’s Irish Pub (Soi 15, Sukhumvit), Louie’s on 15 Bamboo and Bourbon, a Thai European restaurant in the same area. Before moving to Bangkok, he worked in Doha on a hospital project, where he led a team installing integrated low-voltage security and communications systems. Q. How did the name ‘Bangkok Louie’ come about? I will tell you but I must go back in history, my history. My […]

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I’ve spent a fair few nights on sleeper buses around the world at this point, and honestly? The experience is wildly different depending on where you are. I’ve taken overnight buses in Turkey, Western Europe, Thailand, Vietnam, all over South America, Mexico, and even the UK, and each region has its own quirks, comfort rating, and chaos level. Some buses are genuinely brilliant, like in Vietnam, where they have lie-flat seats that could rival a hostel bed. Others… well, let’s just say I’ve spent more than one night wide awake, […]

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The island of Phu Quoc is located in the Gulf of Thailand, located closer to the Cambodia border than the Vietnam border. It is an extremely popular and family friendly destination for tourists due to the fact that unlike mainland Vietnam which requires visas for many nationalities, Phu Quoc offers a visa exemption for citizens of numerous countries. And it is also appealing for its weather, beaches and affordable prices. From Bangkok its an easy 1 hour non stop flight to Phu Quoc in Vietnam. Passengers on my flight were […]

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Originally published via Armageddon Safari: Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on modern Bangkok. Via Bangkok Post (emphasis added): “Forty-four men, many wearing only underwear and testing positive for illicit substances, were arrested during a raid on an illegal drug party early Saturday in Bangkok’s Wang Thonglang district. The operation, led by the Metropolitan Police Bureau, took place around 1.30am at a three-storey building on Soi Ramkhamhaeng 21. The premises reportedly hosted a private party targeting LGBTQ clients, with reports of drug use and suspicious activity. Police ordered activity to cease immediately upon entry. They found […]

The post Alphabet People, ‘Ya Ice,’ and Wanton Penetration: A Bangkok Story as Old as Time appeared first on Dave's Travel Corner.

Originally published via Armageddon Safari: I recently stumbled upon a true gem of an X post from @kunley_drukpa — not necessarily a ringing endorsement of expat life in India, but an expert treatise on the “low trust society” that rings all too true for anyone with experience in the Third World. A small excerpt: “A few years ago now I spent some time in India. One of the more lasting impressions I have from that period was the degree to which the low trust environment there (of a kind) wore me down mentally and transformed […]

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A quick journey to Taipei was not meant to be. Rather than get up with the chickens at 430am in the Thai village I am staying in to catch a van to Suvarnabhumi Airport to catch an 11am flight, I opted to take a a van into Bangkok a day early at a reasonable 3pm departure. I didn’t catch much sleep that night due to three women next door partying like it was December 31, 1999. The day of my flight, I left my hotel at 8am for the airport. […]

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Jake Needham is an American-born novelist and former screenwriter who has lived in Asia—mainly Thailand and Singapore—since the early 1980s. He has published 18 books and has been nominated for the Barry Award three times. His seventh book in the Inspector Tay series — Who the Hell Is Harry Black? — won the Barry Award for Best Paperback Mystery of 2024. Q. You are originally from Houston, Texas, but you have been living in Asia since the 80s. That is a long time in Asia. Tell us what first drew you […]

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Originally published via Armageddon Safari: Sometimes stereotypes hold true. Case in point: Asian men do indeed, as a rule of thumb, as anyone who has watched Japanese pornography may have noticed, tend to have smaller-than-average packages compared to those of the European persuasion and definitely pitted against the Africans. (I discuss issues related to the phallus in the context of living in East Asia as an expat extensively in my top-selling memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile.) Accordingly, the Asian market is rife with all manner of pills and potions to […]

The post The Backseat Butcher of Bangkok: Busted! appeared first on Dave's Travel Corner.

Originally published via Armageddon Safari: “Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain? Tell me, have you these in your houses? Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?” -Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet Of all the cancerous cultural exports America has inflicted upon the unsuspecting innocents of the Third World, the mega-shopping mall is arguably the most unforgiveable. Overpriced soulless condo buildings […]

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Originally published via Armageddon Safari: At the Thailand Cultural Center MRT, recently, next to the standard no-durian infographic — the king of fruit’s smell comes off as obscene to many people and is therefore banned from public transport and hotel rooms — there sat a new addition to the list of prohibited substances and activities on the subway: upskirt pics, later to be uploaded and monetized on some shady dark corner of the web. The posted official anti-upskirt warning from the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority The upskirt video/image industry has […]

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Originally published via PJ Media: What follows is a (mostly) unedited excerpt from my critically acclaimed, gold-standard expat travel memoir/existentialist treatise, “Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile”: The degenerate felon with whom I had come to briefly reside in South Georgia in 2006 through a series of unfortunate events, in my younger years, asked me for a cigarette. Tyrone had none because he refused to buy any. Inhaling deeply the smoke he hadn’t paid for, Tyrone once said to me: “Get it how you live.” For sure. November 12, 2018: Me and […]

The post Samsung and I Paint the Town Red: The Tuk-Tuk Hustle appeared first on Dave's Travel Corner.

Originally published via Armageddon Safari: In the Big Mango, the extremely friendly prostitutes outside the “massage” shops on the street all tell me I’m “so handsome man.” Related: Critical Insights: What Makes Thai Prostitutes Superbly Talented The strange Indian men who prowl those same streets all tell me I’m “lucky man.” Lucky and handsome! I feel so fucking special every time I step outside. (Forget SSRIs or self-medication. If you’re a farang in Sussex or Cincinnati or wherever feeling low on self-esteem, a holiday to Bangkok will set you right as rain.) Anyway, as […]

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When I told my brother in law that we were visiting Nashik in India to try their wines, his response was something like, “when I was growing up in Chennai, Indian wines were not considered very good”. That was in the 1970s and 1980s. Things have changed in this regard with a select number of Indian wineries having elevated viticulture practices and winemaking, Chandon India being on the forefront of doing so. I arrived in Mumbai from Bangkok; the Mumbai airport appeared to be located in the center of the […]

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Waiting until the last minute and short on some upcoming vacation time, I scored what I thought was a bargain, at a room located next to the beach on Ko Lan. This was the last budget option I saw listed through various booking sites. And only a few other resorts had rooms, all of which were extremely expensive. Satisfied, I pulled a Spy wine cooler out of the fridge, grabbed a book and hit the hammock for the next few hours. The next morning I received an email that my […]

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