Personal Dork Assistant

Holy Moly

It's no secret that I waste way too much time on the IntarWeb. It's useful for casual information on just about anything, and I pick up a lot of useless knowledge that way, but it's like a blue whale feeding on krill. You have to filter through a lot of crap for the useful nuggets. So it's a bit of a shock to see a hugely detailed treatise stuffed into a single webpage, talking about... Thailand prostitutes, of all things. It's a generally clear-eyed, slightly cynical view of the scene, warning the farang (a.k.a. gaijin or lao-wai) about the pitfalls and acknowledging its unsavory aspects while giving advice about how to get one's rocks off cheaply. The only problems I had with the piece is how he complains about people (e.g. Japanese tourists) overpaying and driving up prices (used to be 500 baht a night, now it's more like 1000 and up), even as he quotes rising tourist numbers. It's called "supply and demand", buddy. And he's banged how many cheap Thai whores and he won't spell out "fuck" on his webpage? Oh, and there's the usual complaints:

• With the West becoming more and more politically correct, many Western men consider farang females to be brash, opinionated and downright arrogant when compared with their more feminine, Thai counterparts. It really does seem that Western women want equal "rights" — but without equal responsibility. Many Western men claim that however you compare it, Thai women come up trumps when compared with Western women.
  
• Unfortunately, Thais are classic liars and frankly, you can't have a meaningful relationship with a liar. Thais simply do not seem to value honesty like Westerners do, and the Asian notion of face is FAR more important to them. This whole loss of face thing really gets in the way of things and makes people lie so much — due to fear of losing face.

But that's the usual spiel from Asian expats, each of whom seems to feel that he's the only honest man in a sea of deceitful yellow faces.