I like how at the moment there’s a thread titled: “Going to Bangkok on Saturday!” right above this one.
At least she didn’t bite off his nose.
Don’t call yourself a man! What real man would treat an innocent woman like that!!! Cad!!! Scandalizer!
I like the way she is identified as “N” all the way through but then is called “Newalee” in a heading. (I assume that is her anyway).
Yes, the link in the OP. Stick tried to go through and change her name to N in every instance, but I guess he missed that one.
So if I actually want to find love in Thailand, I’m SOL?
Nah, just keep your wits about you. My best friend is an American who basically married his secretary upcountry. They’ve been together for close to 20 years, with two beautiful daughters. There’s me. (Well, I met my Thai wife while we were both students in Hawaii, but I had already lived for years in Thailand before that and managed not to fall for a bargirl.) Lots of good relationships.
But they’re boring. It’s the many, many doofuses who arrive here every day who keep us entertained. 
That’s a relief. I was beginning to think that you’d been hired as an agent to dissuade people from seeking love in Thailand. 
He is a Man with a Mission.
Another poster sent me an excellent 8-1/2 minute YouTube video that was apparently aired in the West recently. You can see it here, and it IS safe for work: My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist 1.
I replied to the poster the following:
**"Hey, thanks! That video is spot on. It’s a story I’ve seen time and time again.
"I like that it does not portray the lady as an evil gold digger, although there are some of those out there, too. She seemed to be portrayed sympathetically.
"The one detail the video gets wrong is that there is no province called Isaan. Isaan is simply the collective term for most of the Northeast. It consists of 19 provinces and has always been the poorest part of the country and thus where the vast majority of bargirls in Bangkok and other tourist towns come from. At least, the bargirls in the bars that cater to Westerners. It’s true what it says in the video about these girls often not being attractive to other Thais. The Thais prefer lighter skin, as do the Japanese and Chinese tourists, and the girls in the bars catering to them are usually from the North, where lighter skin prevails. Western men’s preference for darker-skinned girls is in fact often taken as “proof” that they’re a bit touched in the head. Among the Thais, northeastern girls are usually considered the ugliest, with the North setting an ideal standard of beauty.
“I looked up Kranuan and found it’s a district in Khon Kaen province, up in the Northeast, or Isaan. The name Isaan comes from Isana, the name of an old Mon-Khmer kingdom that flourished in that area and northern Cambodia a couple thousand years ago. Khon Kaen seems to be a particularly abundant source of bargirls in Bangkok; I’ve known quite a few from there.”**
[/QUOTE]
After viewing that video, I noticed there are four more, and all five are part of the same show. All are work-safe:
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist 2. It purports to show Nana Plaza in Bangkok, but no, that is NOT Nana Plaza. I can’t quite work out where it is, but I think it may be the old Sukhumvit Plaza Building on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 1. I say “old” because it’s in the process of being demolished now, but it was built maybe 10 years ago, no longer than that. It’s a stone’s throw from Nana Plaza, which is in Sukhumvit Soi 4. Even though it was near Nana Plaza, that corner is a bad location and cannot compete with Nana, because you have to cross a very busy street to get to it, so why bother? Nowadays instead, the bar scene is creeping up along Soi 4 instead of making you go out of your way like that.
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist 3. This one does actually show Nana Plaza, but then suddenly Poof! at the 7:16 point in the video, they’re back at Godiva Bar, which I’m pretty sure was in Sukhumvit Plaza. That’s odd.
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist 4.
My Boyfriend the Sex Tourist 5. Shows the Best Foreign Husband contest. That part must be stock footage, because I have seen this before, with the same contestants, and it always makes me wince. I don’t believe it’s an “annual event” as portrayed, nor do I think it common. I’ve only heard of this one occasion and believe it to have been a one-off.
Skipping most of it made me feel smart. 
And yes, it’s just been confirmed to me that Godiva Bar was indeed in Sukhumvit Plaza.
Well, this is interesting. I just found out local writer Dean Barrett, a former US Army intelligence officer way back when, wrote about the filming of that documentary here. I missed all of this before:
**"How would you like to hang around a Bangkok bar with pretty women and have all the drinks you want for free? I thought so. Well, an English TV team (Channel 4) is in town making a documentary film and they need warm bodies for the bar scene. The film director says they are 'looking at a letter-writer from a small town in Isaan called Kranhuan who translates emails and letters between village girls and the farangs they met in Pattaya and Bangkok. It’s quite a nice way of getting into the lives of a number of girls, and also getting a flavour of Isaan and how it has been affected by the fact that so many of its girls end up in relationships with farangs. They say here that when they ask the schoolgirls what they want to be when they grow up, they say that they want to be the wife of a farang!
“‘Anyway, we’re also filming in a bar in Bangkok (pool bar, not a go go bar) where one of our girls works. It’s called Lady Godiva, it’s in the small beer plaza on Sukhumvit just before the railway track, sometimes referred to as the Soi 1 Complex where Morning Night II bar is located. From Nana Plaza itself its West down Sukhumvit and on the right, just before the railway track, almost at the end of the Nana area. Once you get into the Beer Plaza, it’s the first bar on the right. It’s very little but the Mama san is great’.”
"The point is the film crew says that as there aren’t many customers around at the moment, as a way to induce guys to be in the film drinks of customers are free. So if you’d care to be in a documentary and get free drinks head for Lady Godiva’s.
“The dates are August 4th and 5th, anyone willing to be filmed will have their drinks paid for from 7 p.m. onwards. (Presumably not ladies drinks as well but who knows?)”**
Hey Sam, as someone who has had the great good fortune to visit Thailand many times I am not especially surprised by any of the stories you post. None of them seem remarkable to me in any way. In fact, I’d wager, you could find similar stories of men getting taken in, by conniving women, in pretty much any country in the world.
I enjoy your posts on other topics enormously, I always enjoy seeing them!
What is it with you and these stories? What is the appeal? You seem endlessly fascinated with stories of Thai prostitutes.
Have you had experiences with Thai prostitutes?
What’s so captivating in these stories, for you?
I’m glad you enjoy my other posts. If the ones in this thread bother you, then really, maybe you shouldn’t read them.
I’m sorry if I offended you, I wasn’t trying to.
And I certainly didn’t mean to imply that your thread topic ‘bothers’ me in any way, it doesn’t.
I really respect you as a poster and was just wondering what it was about these particular stories that you find so interesting, because they seem just so unremarkable to me.
I was just trying to understand, honestly. Again, I’m sorry if I offended you or hit a nerve, apologies.
Well, they are exotic, and judging from the pictures in the last link, cute.
One wants to take them home, give them a very long hot bath, shoot them full of antibiotics, lock up all your valuables and feed them sushi or something.
No, no apologies necessary. I wasn’t offended. if anything, I thought you may have been offended
I think a lot of people do find these stories remarkable. They have become run of the mill to me now, but when I was fresh off the boat, I was floored by them. Nothing like that ever happened in West Texas! Apart from my wild and crazy youth over here, I’ve known a lot of bar owners over the years, am in their bars often and so have come to know quite a few of these girls just by hanging out and talking to them, and their stories are frequently fascinating. However, I do try not to load too many of them on the Board; believe me, these are just a small sample of what I’ve encountered. I know one Westerner who works as a private detective here, and Man! the stories HE’S got would curl your toes, just from the few details he’s able to relate.
I liked the documentary I just linked to above because apart from the geographic mistakes, the story is recognizable to me. We get many, many Western film crews in town that seem to set out purposely to exaggerate the situaton into something not even remotely recognizable to local residents, and that BBC team did a fair job, I thought.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere here that the wife is a researcher and works for the government. Her office did a prostitute census about in the mid-1990s and came up with 200,000 for the country as a whole. She freely admits that was almost certainly woefully low, but you do what you can, and for years that number was taken as gospel by not only the government, but also various international agencies that had occasion to quote it. But then came the 1997 financial crisis, and their ranks swelled. A trip down to lower Sukhumvit Road or Thermae Coffee Shop or other freelancer hangouts saw lots of unemployed office workers out trying to turn tricks. Word was some of them was just happy with a bed for the nigth and breakfast in the morning as payment. Those were some tough days, and it looked for a while they might be re-created with this latest financial crisis, but I’ve not heard it happening at those 1997 levels.
A smart guy could scan your old posts and figure this out, but I am arguably not that smart, so don’t be offended if I ask:
Is your history that you did/do/never did “partake?” If not – what’s it like being in those joints as a non-punter?