Ep. #45 Bangkok Dating: Where to Meet Women, What to Avoid and Other Inside Tips

[Angel Donovan]: Angel Donovan here with another episode, Episode 45 of Dating Skills Podcast. Today we're going to do something a little bit different and a little bit special, and I'm hoping it's going to be like a miniseries. This is going to be like a miniseries within the podcast. Whenever I have an opportunity to meet some people who can really contribute something on this little area that we're going to be discussing today, we're going to invite them on and have a bit of a discussion. I'm hoping this is going to be three or four people each time.

Today we have three people and we have an aggregate of 16 years experience on this one subject, which is dating and relationships in Bangkok, Thailand. This is what I'm going to call the Exotic Dating Series because we're going to visit a place and give you lots of practical tips about everything that's going on in the city, really stuff that you can…so you can hit the ground if you go traveling there or if you go to move there, or perhaps you're interested, you're like dreaming one day you'd like to live somewhere else and you're wondering what the dating and relationships and everything like that would be like in that place. Well, this is the place you'd come because we're going to give so much information that really isn't available anywhere else. I'm planning for this to be something really special.

So as I said, the guys on the call today, we've got 16 years experience in this place, in Bangkok, Thailand, which is, you know, obviously it's one of the most special exotic cities around the world. You may not notice but Bangkok, and Thailand more generally, is the number one tourist destination in the world, and I have to say that the four years that I stayed there – I never had so many visitors in my life. All of these people actually that I hadn't seen for a long time, they would be passing through Bangkok and Thailand and then I'd catch up for them. So it's a great place to meet a lot of people because there are so many people that actually go for that city every year. So it's a very vibrant, exciting and dynamic city, and that's why I thought it's a great place to start.

Now, this is a monster episode. This is over two hours long, and when we got down to talking about it we realized there was just so much to talk about. And in fact, we actually missed out on a load of stuff, so when you're listening to it, see if you can guess which bits we missed out on.

So today we have a wolf pack from Bangkok. Welcome, wolf pack. And we have Charles and Jackson – you know Jackson as the editor. Hey guys, how are you doing?

[Charles]: Great.

[Jackson]: Hi Angel, how are you doing? Hi Charlie.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Great to have you guys on…

[Charles]: Hey Jackson.

[Angel Donovan]: So let's get a bit of background on you guys and your experience in Bangkok to get started. Jackson, if you could start out. Like everyone probably knows you already because you've been on the podcast before, but can you give us a little bit of background about how long you've been in Bangkok and how long you've been studying this stuff?

[Jackson]: Yeah, well, quick background on my dating skills. I've been studying this now for about 10 years or so. For those who don't know, I met Angel back in 2003 in London and we started learning all of this stuff together around that time, hanging out with other people, going out to all the bars and nightclubs. So I've been doing this now for about a decade. Been in Bangkok for now two months, so still pretty new to the scene here, but it's a great city and having lots and lots of fun.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. And Charles, how about you?

[Charles]: Well, about 10 years ago I went backpacking in Southeast Asia and I traveled around for six months and ended up staying in Bangkok. I got a job here and I started my own business.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: So I've been in Bangkok about 10 years.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow. And how about dating stuff, when did you start studying dating?

[Charles]: Probably like four or five years ago. I studied it not too intensively for maybe a year or two, and kind of dropped off the wagon a bit lately. I've had a girlfriend for two years.

[Angel Donovan]: Cool. Well, so we'll get into it, of course, the details, but of course you were dating in Bangkok pretty much ever since you were there, right? Before you even started studying anything.

[Charles]: Yeah. Yeah, I was out there going to clubs and stuff for quite a few years before I even heard about game or whatever you want to call it.

[Angel Donovan]: Jackson, what’s the, kind of to give a bit of context about your relationships and sex life, like how is it today in Bangkok? What’s the longest kind of relationship you've had? Have you had many relationships? You know, how many sexual partners have you had?

[Jackson]: In Bangkok? I haven't really had any relationships. I've only been here for a couple of months, so. I've been out on a number of dates here. I hooked up with a few girls but obviously, in two months, nothing too serious yet. But outside of Bangkok I've had a handful of serious relationships. Probably because I spend a bit of time on the road and traveling and doing different things, so I've probably had more like short relationships with girls, a few one-night stands and a few relationships around about a year or so. I've probably had about four or five more serious girlfriends. Number of sexual partners – tough to say for sure. I'd say it'd be around about the 100 number, so something like that.

[Angel Donovan]: And Charles, how about you?

[Charles]: Back when I was living in Canada I had one serious girlfriend for about a year, year and a half, and I guess sexual partners in Canada was…it was around 10.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: And since I've been in Thailand, or I guess like since I've been traveling in Asia, including my time backpacking and including the time where I settled in Bangkok, I had maybe two or three like serious relationships around a year or two each.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: Actually, less than that, but my current one is about a year and a half. And sexual partners, in Thailand and in the surrounding countries is around 170.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. Very clear stuff. So we've got two pretty experienced people here. Obviously, Charles has been in Thailand way longer than myself or Jackson. I was there for about three, four years – I actually can't really remember. A fair amount of that time I had girlfriends, I was at the stage where I either had a girlfriend, or I had multiple relationships, so sometimes I was dating a few women at the same time. and then I had some partying times with Charles, you know, going out quite a bit as well, a few phases like that, obviously seeing more girls. And I left Thailand about a year ago. That was that.

So guys, let's dive straight into the club and bar scene and give an overview of the different places you can go and what you can expect, the women you can meet and all of that jazz. So Charles, why don’t we start with you? Like which are some of the main areas you think are worthwhile going to in Bangkok, any particular clubs and places like that that you've enjoyed?

[Charles]: Yeah, sure man. Well, first of all, the nightlife scene here in Bangkok is exceptional. It's just really awesome.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: We have a lot of friends who come here just to party. So if that's your thing, then you can have a great time in Bangkok. And I kind of see it as there are two different types of clubs and bars in Bangkok – there's Thai style and there's Western style.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: So if you like Thai style, RCA - that’s Royal City Avenue, there's Ratchada, and there's Thonglor - Ekamai. Yeah, and Western-style clubs are around Sukhumvit, around Soi 11 - our old stomping grounds, you and me, Angel.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, we spent a lot of time there.

[Charles]: Yeah. There's also…actually one of my favorite places is Khaosan Road, which is kind of…it's like where the backpackers go. It's where I started off when I first came to Thailand. I stayed in a hotel there and I met a lot of people and I had a lot of fun on that road. So it's like a lot of…there's a few nightclubs but it's just everybody’s out on the street, walking around, shopping and drinking and eating and, yeah, it's a good party, for the younger crowd too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's a pretty good overview. So you and me spent a lot of time in Soi 11, which is the main hangout at first. Later on, I spent a bit more time in Thonglor-Ekamai for a few reasons. Jackson, where have you been hanging out, man?

[Jackson]: Well, I've actually just moved into a new apartment. So I'm quite close to Soi 11.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Jackson]: I guess the way to explain it to guys who haven't been to Bangkok before is a lot of the people who come to Bangkok long-term, a lot of the expats who move over here, they tend to live around Sukhumvit area. A lot of the backpackers that come here, they come here for just a week or so, passing through while backpacking around, tend to hang around Khaosan Road. There’s a lot of cheap hostels around there, cheap bars. If you're into that sort of backpacker scene, then Khaosan Road is an awesome place to go. Sukhumvit is a bit more upmarket compared to that – well, a lot more upmarket compared to that. You can get some nice clubs around here.

So I've been out in Soi 11 quite a bit. For people who don't know, when we say Soi 11 that just means Street 11 – the streets are named by the numbers.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: So Soi 11 is basically like the party street around here.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: You'll find a lot of Western people, a lot of upmarket clubs, and also some laidback bars. If you go out Friday, Saturday, you'll see the place is pumping, there are people sitting out on the street. They have all these, I guess best way to describe them is mobile bars. They're basically vans that are being decked out and turned into bars. So they’ll just park up along the side of the road, start serving drinks out of them. People sit down on the chairs. Very chilled out, laid back.

And then you have places like Cheap Charlie's, so especially people just sitting down at seats and tables outside, having drinks, chilled out. People are in their shorts and T-shirts there. It's pretty laid back.

The other side of that is to go some of the clubs in the area that are a bit more upmarket. You need to dress nicely to get into them. They might have cover charges working up close to 20 dollars, 20 dollars American or Australian.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Jackson]: You often get free drinks for that as well so say, cover charge might be 500 baht, which is 15 to 20 dollars. So for that you might get a couple of free drinks when you go in, so it's not too bad.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, that’s a good overview. I like the point like you talked about like Sukhumvit is the longest, kind of largest road in Bangkok.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And that's where a lot of the expat life, the tourist life…some of the tourist life is a lot of the department stores, and it's a very long road with different sois.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So, you know, Soi 11, and then it goes up Soi 13, it goes all the way up to the hundreds somewhere. And Soi 11 is pretty much in the center. It's not too far. It's a couple of stops from the center, and that's where there's a concentrate…

So let's start talking a bit…like we've all spent a lot of time in Soi 11 and it's kind of one of the highlights for expats and tourists. There's a lot of tourist activity turning up there as well. So which is the best club, what are the best clubs along that road? Like thinking about kind of like meeting girls. For instance, Cheap Charlie's for me is not a place you go to meet any girls or anything. In fact, I personally spent very little time there. It's okay to go and chill with your buddies.

[Jackson]: Yeah, it might be like a place you go have a couple of drinks at the start of the night before you move on to like a better bar or a club somewhere wanting to meet some girls. For me at the moment, I think the best club on the area is probably Levels, from what I've seen.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: Levels - it's a club that's in this like really expensive upmarket hotel. So if you go there, especially on the weekend, you get a lot of people there. So it's probably like a 50/50 mix of Western people and Thai people.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: So you get quite a lot of attractive girls in there. It's a bit more upmarket in that the drinks are maybe a little bit more pricey than what you're going to pay in the average bar, but compared to some of the other bars and clubs in the area, I think it's probably worth it. Q Bar is another club. I've been in there a few times in the last few weeks. Personally I haven't been that impressed with it. I've found it quite expensive and there's not that many girls inside, so I'm tending to stay away from that one now. I've found Levels to be better.

There's actually a place behind it that's called WXY Bar. I was in on Friday night. They're doing 500 baht entry and all-you-can drink in that time from 9 o'clock to 12 o'clock. So I was in there with a friend. We met quite a few girls in there very easily. There wasn’t a lot of guys in there. There was low competition. So while everyone is down in Levels spending a lot of money on drinks, we were up in this bar behind it—maybe people don't know about it, but—drinking basically for free once we paid to go on in. Met some girls going down to Levels afterwards. Met some other girls in there and ended up going to three other places after that. But I'd say for most guys who are maybe wanting to start off with a good club in Soi 11, wanting to meet girls, probably Levels is the place to go.

[Angel Donovan]: So from my experience, basically, Q Bar isn't a place I would go very often because there's a lot of lady boys in there and there's a fair amount of hookers, especially downstairs. They have like two parts - upstairs and downstairs. Some people will go to chill out upstairs. It's kind of expensive and there's not normally a lot of people in there, and just in my experience it tends to be kind of focused on older guys looking to pay hookers or mostly that scene. It may have changed in the year I've left, but that's primarily what it was when I was there.

The other thing to say is like Levels has become pretty popular over just the last year. It was only set up about a year ago, but it was actually set up by one of the main promoters that we know and he's heavily promoted that – he's very well connected. So that's why that's done pretty well.

Before people go out, they tend to go to where… this bar which is opposite Levels, which Levels is in W Hotel, by the way. And Oscar is this like pub bar. You can meet girls there. There are some nice girls there sometimes and it tends to be the place people go before they go somewhere else in Soi 11 like Levels or somewhere else. So you kind of see the same crowd.

And like, Charlie, we can talk a little bit about the past, right? Because there's been like a big change in Soi 11 just recently, which is, where did we use to spent most of our time before?

[Charles]: Yeah, it was…Bed Supperclub was on Soi 11 there. That was our main place that we went all the time. But yeah, it's recently shut down and it sounds like it's kind of been replaced by Levels, which I haven't been to by the way because I haven't gone out much since I got my girlfriend like a year and a half ago. But yeah, that was a great place.

And did we talk about Nest yet? I cut out for a minute there, so I didn't hear if we talked about Nest.

[Angel Donovan]: No, we haven't covered Nest yet.

[Charles]: Is it still there? [Laughs]

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] It's still there. I'm not sure…

[Jackson]: I was in Nest on Friday night I think it was, and it was quite good because we were there with a group of people. I would say from the setup of it like it's maybe not the best place to go to go and approach women, and most people were sort of sitting down at the table in a group and it wasn’t too busy in there. But if you're already with some women it would be a great place to go.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. When I went there and, Angel, when we went there, most of the time it was one of the club crawl nights, so it was really packed. And there was a lot of mingling when it was super-busy, but maybe it's not so super-busy these days. Do you guys know if the club crawl is still going on?

[Jackson]: I've got no idea about that, but it sounds interesting.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so the club crawl was pretty much I think the main event of the month. It was a once-a-month thing in Soi 11. If it's still going on you'll easily be able to find out about it, just like kind of Google it online. And that would be basically one night where you pay one fee and you go to Bed Supperclub at the time but now it would be Levels and Nest and Q Bar. And it was the only night in my mind that, you know, Q Bar was worth going to and Nest would be packed.

And as the guys have said, the problem – Nest is a laidback bar. I would go there mostly for dating and to meet girls a second time after I've met them somewhere else, and it's a great place to chill out like that and go with your friends and chill out. But unless it was a specific event—they have events there and they have this club crawl—then it's not really a place you go to meet girls.

[Charles]: Yeah, I'd agree with that.

[Jackson]: Yeah, sounds good.

[Charles]: One thing I will say about Q Bar—I was saying it wasn’t the best place to go, but—we found that on Wednesday nights they're having model nights in there. I don't know if it was the same when you guys were going out there, but we went there on a Wednesday a couple of weeks ago. And basically there's a lot of models who live in Bangkok, especially girls from Russia and Eastern European countries, so they’ll be hooked up with model clubs and their agency and all of the nightclubs will give them free entry, free drinks just to get them in the door and use that as a sort of promotional tool to get guys coming in and spending money on overpriced drinks.

So when we were there a couple of weeks ago, there were quite a few attractive girls in there simply for the free drinks. So we talked with a couple of girls from Russia, Denmark, and they're like, “Oh, you know, we've had 15 free drinks in here tonight,” and they’ll go there just for that. But that might be worth checking out if you're looking for somewhere to go midweek.

[Angel Donovan]: A great point about the models, like there's a lot of Eastern European models now in Bangkok. Basically, think like a lot of tall white girls, right? Because they want…

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: They want the comparison with the Thai girls with the darker skin and so on. So, you know, there's a lot of those type of models that have been imported and a lot of them tend to be Eastern European, but there can be other places. There's Brazilian ones and others, but it's most East European.

There's another bar where they have model nights quite often and it had a Japanese sushi bar. It wasn’t in Soi 11. Do you remember that place?

[Jackson]: Oh that's Koi Restaurant.

[Angel Donovan]: Koi, right.

[Jackson]: On Soi 20.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, right. That's Sukhumvit 20, right? Or somewhere like that.

[Jackson]: Yeah. Yeah, Sukhumvit 20.

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: That's a good place to meet those types of girls. I can't remember, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursdays at the time, but you'd have to check which nights it was, yeah, and that was…

[Jackson]: Wednesday at the moment. So I was actually in there a couple of weeks ago with a couple of guys and we joined a group of models at a table because they get free food, free drinks, and then they normally head on to Q Bar afterwards. So Wednesday night seems to be model night. So yeah, a good place to go. There's quite a few attractive girls in there.

[Angel Donovan]: So going back to Bed Supperclub, Bed Supperclub was the icon club for maybe 10 years in Bangkok and it was like all the tourists would end up there, everyone in Bangkok would end up there. Closed on 31st August, 2013, just this year. What happened was that they had to move somewhere, I think. So I think they're going to open somewhere else, and when they do that it's probably going to be a central point again because they were doing very well before. They were very successful at what they did.

The other point to know is that they’ve actually got Bed Supperclubs around the world now – Singapore, where else have I seen them? Anyway, so it's kind of a company and they’ve sown the success that they had in Bangkok.

So what else is there to say about Soi 11? I think that's kind of the roundup, you know, apart from… One last thing is like there may be more of a emphasis on paying now, but everyone I knew and when I was there, we didn't really pay to get into the clubs. Charlie, like that was kind of the situation, right?

[Charles]: Yeah, yeah. If you know somebody or you got like a card that you got from your friend, well, you could get in for free.

[Angel Donovan]: So they have these VIP cards. Some of the hotels have them or you can meet promoters. If you're going to a place regularly, you can get a card from there. That was Bed Supperclub. I imagine Levels is the same. So if you're there for a while, you definitely want to try and get hooked up, because if you're going there every night like we were it would get very expensive paying the entrance fees every night, which is, how much is it normally?

[Charles]: I don't know.

[Jackson]: I think…

[Charles]: It's like 500, isn't it?

[Jackson]: Well, Levels you can get into for free. There's no cover charge to get in there.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Jackson]: If you go to Q Bar, the cover charge basically depends on who they’ve got as the DJ that night. So if you go there with a well-known DJ, I think we had to pay 700 baht to get in, which is quite expensive for Bangkok.

[Charles]: Whew.

[Jackson]: A lot of clubs, you'd be looking at more paying sort of like 200, 300 baht cover charge and maybe a free drink with that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So there's 35 baht to the dollar roughly and, you know…

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So we're talking 10 dollars upwards. So if you're going out every night, it can start adding up.

[Jackson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Charles]: Yeah. So another place that we might want to mention is, well, can we go away from Soi 11 right now?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Charles]: It's…what it called, that place? There's another area that has a lot of nightclubs – silom, Soi 4, is it?

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Charles]: And that's near the Skytrain. There's a lot of gay clubs there, but there was one like really good sort of Western-style house music club.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: What was that called, Angel?

[Angel Donovan]: Damn. You know, I was hoping you would know. I don’t remember. It's three floors. Is it in Soi 4, though? I'm not sure if it's in Soi 4 or Soi 6.

[Charles]: I think it's Soi 4. Yeah, you're right, maybe it's Soi 6. Yeah, like the other clubs on that street are all gay clubs, but this is like the one club you might want to go to there if you're not gay and you're interested in meeting girls.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: I'm sure the name will come to me like as soon as we stop talking about it.

[Angel Donovan]: Guys, we'll put it in the show notes in the usual place. So don’t worry, if we can't think of the name, we’ll put it in the show notes for you.

[Charles]: But that club is like a 50/50% Western/Thai mix.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: There's dance floors there, which is a good thing. When you're in Bangkok, a lot of clubs don’t have dance floors.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: The Thai-style clubs don’t have dance floors and I try to avoid clubs like that. But then when you go to clubs that do have dance floors that are Western clubs, they tend to be like full of hookers. Like you always have the problem that there’s going to be a lot of hookers there and you don't know which girls are normal girls and which girls aren't hookers. But this club we're talking about in Silom is, yeah, I don't think there's any hookers there.

[Angel Donovan]: I haven't met any hookers in that bar.

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: I've met a few girls from the gray area, which we can discuss a bit later. I want to like touch on how you know if a girl’s a hooker or not in a bar because it's a kind of dimension that other, you know, men from the West aren't used to. It's like when you go into a club or a bar sometimes the girls are hookers, sometimes they're lady boys, and you don't know, right? It's something that you kind of should be worried about. You should like learn how to know what you're dealing with, basically. So I think we can cover that in a little bit, but just to say that most bars have element of that, but they have less and more. In Soi 11, there's a fair amount of hooker-type activities, so in Levels… I see the pictures on Facebook now and I know what a hooker looks like. So there's a lot of hookers in Levels.

[Jackson]: There's definitely a few hookers in there. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, there's a lot, maybe 50, 60%. That's the kind of ratios you can be dealing with with those… Soi 11, for example, in the bar Charlie was just talking about. I think it's really, really…

[Charles]: Tapas.

[Angel Donovan]: Tapas! That's the name of the bar.

[Charles]: Thank you, Google.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: Yeah. So the Western clubs we're talking about on Soi 11, Sukhumvit Soi 11, what do you guys think? Do you think maybe like half the girls there might be working?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: Yeah, maybe half the Thai girls. So if you go to a club that's 50/50 Western and Thai, so maybe half the Thai girls are working. So you're looking at maybe 20, 25% of girls in a club might be hookers.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I think the thing to say is that, you know, if you're looking for foreign girls, you're going to probably find most of those in Soi 11, Khaosan, and that Charlie just mentioned - in Silom.

[Charles]: Right, right. And, well, should we talk about the difference between Thai clubs and Western clubs? Because that might be important for somebody who’s coming here for the first time. You might need to know the difference. Like Thai-style clubs, they tend to, like I said before, they don’t have dance floors.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: And usually you walk in there and one of the waiters or waitresses, they grab you and they put you at a table, and you stand at this table with your friends amongst like hundreds of other tables. It's just like, replace the dance floors with a bunch of tables. I mean, you stand around these tables, you order a bottle of whiskey and a bucket of ice and glasses, and you share the drinks with your friends, and you look around and everybody’s kind of hanging around their table with their backs turned to the rest of the club. Personally, I find it really hard to mingle and meet people there that you didn't come with. The music’s really loud and you can't really hear anybody if you try to talk to people.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: So I try to stay away from those clubs. You know, some guys, some Western guys, they tell me that they pick up girls there, and I have no idea how the fuck they do it but…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: …[laughs] they must be magic.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Charles]: So I would recommend like avoid those places, and that would be RCA, Ratchada… Yeah, those two places.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So I've got some little anecdotes from that stuff in a minute, but Jackson, have you been to any of those clubs like Thonglor-Ekamai, RCA, Ratchada, any of those areas which are Thai clubs basically?

[Jackson]: I haven't really been out a lot in those places. From what people have told me, they're not the best places to go, same as what Charlie is saying. But I think with RCA in particular, like it's a very young crowd. You guys totally would know more about that than I would, but it's maybe a lot of college- and university-age kids around there going out for a night, right? There's not a lot of Western people there. There's not really a lot of foreign people who they're hooking up with the Thai girls. It's more like a Thai club and they sort of stick to themselves in that area…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: … people there are there to party amongst themselves.

[Angel Donovan]: So I think I've spent more time in the Thai areas than you guys because I had a few Thai girlfriends, which were pretty active partiers and I used to go and party a lot with them. So the RCA scene is a little bit younger, like Jackson mentioned. So you have one main hip hop club there called Route 66 where you see more foreigners. That has changed pretty quickly over the last few years. Before there weren't any, but now you see more foreigners there. There's another club, Slim, where you see some foreigners.

As Charlie was saying, inside the club it's pretty hard to meet anyone, and if you want to get a table in any of the Thai clubs, you have to buy some whiskey. So you'll go in and you buy the whiskey, and then you get your table. Otherwise, in a way, you shouldn't really be in the club. [Laughs] It's kind of like that, It's the system they have. After we've covered the club scene, we'll talk a little bit about strategies and what ways you can meet people in these, but I've met quite a few girls in these types of clubs, and in fact that's what I was focused on in the last… my last two years in Bangkok more.

So RCA’s kind of the younger crowd, and also I just want to… there is like a little bit of a safety issue in some of these Thai clubs, which I want to make sure not to forget that. There's Thonglor and Ekamai, and this is really my favorite area because it's where you find the highest-quality Thai girls, you know?

They have something called hi-so, high society, in Thailand, which basically means very wealthy Thais. They have a large segment of very wealthy people in Bangkok and they're kind of rich kids which you would see in LA or somewhere else, because it's that concentration of wealth there. So this area’s called Thonglor-Ekamai where most of them hang out, and there's a whole bunch of clubs there. My favorite used to be Demo. That had a slightly more Western feel to it, not that there was a lot of Westerners there, but the music was more Western, and so you got more internationally Western or just more open-minded Thais and they tended to speak more English as well.

So there's a place called Escobar, there's another called Muse, and there's Nang Len. Nang Len is quite young. All the others are kind of ages up to 40 roughly. Escobar was one of the most "in" places, and Muse, when I left, and I'm sure they're still going strong. All of them have the same system that Charlie mentioned. For me, Demo was the most Western one. And that kind of… there tends to be a lot of girls there who are from high society, you know, they're well-educated. A lot of them have stayed abroad, so a lot of them speak English, and they have money, you know, if you're interested in that kind of thing.

There's another Thai area which Charlie spoke about which is Ratchada ,right? Ratchada I've only been to twice. Charlie, how many times have you been there?

[Charles]: Oh yeah, about two or three times. it's like RCA, which is a similar area we're talking about, but it's… I think like the kids there are younger and there's a lot of actually underage kids going there.

[Angel Donovan]: That fits with my experience too. So I remember one girl I met and she invited me there, and that's one of the times I ended up there, and then I found out how old she was.

The one thing I would say that's interesting about that place is a club called Hollywood, which we ended up one night because one of my friends visited and he took me to a go-go bar, which we'll talk about in a minute. And he was talking to some of the girls, and then he said they'd go Hollywood after they finished. So he was like, “Hey, why don’t we go there, see what that's like?” you know, just to kind of explore Bangkok, and we ended up in this club called Hollywood.

It was a pretty crazy place. You can imagine, like it's kind of where all of the dark side of Bangkok goes after they finish working. There were like guys who looked like heavy pimps with tons of chains and tattoos all over their bodies, with circles of girls around them. And we were the only foreigners there and we kind of stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was interesting, just kind of like, “Wow, this is a crazy side of Bangkok we're looking at right now.”

So that's the only thing I really saw about Ratchada. The other clubs were unremarkable. Have you guys been to other after-hours clubs a bit similar to that?

[Jackson]: What was that? Late-night clubs?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, like after, say, I don't know, 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning.

[Jackson]: There's one on Soi 11 called Bash that I've been to a couple of times. I think it opens at midnight and goes till… I think they don’t really have a set closing time – it's just whenever they feel like closing.

So I've been in there. The thing with a lot of late-night clubs is you're going to find there's a lot of hookers in them because there are guys who go into places who haven't hooked up with a girl yet for the night. So girls know that if they go there they're going to find a lot of drunk guys that are looking to hook up with a girl. So there's a lot of prostitutes in these places.

I was in Bash a couple of weeks ago, started talking to what I thought was just a normal party girl from the way she was dancing and the way she was dressed, but started talking to her - she showed me a video on her phone of herself sticking various vegetables up her anus…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: …and then that's when I figured that she [laughs] might be a prostitute…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: …and I left the situation. You get some party girls in some of these late-night places I think.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. I think a nice rule to go by is like—because you just brought that up—the later you go out, the higher the ratio of hookers and prostitutes no matter where you go.

[Jackson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So anything after 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning starts getting really like 80%, 90% and upwards.

[Jackson]: Yeah, even though on Khaosan Road, which is generally a good place to go, you don’t find that many hookers in the bar because they're normally like the bars where you sit down at the table. So there's not really a lot of hookers in these places if you go to them late at night. There's a few Irish bars on the corner, and if you go in there late at night about 2 o'clock, it's totally 90% hookers from what I've seen.

[Charles]: A place that's worth mentioning is called Gulliver’s. Is that the one you're talking about?

[Jackson]: Yeah, Gulliver’s. Is that the one in the corner?

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that’s Gulliver’s.

[Jackson]: Yeah, Gulliver’s.

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: Yeah. So I think anywhere you go late at night you're just going to find a whole lot of hookers where there's just on the street, in any bar. It's going to be something you're going to have to deal with, so just get used to that idea.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: Well, and it's not necessarily a bad thing depending on your style. Like a lot of the girls with questionable morality, you can call them hookers, you can call them opportunists - they can just be sleazy girls. Some guys will have a lot of fun with them, and I did for my first few years. I went to the after-hours clubs all the time. Yeah, like it's a shit show, everybody’s totally drunk, there's tourists like sleeping in the corner and like girls dancing on the tables, and like it's fun, man. It's fun if you're into shit shows. And you can meet lots of girls there, and sometimes they want money, sometimes they don’t.

If you do want to find a place like that, they're super-easy to find. Any time you leave a normal club, a normal Western club that we're talking about before, there's going to be taxis outside. They're going to be grabbing you and trying to get you to go to an after-hours club because they get commissions if they drop you off there. They get paid like 300 baht. So that's really good for them.

Actually, sometimes it's hard to get a taxi after you go to a normal club. It's hard to get a taxi that will go and drop you off at home because they’ll just try to push their after-hours clubs on you.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: And you might want to go to an after-hours club too. You might say like, “Take me to Scratch Dog,” and the next thing you know you're at Spicy, which is another after-hours, because they get a bigger commission when you go there. And you're like, “What the fuck, man? Didn't tell you to go here.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: And then you just get out of the cab and you storm off and then you make a big scene, and then he starts yelling at you and you get a little scared because all the other taxi drivers might get pissed off, assume that you're being the jerky foreigner.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: Yeah. So yeah, the after-hours clubs, they're almost always sleazy but they can be fun if you like shit shows.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So that's like the biggest one and it's the one that the taxi drivers push the hardest. And that's probably close to 95% hookers in there, or as you say, questionable, because it's kind of a… And in the West we think it's a binomial, it's like 1 or 0, it's like you're a hooker/you're not a hooker. In Thailand and in Asia in general, there's more of a sliding ratio. There's pure prostitution, and then there's like people in the gray area, and it's a bit more murky like that.

So one bar you mentioned there was Gulliver’s. That's kind of like what I call a beer bar and there's quite a few of those, and they tend to have a lot of hookers working. And then there's one in Soi 4 in Sukhumvit – is it Soi 4, Charlie?

[Charles]: Yeah, probably. That's where the go-go bars are, and then there's a few beer bars.

[Jackson]: It's just a lot of hookers in Soi 4. [Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay…

[Charles]: Soi 4, Soi Nana – that is hooker central.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Okay, that’s go-go bars, so that's not it. It's actually on the other side, so it's probably like Soi 3 or Soi 5.

[Charles]: Oh yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But anyway, so since we're talking about that anyway, well, quick tip for the taxis is just like, you know, as Charlie was saying, you’ve got to be careful. Monitor where you're going when you get in the taxi and just keep telling him where you're going, because it's just like he may lie to your face that he'll be like, “Hey, you're in Bed Supperclub,” when in fact you're in Spicy. So if you don't know what the place looks like, you might end up in the wrong place, too. So that's something to be pretty careful of.

So anyway, let's quickly… we've spoken a bit about a few of the after-hours there, which tend to… you can go on partying till like 12 o'clock the next day. I think Spicy closes at 6 or 7, and some of the others.

[Charles]: Yeah, but across the street from Spicy, like when Spicy closed around 6, Swing Club opens.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: Yeah, and that one opens and you can stay there till like noon, and it's a complete shit show in there.

[Angel Donovan]: It's crazy. Jackson’s been in there the first time he came in—you remember that, Jackson?

[Jackson]: Yeah, was that Spicy?

[Angel Donovan]: No, but we went into Spicy and we ended up in, is it called Swing?

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Across the road you go up in a lift, and that was a real crazy shit to get introduced to Bangkok with.

[Jackson]: Yeah, so [laughs] and that was a place that was… I think we were very drunk when we went there and the place was just full of hookers.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: I think I was pretty much disgusted when I [laughs] walked in there for the first time, at what the place was like. It was very sleazy. But it's something new and was worth seeing, so if you go to Bangkok and you're looking to have a big night and you want to get a different take on some of the sleazier nightlife in Bangkok then you can be going and checking out these places.

[Angel Donovan]: And of course, if you want to party a long time, you're going to end up there. You tend to get a lot of visitors in Bangkok, and you know, I guess it's always good to show them a long party night all the way through to dawn, you know.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It's one of the things you've got to do. [Laughs] You were going to give a roundup of the clubs, the after-hours clubs.

[Charles]: Okay, so yeah, quick roundup of the after-hours clubs. There's Spicy and Swing, and those are super-super-sleazy but they're fun, and they're pretty big too. Climax – Climax is in Soi 11. So if you're at those Western clubs that we were talking about before in Soi 11, you can just pop on down there to Climax when they close and that's in a basement of the Ambassador Hotel. There's going to be a lot of hookers there too. It's probably like 80 or 90% working girls in that club.

There's also Scratch Dog, which is kind of more like a Thai-style club with a lot less hookers than all the other after-hours clubs. So of all the after-hours clubs I can think of right now, I'd say Scratch Dog has the least number of hookers. And a club with a lot less hookers probably has the least number of Westerners too, and they play like kind of house and electro music there. So any of these clubs, you can just tell the taxi driver, just tell them the name they know where it is usually. Did I miss any?

[Angel Donovan]: There's one you missed, which is actually really hard to find, and I didn't find it until like my third year when I started focusing on Thonglor, and the only way I found out was like some girls from Demo took me there one time. And they tried to keep it pretty foreigner free and I didn't find it until like my third year in Bangkok.

[Charles]: Is it Wip?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's the one, Wip. That place is interesting because you go into this like shopping mall, underground shopping mall, and you go up through this car park and you think… you're like, “What am I doing here?” And you go up through these stairs, and all of a sudden there's this club in the middle of this shopping mall, which is an after-hours place, and it's just for the… so it's the hi-so, where they go to party…

[Charles]: Thai style.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: Yeah. There's also Bossy. Is that what it’s called? They change names and they change locations so often. Like there used to be one called Boss, and then there's Bossy, and then there's like Spice and Spicy. Yeah, it doesn’t really matter which club they are - you can just hop in a taxi and you'll end up in an after-hours club.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Well, I think we've done a tour of the nightlife. Is there anything you… After this I want to get into kind of like dating places, not kind of where you meet girls, but we'll leave that till afterwards. That's kind of like the overview of the nightlife kind of bar date hookup scene or whatever.

[Charles]: Yeah, I think that's good.

[Jackson]: Unless you want to talk about this new place. Have you heard about Ku De Ta?

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, Ku De Ta.

[Jackson]: Like super-high-end.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: This just opened a couple of weeks ago.

[Angel Donovan]: That's something to mention because that's the same one from Singapore. There's a Ku De Ta in there…

[Jackson]: Yeah, there's one in Singapore and there's one in I think it's Bali. It's in Indonesia somewhere.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: They're charging a million baht membership fee to join.

[Charles]: Whew.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow. So you can't get in? Is it a private club?

[Jackson]: They had the grand opening like two weeks ago. One of my friends was going to go there and no one could get in. It was just all media and invite-only, and they opened it up last Saturday for the public.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh.

[Jackson]: So you can get in - I think the cover charge is about a thousand baht to get in if you're not a membership.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: And the drinks are like super-expensive.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. But, you know, it might be worth it. I went to that. It's a really nice place. I went there with my girlfriend. It's a really nice place to hang out if you like high-end clubs like that.

[Jackson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So you're sure to meet high-quality people because you've got that spend bracket to stop hookers and stuff getting in, I guess, because it's also…

[Jackson]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: I mean, that's kind of something to be said: Like in the clubs where you have to pay more to get in, you see less hooker activity. And that makes me think of, ah, there's Narz and… what do you guys… Charlie, I know you've been to those. What have you got to say about…?

[Charles]: Well, what’s the other one? Narz and the other one?

[Angel Donovan]: Glow.

[Charles]: Glow. Oh yeah. Yeah, those are good places, man. Glow – really small, house music. Kind of a tight crowd. The people who go there kind of know each other and real friendly Western people are there and Thai people are there. And there's a dance floor, so it's nice. And down the road from that is Narz, Narcissus.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, Narcissus.

[Charles]: And people say Narz for short. And there's also another club that’s in that same building. Can't remember the name, but it doesn’t matter. It's like what, they have like three different rooms?

[Angel Donovan]: It's huge.

[Charles]: Yeah, it's pretty big. One of them is, it's like… I can't even remember. Like it's always… it's really fucking loud hip hop. Like you can feel your ears getting damaged as you're in there.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: It's the loudest place in the city. And then they have like trance music in a different room downstairs. And then there's another room that nobody goes in, which seems to be like sometimes they have live music there.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: I think there's less hookers there. Like there's probably a few, but it's kind of a young crowd and like hip hop crowd. And yeah, like I met a few girls there. Yeah, I liked it there. What do you think about it, Angel?

[Angel Donovan]: It stays open really late.

[Charles]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: I met a couple of girls there. Typically, after Bed Supperclub—we used to finish about two or three—if you go straight over there for about an hour or so, it doesn’t get too sleazy. [Laughs]

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: So there were some interesting girls maybe, potentially, to me at that time, and then it starts going to downhill as people get more drunk and some people go home and new people turn up.

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so how about the daytime? What do you guys think of meeting girls in the day?

[Jackson]: Well, the thing is I think with Bangkok, because it's such a huge city there's girls everywhere, so it pretty much doesn’t really matter where you go like you're going to find some girls that you find attractive. So I've found with me just going out doing whatever I'm wanting to do anyway, you're better off doing that, and then you can just sort of meet some girls, talk to some girls while you're out maybe shopping. You know, I was out shopping a couple of days ago buying some stuff for my apartment, like grocery shopping, and everything is written in Thai pretty much so it's easy enough just to talk to the girl who’s in the aisle next to you like, “Hey, do you speak English? Can you tell me what this says on here? I've got no idea what I'm buying.” And then you can sort of get into a conversation from there.

So if you're out doing that, if you're out shopping, walking around just checking out the city, you're going to see a lot of girls around public transport. The good thing about Bangkok is it's quite easy to get around the city if you're going to the main part. So you get the Skytrain, it will take you to most places. There's plenty of hot girls on that. To me, my favorite place to talk to girls in the day is Khaosan Road.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: Like we were saying before, that's the big backpacker area, so there's a lot of young Western girls, typically who are from totally Western European countries is most common like German girls, French girls…

[Angel Donovan]: Swedish.

[Jackson]: .English girls. Swedish, yeah. A lot of Scandinavian girls, which is great. So if you like early 20, skinny blond girls, it's a good place to go, just walking around, checking out the cars that they're selling, the jewelry. If you're looking to buy gifts for people, it's a good place to go. But there's a lot of girls just walking around either by themselves or in small groups. It's very easy to start a conversation with them. There's a lot of street vendors selling food on the side of the road, even just standing there buying some food I was able to start conversations with girls who were standing next to me buying something.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: It's a very low-key, chilled-out kind of place. It's not hard to meet people there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[Jackson]: A lot of the girls are traveling by themselves, so even the ones that you see sitting down having lunch with another girl or at night having drinks with a friend, it's often just a girl that they’ve met in the same hostel that they're staying in. They're not really good friends that they know from back home.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: So in that situation they're open to meeting people. One of the reasons that they come here, they want to have adventure, they want to meet other people that will have a good time. Definitely, it's a good place to go meet some girls if you're looking to do some daytime stuff. I know that Angel, you're probably more of an expert on shopping center game, like places like Paragon. Do you want to talk about your experience with that?

[Angel Donovan]: The types of girls I wanted to meet, they weren't necessarily party girls. I like kind of well-educated girls that are kind of hi-so vibe sometimes, which means they have more money and stuff like that. And so one of the things I did is I used to just work, because I can work anywhere, so I used to work in a Starbucks in Paragon Center. So I spent a lot of time in Paragon, which is the largest, kind of nicest shopping center, and you tend to get people of good background – they have money and stuff.

And so I would meet a lot of girls there and I met a lot of my girlfriends there. I would say maybe at least 50, 60% of the girls I dated are probably from just that shopping center and you're just hanging out. It was just if I walked around and I saw someone I liked, I’d start talking to them. Thai girls are very friendly. Not all of them speak English, so that's one dimension. So I guess we can talk about language, but I studied Thai, and you can learn some basics pretty quickly to have a basic conversation. I'm into languages, so that was a lot of fun for me.

I think Paragon and Demo and some places in Thonglor, if you're into high-quality girls from an educational, kind of like intelligence and other kind of standpoint, then you can meet some really, really nice girls there, and those are kind of like where I met most of the girls or friends and stuff with them, all sort of girls with different backgrounds. So some of them are just kind of rich kids, they don’t do anything. Some of them are… they just decide to party a lot, so the girls in Demo sometimes they don’t really seem to want to do much with their life apart from party. There are a lot of airline hostesses around because a lot of the airlines get a lot of airline hostesses from Thailand because they're pretty and they're very polite. There's a lot of that kind of job.

So yeah, and the other place is Central World in terms of shopping centers, and there's another one called Terminal 21. So I met a few nice girls in Central World and a couple of in Terminal, but Paragon tended to be a place where I met girls I felt were of a higher quality. So that's kind of my story.

[Jackson]: Yeah, there's a couple of other places like Emporium is another shopping center that's got quite a lot of quality girls. Big department store in there and there are plenty of other shops a bit more upmarket. The other one that I've been to that was interesting was MBK. It's [laughs] maybe hard to describe that place. It's, what is it, six levels?

[Angel Donovan]: Six.

[Jackson]: Probably six levels.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it's six levels of what Charlie would call the shit storm, right?

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Charles]: [Laughs] Shit show.

[Jackson]: It's a lower-quality place which seems like mostly market stalls, so the people in there are selling basically their shit products. Thai people, they pay their fee to set up and they're selling shitty T-shirts and fake rip-offs of name brands…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: …and all sorts of shit like that. But there's one floor, it's dedicated to like mobile phones. It's a very busy place. There's a lot of girls working there. I was talking to Charlie about this place the other day. There's a lot of girls just working in the shops that are very bored.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: They're just sort of texting on their phone, watching DVDs in the little portable DVD players that they have. They don’t really give a shit about their job, they're just in there killing time, so I think they're quite easy to approach some of those girls.

And there's a lot of tourists in there. It's one of the places tourists get told to go and check out. If they're looking for bargains and things that they want to go buy, check out Mbk. So I've found a lot attractive Western girls in there, Russian girls, probably models in there. The same as the Russian girls you see, a lot of them, they come over as models, but the other side of it is a lot of them are prostitutes. There's a big market for Western prostitutes here and there's also a lot of Russian mafia working here in Thailand, so there is a lot of Russian prostitutes. So just keep that in mind when you're going and talking to them, thinking, “Oh, this is obviously a Russian model, but chances are she could be a hooker.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: Some very nice Western girls in there also. That’s maybe another place worth checking out.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so there's a couple of after-hours clubs we missed which were Insomnia, which is by Sunrise Taco near Times Square on Sukhumvit, similar to the others. Mix, which is a newer one – it's in the bottom of the Intercontinental Hotel. And I think that's kind of something that's interesting to mention, is that there's a lot of these like under-hotel bars. I've been to a few of them, not that many, but I think there are lots in Bangkok. Like all the major hotels seem to have them, Novotel and so on. There seem to be a lot of hookers in those kind of places. That's kind of been my experience. One of the best ones where people tend to go more and there's a slightly lower ratio of hookers too, normal girls and so on, is Mix, and that was quite popular when I left about a year ago. Not sure if it's as popular today.

[Jackson]: I have no experience. I haven't been there. A couple of people told me they’ve gone there and they say that it's quite a lot hookers in there, so it may have changed a bit since you were there last.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, there's a lot of hookers, so there's probably 80% after 2 or 3 a.m.

[Jackson]: I see.

[Angel Donovan]: But there are some normal girls that go there and there's also some foreign girls like Russian models and stuff in one room. There's one room which is a little bit better.

[Jackson]: Yeah, actually a friend of mine was… last week he took a Thai girl home from there, but he said the same thing – there's basically one room for normal girls and one room for hookers, so I don't know if they have signs on the door…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: …or not to tell you which way to go, but you can tell which room is a prostitute’s and which room is a normal girl’s, so it sounds interesting.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's funny, there's one room that's packed, and then there's the other room which is normally empty and it has this small dance floor, and the small room is the one which… and it's small and empty, is where more normal girls are. It's strange like that. Must be some…

[Jackson]: Is there like a club policy like they don’t let the hookers go into the other area or is it just how the hookers want to separate themselves? I don't know how that works.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I actually have no idea. Like you do see a hooker that will walk through this little passageway into the other side of the club, and then she'll kind of normally turn back pretty quickly, or sometimes she'll hover around for a little while and then I guess they just decide it's not their scene and they go back.

[Jackson]: Okay. Sounds interesting.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Kind of weird. Let's talk about like more of some of the cultural aspects or differences with dating and meeting women in Thailand. One of the kind of I guess the big things to get away is like any cultural taboos which could like get you into trouble with a girl and maybe you don't know it. I have a few in mind but Charlie, are there any big no-nos that you should try to avoid with Thai girls?

[Charles]: Yeah, well, the pink elephant in the room would be the whole foot and head thing. I learned about that when… like I read about it in The Lonely Planet when I was backpacking, but then I forgot about it, and the first girl that I hooked up with here, I was staying in her room, we're just clowning around on the bed like wrestling and whatever, and I pushed her away with my foot, like I put my foot on her ass and just pushed her across the bed, and she got really upset. And I was like, “What? What’s wrong?” And she's like, “Don’t do that!” Yeah, she explained to me, “You know, it's the foot,” and then I remembered – you're not supposed to touch things with your feet and you're not supposed to point at anything with your feet.

Just the other day I was working and one of my employees, I was talking to her and I pointed at something on the floor with my foot. I was like, “That one right there!” She got really pissed off at me.

Yeah, don’t point at things with your feet and don’t touch things with your feet, and that… So the foot is like a low part of the body - it's like the dirty part, and the head is the sacred part – it's the part that's closest to heaven. Well, they don’t really believe in heaven, but it's like it's the sacred part of the body and you're supposed to treat the head with respect.

And like one time I dropped a coin, like I was fishing in my pockets and like a couple of coins fell out and the coin was rolling across the ground, and like what do you usually do when a coin is rolling away from you? You step on it, right? But the king’s face is on the coin, so you're breaking two taboos there if you step on a coin – putting your foot on a king’s head.

And that leads to another taboo, is the king and the royal family: Don’t say anything about the royal family, anything bad, or you could get thrown in jail. And it's happened before too. Westerners have been thrown in jail for shit-talking the royal family.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: What else you guys got?

[Angel Donovan]: On the head thing, when I got to Bangkok—I think you told me about that—I had a girlfriend who was very much a party girl. I mean, she would go out like most nights. And so she was a bit more feisty, a bit more edgy than other girls. One night in bed, I pushed her down onto the bed and I stood on her head [laughs]…

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: …and as you can imagine, she like freaked. And so she was quite an internationalized…

[Charles]: And that's in public too, right? Like everybody was watching you guys fooling around…

[Angel Donovan]: No, no, no, no, no.

[Charles]: …and you stepped on her…

[Angel Donovan]: No, no, no, that wasn’t in public. Of course, that's another thing to talk about, is public things. This was in my room and in bed. So I pushed her onto…

[Charles]: Ah.. I thought you meant in Bed Supperclub.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh yeah, that would be so uncool. Okay, so you know, I stepped on her head and I kind of… I held her there, and she like got so pissed off at me. Now, obviously, the thing with party girls, you know, they're a bit more drama, and in a way it can be good for the relationship sometimes to be a bit more edgy. So that was kind of the angle I was going for. It didn't hurt the relationship or anything, but that’s a very specific situation and she did get pissed off at me and called me an asshole for a while afterwards with a slight smile to her face, right? But she was a more edgy girl than the majority of them, and she's more open internationally as well. So she kind of understands that we're not Thai and we don’t understand… Well, she knew I understood, but she knew I didn't take… you know, it's not something in my rules too with the head and the foot and stuff. You have to calibrate, I guess, the situation. But in general, I would just avoid the whole head and foot issue, as Charlie said. Jackson, have you come across anything yet?

[Jackson]: Not so much I think no. My ones are ones that you talked about, especially with the feet, like not to point your feet at people and to be respectful that way. I don't know, I think for me like it's maybe not cultural taboos but just being respectful in general and, like you were talking about before about things in public. I think they're very concerned about how people see them in public and how their reputation is, so don’t do anything that's sort of disrespectful to people in public would be a big one.

One thing I've noticed is you don’t see a lot of people like misbehaving and doing things to draw attention to themselves like you might see in Western countries. For example, like if I go out to nightclubs back home in Australia, I guarantee every night I go out I'm going to see people getting drunk, having fights, stumbling out under the street, swearing at people, you know, starting more fights out on the street. Like literally every night I go out I see that. That's just sort of what people might do in Australia when they get drunk, especially in certain areas.

I haven't that once over here in the whole time I've been going out, so I think people are a lot more respectful of people in general. They're concerned about their image in public. You won't really see a lot of girls hooking up with guys in public. There's not really a lot of like, you know, kissing in public is not really a big thing, so maybe stay away from that. You can sort of get away with it in nightclubs, but if you're out on the street, I don't think I've really seen people kissing in public.

The other thing I would say to avoid is being overly familiar with girls that you don't know. A lot of guys, Western guys, they come here and they think that all Thai girls are hookers and they can do whatever they want with them. A lot of girls that I've spoken to here told me they're out in a bar or a nightclub and some drunk Western guy comes over and puts his hands all over them, starts touching them up, thinking of them as just some Thai hooker and they can treat them however they want. And obviously the girls get pissed off with that because they're just regular girls, they're not hookers, and it makes them feel disrespected, like a piece of meat.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: So just treat girls with respect. And the girls who told me, like they're open to talking to any foreign guy who comes and talks with them if you'll just be respectful, ask them their name, talk to them like a person, and treat them like an equal. I think after you get to know them you can, you know, be a lot more physical with them, but you wouldn’t really do that to a girl in your own country. You're not going to go up to some girl you don't know, stick your arm around her, start trying to fondle her breasts, that kind of thing. It's a rude thing to do, so don’t do it over here either.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. You bring up some great points, and I think one of the main… I feel that, in a way because it's the Buddhist thing that's embedded in the culture, I think it's kind of like they have very high social standards for behavior. Like if you see someone misacting socially so they kind of lose control and they start yelling at people, well, they do anything negative like that, like giving negative emotions out, I find that Thai people are more sensitive to that, a lot more sensitive, and they're like, “Oh, what’s that person doing? He's just yelling and he's not being nice and he's not in control of his emotions and he's not being respectful, he's not being polite,” and they really look kind of down on that.

I mean, I wouldn't say it's looking down, because the other aspect of Buddhism is you're nonjudgmental, but it's just kind of like that's wrong and they don’t feel comfortable around it and they're going to try and avoid it, right? They’ll just try and avoid that kind of behavior because it's inappropriate, basically. And in a way I see Thailand is… one of the things I like about it is they kind of have very high standards for socializing and respect, and for me they're great attributes for anyone to learn whether it be in dating game or just in general life. I think you've got a lot to learn from being in Thailand and relating to Thai girls and Thai guys because they have some great standards around that.

The other thing that Jackson just mentioned is discretion. That's another important thing I looked at. And that's kind of applicable a bit more to Asia in general as well, but when you're hooking up with a girl or getting physical with a girl or anything, or even like, you know, if you're becoming girlfriend and boyfriend, especially on the… there's a continent in Thailand you go all the way from hooker, which is their standards for the way they live are obviously extremely different because of their lifestyle compared to the normal girl. And somewhere in the middle you would get a girl who's kind of like balances… like you'd think she was balanced based on your Western standards, and then you'd have another extreme which is more traditional. So if you go to Thonglor, if you go to the more Thai area, you'll find people a bit more traditional and they're not as cool with some of the behaviors Jackson talked about. They’ll be kind of horrified in some places.

So one example I'm thinking of, like I started dating a girl who was… I met her on actually Ko Samet, one of the islands. So she's just a Thai girl who, you know, she comes from the Thai world more, some of the Thai clubs we talked about. She doesn’t go to any foreign clubs or anything like that. She didn't speak very good English, actually. I was taking her out and I think it was only my third or fourth date, but you know, we got to this point we're holding hands and she's coming around my house. But in public I still had to be kind of careful with her because she didn't want everyone to see what was going on and stuff like she’s coming from that it's a lot more discretion is required.

And I guy I know, didn't know him very well, I bumped into him on the street and he went to just go and hug her and she was horrified, [laughs] because it's something she's just not used to, and she's not used to meeting a lot of foreigners either. She'd never really spoken a lot to a foreigner apart from me. So I had to go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey,” because you could see from her face that she was reacting very badly to that. So I just said, “Hey, you've got to be a bit cooler with the girls who aren't used to foreigners and stuff.”

So that's an example of where you've got to be more discreet about physical touch. Obviously, that's a bit more of an extreme example, and you'll find, depending on the type of girl you're dating or you're seeing or you're meeting, that it's a bit different.

Another girl I was dating—a quick example—she was an airline hostess, so she spoke English. She'd obviously traveled. She'd been to lots of places around the world. But she was also very hi-so, kind of that background, and on our second date I held her hand, and that was pushing her personal boundaries. That was pushing her physical boundaries, and she immediately said, “What’s going on? You're holding my hand,” even though we'd had a good vibe and everything. And I had to work over that and get her used to it in a more like dominant frame-pushing approach than I would normally elsewhere in the world to get her over it and to get her to feel comfortable with that.

So that's partly because it's in public but it's also kind of a comfort zone some of the girls have. So Charlie, I mean, you've been in Thailand a long time – what kind of examples of this or other aspects that you found different can you give?

[Charles]: Well, I'd just like to add to what you're saying there. Like you were stressing there's like a continuum, it's like a big spectrum. So some girls will be really slutty and open, or not necessarily slutty but, you know, like the party girls – you can come around and you can get away with more with them in public. And not every girl is like the air hostess that you were just talking about, like holding hands.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: With my experience, like that's really, really extreme, but yeah, it's usually like somewhere in the middle, maybe a little more towards that end. And I've also noticed that—we've kind of touched on it earlier—that Thai people are really conscious of people watching them. So like if you're like in a mall and you're talking with a girl, I think the girl’s going to be really conscious that like you're standing there in the mall and she's talking to a white guy—if you're a white guy like me—and there's kind of a stigma with that in Thailand. It's like every time you see a white guy with a Thai girl, people think, you know, they think, “Okay, is that a hooker or is that guy paying her to hang out with him?” which it's not always the case, like most of the time it's not, but people do think that and the girls are aware that people are probably wondering that about her if she's seen talking to you.

So that would be like in a mall or something. But if you're in a nightclub, like in an upper-class Thai-style nightclub, and you happen to be talking to a Thai girl who's there with her group of friends who are like guys and girls and maybe like they're high school friends, and you go over there and you start talking to her, just be conscious that she is also being conscious of that her friends are watching her and she might not like that, like she might…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: Like if you're alone with her, she might be cool and she might want to talk to you, but you might get a bit of a barrier if it's like that. So you have to watch her behavior. Can't do anything outlandish and stupid and really flashy like we were talking about before. Behave yourself and be polite and maybe say hi to her friends too and, yeah, don’t draw attention to the two of you standing there talking.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: She might get shy. And also we're talking about the whole conflict avoidance thing in Thai culture.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: It's really frowned upon if you have conflict with somebody, especially if it's public conflict. Maybe you've heard about Asian cultures and saving face. Thai people tend to avoid arguments and direct conflict with other people.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so the whole area of conflict avoidance and resolution really comes out in some interesting ways, especially in relationships. This is where you learn a lot about Thai culture and some of its intricacies. And I know both I and Charlie kind of have some stories in relationships, and you learn a lot from these relationships. I think there's some good things you learn like about conflict avoidance and how to handle things more appropriately in a better way to preserve trust in the relationship. So that's something that I think I learned from Thailand and dating Thai women.

But I know Charlie has a good example of one of the situations you can come across, you know, the different ways Western and Thai people can look at lying and conflict avoidance, which I think Western guys could find very confusing and annoying. So anyway, Charlie, like it would be cool if you could tell us that story.

[Charles]: Well, I'm not really sure if that story is about conflict avoidance.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: It's more of just like a story about lying and unhealthy and untrusting relationship with someone. I met this girl at a 7-Eleven and we ended up dating, and I was dating other girls. And she told me she wasn’t dating any other guys and she kept like asking me to be her boyfriend and to be exclusive with her, and like I kept saying no, and after a couple of months I finally said yes. And so like, alright, cool, I've got a girlfriend now. It's me and her and we're exclusive.

But then she kept like disappearing for a few days or, you know, like she wouldn't answer the phone. Like there's a lot of times where I was kind of getting to be suspicious about what she was doing. She told me she had this business, like she owned a restaurant in Hong Kong. So that was her excuse for disappearing for a few days. It was just really suspicious, and at one point, like when she was sleeping, I took her phone and I [laughs] plugged it into my computer and I downloaded all her text messages, and then I just read them and found out that like she was a hooker. She used to work in this bar. She knew a lot of guys. And like I just read messages like, “Come to my room, suck my dick. How much money do you want?”

And I found out that the place that she's staying at, like her apartment, was actually one of her boyfriends' apartment who… he was in another country, and like he's really rich and he's letting her stay in his apartment while he's gone, which explains why she never let me come to her place. And the Mercedes that she wrecked was actually his. And when she told me that she was going to do some business in Hong Kong, obviously she went to a beach with some guy, one of her clients.

So like this girl is typical. Like she had a few different guys in different countries sending her money every month and she was just partying, and I don't know why she wanted me to like be exclusive with her. But yeah, it was pretty hardcore. And Angel, you remember when I was going through that, like I was really upset, like I was ridiculously upset…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: …and it was a real hard time for me. And I see that kind of shit all the time here. It's very common. Like we all know somebody who’s been that guy. And like that was after I'd been here like seven years. I should have known better. I should have seen the warning signs. And like I always laugh at guys that [laughs]…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: …that that happens to, like, “That's never going to happen to me. Look at those idiots.” But yeah, I was one of those idiots. So like guys, if you come out here and like you stay a while, be careful of girls like that. There's a ton of girls that like their game, their whole game is to meet guys who are traveling, to like have a relationship with them, and then the guy goes back home and then she needs money, so she asks him and the guy ends up sending money every month. You know, there's a joke that's going around that like the Thai girl will tell the guy that her buffalo is sick and she needs money to help like take the buffalo to the vet. And yeah, be careful. Be careful about that.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright. It's a part of the Bangkok scene, is that these go-go bars where girls will start when they're really young, I guess 18 or early 20s, and they’ll be working there for a while, and it seems like what happens is they get some clients who really like them and those clients start sending them money, so they kind of get set up and then they leave the world of the go-go. And then I think a lot of them, because they're so used to partying—they’ve kind of been trained to be hardcore partiers because that's what they’ve been doing for the last, you know, all their working lives—they will start partying in places like Soi 11.

So that's why you see a lot of hookers or kind of ex-hookers, this gray area where they have providers in other countries and they’ve got this lifestyle where they have tons of money, they have like a Mercedes. There's loads of girls like they have loads of money and they have a nice apartment and they don’t work – those are all red flags.

[Charles]: Red flags, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. All red flags because she's probably got money sent to her. And then the other thing that Charlie just brought up is the disappearing thing. So if you ever start seeing a girl and then she disappears, like basically she's not answering SMS or phone, that’s a huge red flag because that means that her provider came into town and she either went to the beach or she's at the apartment with him and she can't reply to your messages, of course, because he's more important because he's paying for her lifestyle. So she would never want him to find out that she's partying and having fun with you, right? And obviously, you're not paying her.

And on some levels, like some of these girls it varies, but they actually want a real boyfriend and they want real love, but because of their background, their economic background and everything, they need the providers. So I guess they're feeling this really difficult situation where they kind of want to evolve to a normal relationship with some guy but they have all that background behind them too. You can see how complicated that life is. They're trying to keep secrets from everyone.

And with Charlie’s example, like he actually said to her many times, and this is why we came up on this, because of this conflict avoidance or like just lying is a different thing in Thailand, is that he would like show her the messages and stuff that he had on her and she would still deny everything.

[Charles]: Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, like I kind of forgot about that. I think this was a pretty traumatic experience for me and I kind of just avoided thinking about it, so I forget about the details. You probably remember them more than I do. But yeah, now that you mention it, I remember, I don't know if I was showing her the message but like I would maybe quote it word for word and she'd keep denying it. Like that night that we broke up, like I told her everything that I read and she kept denying it and denying it and denying it until I think she slapped me in the face and she stormed off, and that was the last I talked to her for quite a while there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And, I mean, in a way it is like if a Thai girl doesn’t want you to know something or she feels bad about something, if she doesn’t tell you the truth the first time, she's going to make… it doesn’t matter how much you know, she's always going to make up a new lie, right? Like we look at it as lying but I think in a way it's them avoiding the discomfort of the whole situation. She knows that you know but she doesn’t want to talk about it with you, right?

So in the West we hate it because it's lying, but for them I think it's something different, which I'm not exactly sure what it is. There's no point in pushing. Like in a relationship, if this happens, for instance, and you keep on pushing, like some of the times you're just going to end up having more drama, more arguments, and never get anywhere.

[Charles]: Yeah, yeah. Oh, totally. I couldn't agree more.

[Angel Donovan]: I mean, maybe that happens in the West too, but it happens a lot more… because I think it's the face-saving thing. So if they’ve said something to you and then you say, “That's not true because I have proof,” to save their face they still have to say that they didn't tell you a lie in the first place, right?

[Charles]: Yeah, and then you're supposed to just stop talking about it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: And like maybe you both know that it's bullshit but you just don’t talk about it, so you can save face and you don’t have to have that uncomfortable situation.

[Angel Donovan]: Jackson, I know you haven't been in relationships or anything, but have you noticed anything like this?

[Jackson]: I've probably noticed it from the other side because of I've hooked up with a few girls who have told me that they’ve got boyfriends, like guys who live in other countries that send them money…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Jackson]: …and it's interesting to talk to them about it because I say, “Does your boyfriend know that you're out sleeping with other guys?” and they say, “Oh no, he thinks that I'm a very good girl. He doesn’t know what I'm really like. I'm a really bad girl but he thinks that I'm like a princess. And if I ask him to send me money because I need money for my family because they're sick or…”

You know, I've heard the buffalo thing before that Charlie was talking about. The guy will just send the money. Like he won't even think about it because in his mind she's his girlfriend, and she's probably over here sitting in her apartment, waiting for him to come back and spend time with him, and it's a very naïve way of looking I think for the guys who, obviously, life if you're living here, like the situation that Charlie was talking about. If you're in another country, I would say don’t even think about having a Thai girlfriend who lives here because I can guarantee you she is going to cheat on you. If you're coming here a few times a year, don’t expect her to be faithful. Don’t send her any money. She's just using you to support her lifestyle while she goes out and hooks up with other guys.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Jackson]: So be very careful about the type of girls that you get involved in a relationship.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. One thing I want to bring up here is like we can't say Thai girls here because we're talking basically about the Thai girl partiers or the ex-hookers, but they may look just like partiers to you.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Because if you go to the traditional bars and the Thai bars we were talking earlier and you meet those kind of girls, that's not at all the situation. It's very different. So you know, there's different worlds in Bangkok and you have to kind of learn which to recognize. So since we're on this topic, if you're in a bar, how do you—like there's two things like I guess guys would want to know if they're in a bar. How do they recognize if a girl’s a hooker or not, or maybe an ex-hooker, and how would they know if she's a ladyboy or not?

[Jackson]: With the first one, with the hookers, it is really hard to tell. One of the reasons for that is what we were talking about before, is there's not really like just hookers and non-hookers – there's this whole gray area in between. So you might be out in a bar or a club and there's a girl in there and she's not a hooker, but sometimes she'll go out and if she meets a guy she might be kind of attracted to him so she's willing to go with the guy, but then she'll expect him to give her some money as compensation or she might say, “Oh, I need to go shopping tomorrow. Can you give me 500 baht, 1000 baht so I can buy something?” And they don’t really look at it as them being hookers, they're just hooking up with a Western guy who has got some money. He's trading them too, like a gift or something like that. So it's different to what we're thinking of as prostitution but it's very normal over here.

I've found for me, like I'm still not at the stage where I can tell 100% which girl is a hooker, which girl isn't. Like if a girl was by herself, she's looking around trying to make eye contact with a lot of different guys, wearing a really short skirt, high heels, she doesn’t really look like she's having a good time, she's not vibing with what’s happening in the bar, chances are that she's a hooker and she's looking for business, but it's not always a certainty until you actually go up and talk to them and maybe bring up the subject. Like you're not really going to know 100%, so it's tough. If you guys have got any surefire ways to tell, I'd be keen to hear them.

[Angel Donovan]: Charlie, do you want to…?

[Charles]: Well, yeah. First of all, like where are you? If you're in a questionable place then, yeah, it might be a hooker. If you're in a Thai club, chances are they're not but, yeah, sometimes there will be hookers at Thai clubs. Everything Jackson said, and also, like you said, if they're looking around and making eye contact with guys, yeah, definitely. And if you like go up and you approach her and she's just really, really receptive, yeah, maybe she just really likes you but she also might be a prostitute or just looking for some money. If they approach you, yeah, and if they touch you, because like we'd said before they're not really that touchy… Like maybe if they just touch you lightly on the arm, that's normal - normal girls might do that. But if it's any more than that, then yeah, be suspicious.

And once you get talking to them, ask them like what they do and do they have a job or are they a student. If they're not working and they're not studying, well, then you have to wonder like, where do they get their money? And they might not directly tell you that… like actually sometimes they don’t directly tell you because they might not be looking for money with you – they might just be trying to have fun that night and maybe they actually like you and they don’t want you to know that they're a prostitute. Or they might want money from you but they might still not want to tell you that they're a prostitute because… you know, it gets pretty confusing. I don't know. What do you guys think about like directly asking them if they're a prostitute?

[Angel Donovan]: I think I’ll give you an example of a similar case where I did. So I would do exactly what Charlie does, is like, first of all, I'd say the clothes can be quite a giveaway. How much breast are they showing? Like there's some Thai girls which are extreme party girls that'll show a bit more breast and kind of that stuff, but most of them won't. So the clothes and how much makeup they're wearing and stuff like that, it kind of… but you can't make an assumption based on that because it could be like there's one party girl and she's a bit more hardcore than the others.

So when you start talking to her, as Charlie said, like ask her what she does, ask a few questions like that. And if there's any hesitation or if it sounds unusual, just ask a few more questions and just keep going in a relaxed manner, but just… and if it sounds weird, then there's something she's hiding, most probably – kind of the things to watch out for.

So the other aspect I would say is like—this is what I was doing later on—was like some girls I wasn’t really sure. Like and this will happen in the gray area: Say they used to be hookers, but for like five years they haven't been a hooker because they fixed all of that and they’ve got a provider, and sometimes they even manage to get like a permanent source of income somehow, like maybe they got married and then they got divorced, and some of them even have kids in another country. Like I've met girls like that. Like she had a kid in Sweden and she was getting money from the ex-husband and she was partying in Bangkok.

So you can get all sorts of things like that, but what I did find is that—this is my assumption—is like basically if she's got an ex-hooker background, she will expect to hook up with you that first night, alright? So my system later on was… I'm not usually a one-night-stand or a one-night-hookup guy anyway, so I found that this works very well for me, is just like I would be like, “Okay, well, look, I'm busy, I'm with my friends and stuff. I'm going to go and hang out with them now, but let's hang out a few days later and see.” And they would resist that and they would get confused by it, because if you think about that background, where they’ve come from, and they're not used to guys being like that, right?

So that's kind of like a sign, whereas all the traditional Thai girls and even the party girls, they're not going to kind of resist that. These girls would sometimes get… they basically think, “I don’t like him.” That was their immediate reaction. They would push it a little bit sometimes, like they will, you know, “Why don’t we go home tonight?” And sometimes they'd basically proposition you for it.

So I found if I pushed them off a bit and then I contacted them later in the week, they become a lot less interested because they thought I was playing them or… and things just wouldn't work out if they had that kind of background. That's kind of the filter system I had that seemed to work for me – for the difficult girls, the ones with a bit more complicated background and it wasn’t so sure. But I think a lot of them, just asking the questions Charlie asks, it filters out most of them anyway.

[Charles]: Yeah. Jackson, do you have anything to say about that?

[Jackson]: Yeah, I'd agree what that. I think just asking them questions and, like you say, if something doesn’t sound right, just ask another question. And if they seem to get overly defensive or try to avoid the questions, something’s up, then you probably know that they're hiding something and you're going to have a fair idea of what it is. Ask some girls what their job is and they might say, “I'm between jobs. I'm looking for work.” So you ask: “What have you got planned for the rest of the week? “I'm going on holiday. I'm traveling to this place with my friend,” and it all just sounds very suspicious. A typical situation is that there is some guy flying in and she's going there to meet him and he's paying her, and that's what her job is. So ask all sorts of questions and just, I guess, trust your ego instinct.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. A big red flag you just brought up is the manipulation and drama. This goes if you're in a relationship as well, like in Charlie’s example. Before, she was giving him a lot of drama when he challenged her on it and always trying to emotionally manipulate him, and to basically get out of the trouble she was in she would try to cause drama and use your emotions to… and they can be pretty good at it because they’ve had a lot of experience playing guys and working guys, basically manipulating guys. That’s what they used to do in their job.

You can also tell if they're really good at that. I think if they have a lot of experience with emotional manipulation and you see she's trying to kind of do that and switch the subject with drama and stuff like that, then I would also think that’s a big area for suspicion. If she's that good and she's that used to kind of doing that, then that might be a big red flag also.

[Charles]: Yeah, or you could just ask her, you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: Like directly ask her.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: If you don’t give a fuck, like if you couldn't be bothered and you don’t mind losing the girl and offending her, you can just directly ask her. And that was my move for a few years. Depending on where I was, I would just be like, if I was leaving the club with a girl, I would just say, “I'm not going to give you any money tonight, right?” And actually I can only remember like one or two girls that got pissed off when I said that. I'm not sure if I would recommend that to other guys. I guess you have to play it by ear according to the situation.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I would… I mean, I think in general, like especially with the more traditional girls, you'd have to be careful with the way you presented that. Like I’ll give you an example of one of my girls. I said like, “Let's meet in Soi 11.” And there are some expats, foreigners, there that go to places like Climax and stuff to meet hookers, right? So she was waiting for me and a couple of foreigners came up and asked to take her home, and she was like a hi-so girl and she flipped out. She was horrified when I met her. So people from the more traditional extreme, the last thing they want on earth is to be compared to a hooker or think that they’ve done something potentially that indicates in some way they are a hooker. So you could really upset a girl and lose her that way.

So I think, first of all, if she's really traditional, you're not going to be worrying because it's going to be kind of obvious. You wouldn't need to have a straightforward question. If she's more of a party girl she's going to freak out less about that question, but you could say something like, “Hey, I'm kind of aware that there's lots of hookers in all of these bars or girls that have been ex-hookers or have providers.” Just have to couch it a little bit better. “And I'm just concerned about that aspect, so, you know, I don't think you are, but could you tell me if you are?” But the problem with that I guess is that when she doesn’t want you to know she is just going to say, “No, I'm not,” right? So in a way that doesn’t really help, but you kind of have to look for the hesitation, and maybe because you're direct you'll see more hesitation.

[Charles]: Yeah, if you don’t…

[Jackson]: Yeah…

[Charles]: Yeah, I was going to say if you don’t find out, like if you end up spending a lot of time with her and you never try to figure out if she's a hooker or not, you might end up wasting a lot of time. Like if you don’t want to be with a hooker, you might end up finding out she's a hooker later. You might find out as you're leaving the club or you might find out when you're in the taxi or you might find out when you're in bed or you might find out the next morning when she sticks her hand out and you're like, “What? What are you doing?” And she's like, “Give me money.” Yeah, that's the consequence if you don't think of this ahead of time.

[Jackson]: Yeah, and that definitely happens. I know guys who have gone out to a club, hooked up with a girl, brought her home, and in the morning the guy’s expecting her to leave and she's like, “Where’s my money? You owe me 2000 baht.” And the guy’s like, “What are you talking about?” because they never talked about the subject. And some of the guys who were maybe a bit more savvy just kicked her out without paying her. Other guys have sort of gotten sucked in and ended up having to shell out money.

So I have directly asked them. If I'm in a bar, I've just straight out said to them, “Are you looking for fun or are you looking for money?” Some of them would be like, “Oh, you know, I want both.” I said, “Okay, well, good luck with that,” and that's the end of it. So at least you're not wasting time. Whereas other girls were like, “No, I'm not like that. I just want to have fun. I like you and I don’t want any money.” Sometimes it pays to be upfront and direct and just ask them, but some girls maybe get offended and they're like, “You think that I'm hooker? You think I look like hooker?”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: And the way that I sort of play that is that, “Well, I've only just come to this country and for me it's very hard to tell when I go to a nightclub which girls are just there to have a good time and which girls are there looking for customers because I can't tell the difference.” And then girls, they’ll often be okay with it because they think that you don’t know any better. But there is a risk of offending some girls by just directly asking them. I guess it's something you just have to be prepared for.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So I think what we're saying, like there's a lot of similarities with ladyboys actually, and I’ll kind of kick off with a story there, is that one of my good friends in Bangkok, she's a ladyboy, and Charlie knows her. I think Jackson met her. She's very attractive.

[Jackson]: I didn't meet her. I think that's the one that you told me about but I never saw her.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. She's extremely attractive. The way I met her was how I met a lot of girls in Bangkok. And you'll notice I say girl, and that's really because I kind of think of her like a girl, and it's something that you learn about in Thailand, is like when you're not used to it, you never heard of ladyboys before, or in the West there's few of them and we're not used to them, but when you get to…

[Charles]: Oh, Angel, Angel, Angel, I don't think we actually explained what a ladyboy is.

[Angel Donovan]: Aha.

[Charles]: If you want to…

[Angel Donovan]: Go. Go for it.

[Charles]: It's a transvestite. It's a transsexual. It's a woman who used to be a man, and then like they get… they might have breast implants. They might have been taking hormones. Sometimes they really look like girls. Like the one that Angel’s talking about, my friend - she really, really looks like a real girl. Even when she's wearing a bikini and stuff—like I’ll see her pictures on Facebook—you'll think that she's a girl, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: So yeah, go ahead, Angel.

[Angel Donovan]: Like Charlie was saying, there's kind of also, you have to be aware, there's a culture in Thailand they first start thinking about if they're a ladyboy or if they're a boy about the age of 14 sometimes. So you'll see these kids, like you're looking at the kids and they're starting to dress as women. Then, they start taking the hormones; breasts – they don’t get hairs. The shape of their faces will change and stuff. And then later on when they're working and they have money they start doing the operations, so they get the breasts and the vaginas, which are all… can be pretty 100% convincing when it's all added up. I would say there's not very many convincing ones, but in this case there's probably 5% which are really convincing, and even if you know your way around Thailand and you've seen a lot of ladyboys you… it'll be difficult to check.

Now, this girl, I met her in Paragon. She was working in the makeup, one of the makeup here or something, and she was on a promotion that day and she was very attractive, so I went up, started talking to her. I have a sixth sense, and I'm going to explain this. This seems weird to some people, but this is what I've relied on when it's kind of ladyboys. I would go up to the girl, start talking to her, and if I feel [laughs] that she's a guy or that there's something not kind of right, I would assume she's a ladyboy.

And the reason I think that works is because I think that her hormonal profile is different and I'm picking up on it on a biological level. I haven't got any scientific proof for that. I know that pheromones and stuff does work to a certain extent, so I think I'm picking up on that. I don't think everyone can do that, but I feel that works for me.

And so while I was talking to this girl, there was nothing else for me to think that she was a ladyboy but I just felt that she might be a ladyboy. So I asked her, because we were having a very easy conversation. I was just like, “You know, I've got this question in my head. I don't know why it popped up but I'm just going to ask you, and I hope you don’t feel offended by this – are you a ladyboy?” And typically a ladyboy will probably say no, but actually because she was kind of open and stuff she's like, “Yeah, how did you know?” because she wasn't used to people knowing. So that's how I met her and we became good friends, and I've known her for a long time.

So I know some facts from her life which could be quite, you know, amazing, like you wouldn't think of it. First of all, she's looking for love. She's a normal kind of girl from that respect—she's looking for love—but she has this added complication that she used to be a guy and there are some things – she can't have a baby and stuff. She's got issues in her life which make it more difficult.

So the first thing is, well, she met a guy, and she was dating him for I think three years and he asked her to marry him, and she had to say like basically, “Okay, I'm going to have to tell him because he wants kids,” right? And he didn't know up to that point. So that's like probably something a bit astounding for people listening that this guy could be with her for three years and not know. Why? She's had everything operated and is also taking hormones. The only way to tell is she doesn’t have a period. Her vagina is lubricated. They’ve got operations now that do that.

So if you're experienced, apparently there are ways to tell. If you've had sex with a ladyboy, for instance, it's not as deep – the vagina. But you know, for inexperienced guys, and because I know her, she mostly dates inexperienced guys who never know, who never have a clue. Guys who are tourists and stuff will come through and no guy ever picks up on it. And so she dates lots and lots of men and they all think they slept with a hot girl and never know the better.

So the only thing was in that relationship she had to joke about her period. Like every time he's like, “Hey, I never see you if you have a period,” and he would be like, “Are you a ladyboy or something?” He's kind of joking. And she’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, I'm a ladyboy.” Three years later when she had to tell him that she was actually a ladyboy, you can imagine he was distraught and that messed up all his marriage plans.

So it's just a different perspective, and in Thailand, just like every other human there, like they’re very much accepted as normal. I don't know what the percentage of it in Bangkok is, but maybe you could say it is 10% ladyboys? What do you guys think?

[Charles]: No way, dude. Ten percent ladyboys?

[Jackson]: Definitely too high, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Is that too high?

[Charles]: Ten percent ladyboys sounds like way too many.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Charles]: That's like saying…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: …you mean like 10% of guys are ladyboys?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: Or 10% of girls are ladyboys? I don't think that high but you see them all the time, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Alright.

[Jackson]: I've had two different girls talk about this to me. I think these different numbers are definitely off.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: But both of these girls told me that apparently 40% of Thai men who are of marrying age are either gay or ladyboys, which sounds very excessive. I don’t think that would be that many, but there is a lot of gay guys and a lot of ladyboys here.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: So there is a decent percentage of them.

[Angel Donovan]: There's a huge gay population. And it's girls as well – there's lot of lesbians and what you call toms and the ladies. So the gay world in Thailand is a lot more complex and developed, I think, than anywhere else I've ever seen, because you have lots of different types of gays and it's all kind of segmented and they have different approaches. Like, you know, some of the girls that like guys, they're called toms. And then you have, of course, normal gay guys, which we're more used to from the West. And then you have the ladyboys, which is another type. So it's a very complex and interesting world, very colorful.

And I think that's pretty large. I'm not sure how many, but what it means is that the girls have less guys to date because there's more gay guys than there are straight guys, or the proportions are much higher than elsewhere in the world. So I think this is something interesting also, is like there seems to be a dynamic where there's a lot more girls in Bangkok than there are in other cities, like the waiting and in terms of the ratio. And I think it's multiple things: It's the gay aspect for the guys. There's also the fact that a lot of guys who are kind of industrial workers, like they probably leave Bangkok to work more outside in factories and stuff. Whereas more girls tend to come in and get jobs as secretaries or just being pretty or maybe working in go-go bars and things like that.

So I think there’s this kind of ratio thing going on in Bangkok where there's a lot more girls than guys, relevant girls and guys. What do you guys think?

[Jackson]: Absolutely. There's far more girls, single girls, than guys here. And if you take just the go-go bars as an example, like if you go to… let's say you go to one bar in Soi Cowboy, which we'll probably talk about later on, there's maybe, what, 20 girls working in that bar? Fifteen bars in the area. Straight away you've got 300 girls there. Whereas there would be maybe a couple of guys working in that area as cleaners or something. So if you think about how many bars there are in the whole of Bangkok, you can say how you start to get this huge ratio of girls to guys simply because there's a lot more jobs, a lot more opportunities for the girls here, even if it is as go-go bar girls or hookers or whatever you want to call it. Whereas guys, they just don’t have the same opportunities, so.

The other factor is a lot of the girls, they're not wanting to date Thai guys. They’ve got bad opinions of them. They’ve got bad experiences. So I guess for guys like us, like Western guys, foreign guys, you have plenty of options. Girls are hoping to meet a Western guy because they think that they're going to have a better future with a Western guy than they are with a Thai guy, unless you're talking about one of the very top Thai guys who has high social status, a good job, good money. As a Western guy, like if you go out to any bar or club, the numbers are in your favor big time.

[Charles]: Well, about the ratio of girls and guys, yeah, I just think I agree with Jackson there that like you'll notice that it seems like it's pretty easy to meet girls here and they're pretty receptive to meeting Western guys. You want to get back to ladyboys, right? Like how to…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: …how to screen, how to figure out if that hot girl you're talking to is actually a ladyboy.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Charles]: And your advice, Angel, was to, what, sense her pheromones? [Laughs] Yeah, like you said, not every guy has that ability. But yeah, there are other things that you can look at to do with physical appearance, don’t you think?

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, I think… before that I would… you know, I can see a ladyboy I think from a long, long while away. I’ll give you an example. Like one of… I actually had a chuckle one time because Beckster—he's a guy, he's a pickup artist from the UK—he came with his bisexual girlfriend one time and we spent a whole week partying. And basically, you know, his girlfriend was looking for hot girls, and every time would pick a ladyboy. [Laughs]

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And it got to be this joke, like me and Beckster would be sitting in a corner of the club and I'd be like, “That’s another ladyboy,” right? So she'd be like hunting down, and after a while when she'd got like 10 minutes into it and wasted her time, we’d go over and tap her and like, “You're wrong again.” And she’d be like, “No! It's not possible!” right? And I’ll be like, “Yeah, how is it possible that your feminine instinct is so bad?” So like I think even women don't have an intuition about this, like sometimes they can't figure out as well. They actually think ladyboys are really hot and beautiful.

[Charles]: Or it sounds like her pheromones are kicking in, like maybe she's not as bisexual as she thinks and she's like attracted to the male aspect of the ladyboy that she's looking at there.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] That's a really interesting idea there because maybe she likes the idea of looking at hot women and, you know, going with hot women, but actually maybe she likes the biology and pheremones of guys so it works out perfectly for her with a ladyboy.

[Charles]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So yeah, the biggest way I can recognize a ladyboy from a distance is the way they move. I think that is by far the easiest because from their birth they were walking around like a guy, and the way guys and women move is different. Especially in Thailand, girls are more feminine I think than the West where westernized girls tend to have taken on different aspects of their characters and kind of beings. But in Asia, and in Thailand I'd say in particular, girls are very, very feminine in the way they are.

So what happens is that ladyboys, in an attempt to compensate for that, they will try to act a lot more feminine, walk a lot more feminine, act a lot more feminine, and they typically go way overboard. So the question is, like, does she look like she's being too feminine? Is the way she moves from side to side too much? Does it kind of look like that? I don't know, is that Marilyn Monroe like strutting walk? I'm kind of thinking of like where it's really magnified and that kind of thing.

I think that’s one of the easiest ways to pick it up, and the reason like my friend - -she's a lot better at it is because of another thing that is an aspect easy to understand with ladyboys, is that most of the ladyboys hang out with each other because they haven't made friends with girls, right? The difference with my friend is that she doesn’t like hanging out with ladyboys. She thinks they're a bit weird and over the top. So she's got lots of girlfriends and she hangs out with girls all the time, and so because of that she's learned to act like a real girl. She hasn’t over-exaggerated, whereas the ladyboys, they hang out in groups and they don’t learn how to act like real girls because they're not talking with real girls all the time, and they probably don’t talk to girls very often so they're not like picking up on all of that stuff. That’s the easiest way for me to pick it up.

[Charles]: And to add to that, I've noticed that ladyboys, especially the over-the-top ones, they flip their hair around a lot…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Charles]: …and they play with their hair. Have you guys noticed that?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: Yeah, I have noticed that, yeah.

[Charles]: And then there's a few like pretty obvious ways to check just by looking at them physically. Like if they have wide shoulders or big hands…like they’ll have man-hands. A lot of them will have man-hands or big feet. What do you think, Jackson?

[Jackson]: They seem to have longer faces as well, a lot of them, from what I've noticed.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: Yeah, yeah.

[Jackson]: The thing that makes it tough for some of them is that a lot of Thai guys are quite small anyway, so when they become a ladyboy they can look convincing because they’ve got that small frame of a guy. It's not like a Western guy who sticks on a dress and straight away you can tell it's a guy.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: The ones that are quite small can be convincing.

[Angel Donovan]: In a way they're more convincing because you don’t expect the Thai guy to be so small. One time, Syboh, one of the editors here, he was in Bangkok, and I think we were in Bed Supperclub, and there was this really cute Thai girl. And of course it's dark, but I was convinced that it was a girl, so I said, “That one’s fine,” because he was a little bit worried. And fortunately, it didn't work out at the end of the night, but I saw her a month later in the full light and I was like, “Wow, that's a ladyboy.” And we had no idea either but… and I think it was because we assumed she was so tiny there was no way that she could have been a ladyboy, because, you know…

[Charles]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: So that's the thing that tripped me up. So I think the height is normally a giveaway, but you have to be careful.

[Jackson]: Exactly.

[Charles]: You might think that it's like a ladyboy is a guy that turned into a girl with surgery and he's wearing a dress, but actually a lot of them changed… like they make that change when they're really young—I think we kind of talked about that—but like if they're really young before they hit puberty, or like just at the beginning of puberty and they start taking hormones – their body is shaped like a girl’s body. They're going to have curves. They're going to hips and a waist. So there's that kind of ladyboy that actually has a woman’s body, and then there's the kind that started a bit later and it does look like a man wearing a dress. So yeah, like I think the smaller ones that you'll see that look really feminine, like maybe they just started when they're younger.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I think something else, too, you have to be a little bit aware of is like I have heard of situations where ladyboys can get aggressive and a bit violent, and this is the reason that my friend, she stays away from ladyboys, because she sees them a bit like kind of psychotic, a lot of them. They just have more complicated lives if you think about it…

[Charles]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: …and they’ve had people judging them and, you know, they’ve had more negative interactions. So some of them are fine but some of them aren't. And so, in general, she kind of thinks that most ladyboys are a bit messed up.

And one of the things, so you know, I have seen a situation where there was a ladyboy basically kicking and punching a guy, and there was one situation where we were in Gazebo in Khaosan. I can't remember who… I think I was with Charlie or maybe someone else. And there were two tourist guys with two ladyboys and they had no idea. We felt sorry for them so we told them when the ladyboys were in the toilet, and the ladyboys, like they were so pissed at us. I thought they were going to come and like kick our asses and cause a lot of problems. So I think that's like one dimension you can be aware of, and also that like they may not want other people to know that they're ladyboys, often is the thing.

And the final thing I'd say is like one of my ladyboy friends thought they were a bit funky, is like she says a lot of them are obsessed with sucking guys’ dicks.

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: So if you're with a girl and she seems like she's obsessed with sucking your dick and she's talking about it a lot, that would be a big red sign for me too.

[Charles]: I don't know, man. I've had a lot of girls that would like to…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Jackson]: You should be worried about it. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Are you sure?

[Jackson]: [Laughs]

[Charles]: So maybe… yeah, maybe they're ladyboys. But yeah, also, [laughs] like while we're on the topic of being in the bedroom – if you make it that far and you're still not sure, if they really want it in the ass…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: …and they don’t want it in the vagina, you know, maybe it's because they can't feel it as much in the vagina because it's not a real one. So yeah, you'll hear about that, too. I've heard plenty of horror stories about that. Like the guy brings home the girl, she wants it in the ass, and then like she turns around and he notices that there's a penis hanging there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. And actually, I know this also from some of my Thai girlfriends, I know that in the Thai clubs they have quite a few ladyboys, right? But they don’t want to be known… they don’t want anyone to know that they're ladyboys. And they will go home with Thai guys and it's a bit of a risk for them, because if the Thai guy isn't into ladyboys, and a lot of Thai guys actually are into… they're kind of like trisexual or, you know, there's a lot of Thai guys, I don't know how you would say it, but they don’t mind the whole ladyboy thing and they actually think they're hot too. And I think it's because they’ve grown up in a country where that’s acceptable, right? So they're like, “Yeah, that's an interesting experience and I like that too,” or whatever. So they’ll be in a relationship or married and they’ll maybe cheat with ladyboys who tend not to have long-term relationships as often. They tend to be more kind of like one-night stands or fuck buddies.

And that also goes on to, I'm just crossing topics here, but one of the reasons Jackson was saying the Thai girls tend… like some of them don’t like Thai guys so much is because they have such a bad reputation for cheating. Like it's very, very common for Thai husbands and boyfriends to cheat on their girlfriends—a lot of them have mistresses or they have girls on the side and it seems like it's a really strong aspect of their culture—and some Thai girls think that foreign guys are better, but obviously the foreign element has got all the guys coming for sex to Thailand and they give off that really negative, how would you call that, stereotype.

But some Thai girls think there's two types of foreign guys, basically. There's the sleaze… the sleaze guys are only interested in paying for sex, and then there's the prince charmings who come and they're wonderful and they don’t cheat all the time like the Thai guys. And I think there was a Durex survey, it was on affairs, and the country with the men that cheat the most is Korea, and Thailand was second I think in that survey. I mean, it's a survey - it's got a bias.

[Charles]: Wow.

[Angel Donovan]: But I think kind of…I mean, we've all spoken to Thai girls and I know a few Thai guys as well, and it's in their mindset, right? Even taxi drivers will talk to you about this all the time, “Hey, I've got two girls on the side. This is my girlfriend,” like he’ll be texting, talking to his girlfriend, “and my wife’s at home,” you know? So it's kind of a bit endemic in the culture, I think.

[Charles]: That explains the jealousy. Like don’t you guys think that Thai girls tend to be pretty jealous?

[Angel Donovan]: I'd agree.

[Jackson]: Yeah. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. That’s a…

[Jackson]: I think that’s an understatement.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Basically you can get a lot of drama in relationships in jealousy.

[Charles]: Yeah, I've never had so much drama before in my life until I came here. It seems like there's a lot of drama here too.

[Angel Donovan]: So in a relationship, the way to handle that is to really emphasize trust from day one, you know? You have to be really honest about the situation from day one, I think, and you also have to, whenever there's drama, you have to make sure that you deal with that and don’t let it become a routine. One of the mistakes I made was that it became a routine drama thing. You don’t want to get into that dynamic. Your life will become super-negative. [Laughs]

Like that was the actual… the relationship that taught me that I hated drama, because I used to think it was fun. You know you have these feisty girls and you can like banter with them, and you've got this girlfriend where you're play-fighting all the time and in a way it's like, “Who’s got the strongest character?” like you can have these kind of fights with them all time? So I used to think that was kind of fun and just kind of educational or whatever interesting about life and relationships, but I had one relationship in Thailand which got so dramatic which I decided I never wanted any drama in my life ever again.

[Charles]: Yeah, I remember that one.

[Angel Donovan]: So you know, that's an aspect and, you know, I think it's pretty clear like we're discussing like, you know, because of the culture and the way it is, it's kind of normal. And you hear the stories about Thai girls cutting off guy’s dicks, because they cheated, when they were sleeping. I think they're probably true, right?

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: I think they can be very emotional, and when something sets them off they can come out in ways like that where they don’t really think about what they're doing, they’ll just react, and I can definitely see how some girls would do that. I've been reluctant to have girls come back to my place because I'm worried that once they know where I live what they might do if things turn bad.

There's a couple of girls that I've been seeing here a little bit that I can already start to get a sense that it's going to be difficult to end things with them because they're going to take it badly, and I'm thinking, how are they going to respond? Are they going to come over and try and fuck up my apartment? Are they going to steal my shit? Are they going to stalk me? Like who knows what they're going to do? So if you're considering a relationship with a girl over long-term, I think it's a good idea to screen for these sorts of things early on. When you first meet them and are having your first few dates with them, just find out their past experiences.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: Like have they been cheated on before? Have they ever gotten any big arguments with guys over things like cheating and jealousy, crazy things that they may have done? A Thai girl has told me, “Yeah, I found out a guy cheated on me, so I found out who his new girlfriend and followed her back to her house and smashed up her car,” and this crazy sort of shit like that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: So there's definitely some red flags to look for there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, because it'll affect your life. It'll be very distracting as well if you have this kind of thing going on all the time, and it's not fun for the relationship. Anything else to say on this topic?

[Jackson]: Hmm…

[Charles]: I think…go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

[Jackson]: One thing that for me like I think is important is to not continue on this cycle. The reason a lot of girls have these issues is that either Thai guys have cheated on them or they’ve met a Western guy who they’ve seen as prince charming and the Western guy has cheated on them. So they’ve got it in their heads that that’s probably going to happen again, so that's why they are very suspicious.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: For me, I don’t want to like make that worse, so I'm very so honest with girls. Like if I'm not wanting to have a serious relationship with them, I won't lead them on and let them think that that's going to happen because at the end of the day it is going to hurt them and it's going to make them worse for the next person.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[Jackson]: And they also might take it out on you. Once they find out that you're not serious and you've been lying to them, who knows? They might cut off your dick when you're sleeping in bed and these crazy things happen. So I find in relationships like honesty is the better way to go. And there are so many girls here in Bangkok that are open to having a casual relationship if that’s what you're looking for. You don’t need to lie to them.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: You don’t need to promise them something that you're not prepared to give them.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. You just tell it like it is. And coming from like, you know, I've had a Thai girlfriend for a while now, and so I know a lot of her friends and I kind of know what’s going on in their lives as well. Sometimes they meet foreign guys and there's a stereotype, like I talked about the stereotypes of foreign guys, but there's also like the kind of sleazy guys who come just for sex and easy sex and paying for it or not. And there's a lot of guys who don’t treat them honestly – it's because like they're kind of cowards about it, right? So they’ll come to Bangkok and their approach is they just want to sleep with lots of girls, whether it's through online dating or meeting the girls outside, right? They don’t have the guts to just like be straightforward with it.

So there was one situation recently where the guy told the girl that he was going back to Paris because because his mum was dying. She was so worried about him. She's sending messages and he's not replying. And that kind of sets a red alarm, right guys? Because we were talking about if someone disappears then something’s probably not right. And so I guess it works the other way as well. And it turns out that he was in Bangkok the whole time but he was seeing another girl. You can imagine how hurt that girl is, and for the next foreign guy that she dates she's going to be a lot more suspicious.

So I think some foreign guys, a lot of them that are coming there are not setting up the situation well for other guys who come after them because they're doing this kind of stuff, which is really pathetic or… So if you do come Thailand, just be straightforward because you can be straightforward. You'll make it better for everyone who comes after you as well as the girl you're actually meeting.

[Jackson]:, Yeah, definitely.

[Angel Donovan]: I just brought up online dating. Have you guys done…?

[Jackson]: I was talking to Charlie about this the other day - when I first came to Bangkok I was just here a couple of weeks, so I was pretty much back in my hotel with nothing to do. So I was messing around a couple of online dating sites, so yeah, had a bit of experience with that. I found it's very, very easy over here to meet girls from online dating sites. The same that when you go out at night the ratio is in your favor—there's a lot more girls than guys—I think there's a lot of girls on these sites who are looking to hook up with Western guys, so it's not difficult.

For me, I just… I didn't really… I couldn't be bothered making much of an effort turning out detailed messages, so I’ll just come up with a couple of template emails to send out, just copy and paste and just go see what reply you get, and pretty much straight away girls are like, “Where are you staying? How long are you here for? Let's meet up.” There wasn’t really any messing around. There wasn’t a lot of email exchanges back and forth, so pretty much straight to the point.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: Like, “Here's my phone number. Send me a message. I want to meet you for a drink this week.” Some of the sites that I use were PlentyofFish.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Jackson]: I use that because I've used it before back in Australia. I think it's maybe the biggest free online dating site in the world. I've found that it's not as big here in Thailand. Like there's a number of girls using it but it wasn’t getting updated regularly so it was just the same girls on it, but there was enough on there that I was able to meet up with a number of girls from that.

And the other one I use is Adult FriendFinder, which for guys who maybe haven't seen it before, it's more of like a hookup site, so there's many girls on there who are just looking for fun. So you can go on there, send a message, and girls are like, “Yes, where do you live? I want to come over to your apartment and see you tonight,” and it's pretty much straight to the point. I don’t have any experience with using the more… Thai Love Links, the other one. ThaiFriendly.com I think is a big one. Do you have guys have experience using those?

[Charles]: Angel, is Thai Love Links… that’s, yeah, like the most popular one is that?

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Thai Love Links is the biggest one by far. Like they have more members. And then I know ThaiFriendly is getting more and more popular, I think. So that might be the second biggest one.

[Charles]: Yeah, I've used ThaiFriendly in the past for like… I guess for like a year or two like I stopped going out to clubs and I was working more, and it was just more convenient for me to meet girls online. So I was using ThaiFriendly. And I think there maybe there's a higher percentage of young girls on there, like not super-young but like early 20s. And maybe Thai Love Links might have a slightly higher percentage of maybe like older girls, not like old but maybe like mid-20s, high 20s or early 30s. Yeah, and that's where I met my current girlfriend, was on ThaiFriendly.

But I've found that like I was spending a lot of time building rapport, like chatting with instant messenger, and it got to be pretty time-consuming. So yeah, I don't know, we must have been doing it a bit differently, Jackson, but yeah, I found it…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I think you've been using different sites and not necessarily the same types of women use them.

[Charles]: Oh yeah.

[Jackson]: I haven't used that site, and also I think that… are you talking about the younger women? I think in general the younger women are probably going to require a bit more comfort first before they're willing to meet up with you because they haven't got the same experience of going out with Western guys or doing online dating, so they probably need a bit more persuasion before they're willing to meet up with you, I'm guessing.

[Charles]: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that they want to be careful too. Like they don’t want to meet some freak on the Internet. But I have had girls online that like wanted to meet up pretty quickly, too, and I was pretty surprised that they were so trusting.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, for me the only thing I ever did was I'm not really into online dating at all. My personal take is it's just easier when the girl is standing in front of me. I know exactly what I'm getting straight away when I meet her, so if it's worth investing more time… Whereas in online dating I feel like I have to put more effort, and then the pictures aren't exactly reflective and I don’t really get to know her. I don’t see her self-communication. I don’t see so many things about her that I normally pick up when I'm seeing someone straight in front of me.

So just because I don’t like to waste a lot of time, I don’t normally put anything into online dating. However, I did do one experiment when I was in Thailand, which was with Match.com. I told him a few types of girls I liked, like the quality I was looking for, and I just told him to contact lots of them and ask them to go on a date with me.

And that's kind of like a Tim Ferriss experiment. Like Tim Ferriss did that one, Outsource Your Dating Life. So I was just seeing if that would work for me, and for me the quality of girls was like they came back and they gave me a list of girls who they contacted in a dating schedule, and there was only one I could be bothered to actually meet and I was disappointed when I met her. So for me I just felt like it was a big waste of time.

[Charles]: Not a waste of your time – a waste of your guy’s time who was doing that for you.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I did have to go to one date. [Laughs]

[Charles]: Oh. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And I did have to think about it for a while. Like I had to do my profile and I had to tell him…

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I had to tell him what things he could do and not do. So there was a bit of supervision kind of or like process time [laughs] or whatever you want to call it. So for me I just felt, again, I was disappointed in online dating. However, it has to be said that Match.com doesn’t have anywhere near members as Thai Love Links or ThaiFriendly, so it could have been just that I didn't have enough pool… you know, the number of girls in there wasn’t enough for me to get enough quality, quality leads, if you want to call them. [Laughs]

[Charles]: [Laughs] That’s a very businesslike way of saying it.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh well, I had a business education.

[Charles]: [Laughs] Well, and speaking of quality, I think you'll find like very few hookers on these sites. Like most of the girls are students or they're working, and if you're scared of like not knowing if it's a hooker or whatever, like if that whole thing frightens you, then you might want to give online dating here a shot.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Yeah, excellent. So I think that's kind of the online dating thing. The other thing with women in Bangkok and Thailand, you know, basically like I've met foreign women that I actually liked, you know, interesting women in Soi 11 mostly, at the parties and events around there, the kind of the expat world, and sometimes at conferences or events I met some interesting foreign women.

[Charles]: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there are foreign women and there are interesting women to meet. Personally, I haven't. It's like the Asian girls. But yeah, a lot of guys go to these Western clubs and they meet foreign women. One of our buddies, a common friend of ours, Angel, he really liked going to Khaosan Road to meet backpacker girls, foreign, like Western backpackers.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I remember that. I went along, and you [laughs] many times.

[Charles]: [Laughs] Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I met some interesting girls there too, like, you know, because like I say, I think Thailand just attracts interesting people as well. Definitely, Khaosan Road is… especially… but the problem with Khaosan of course is that they're generally backpackers over there for two weeks. So if you're interested in a relationship it's probably not the place you want to go, but you could have a lot of fun meeting people who are up for adventures and fun, like Jackson was saying earlier.

[Jackson]: Yeah, I've met a number of girls there and that's probably the biggest problem, is they're only there for a short amount of time. Last time I was there with some friends, we were talking to some girls and, “So how long you here for?” They're like, “Oh, we're leaving tomorrow. We're catching a flight.” And this is something that comes up pretty often, is you meet a girl and she might be there for a day or two and you're just catching here at the end of her holiday. She's moving somewhere else. You don’t have a lot of time to spend with them, and even if you're just looking for a one-night stand or a fling or something, even then you don’t have a lot of time to make it happen.

So that's the downside with Khaosan Road. I guess with Sukhumvit area and Soi 11, a lot of the girls that are in the clubs around there, they're her long-term. I've met a number of girls there working here as English teachers, high school teachers. They’ve got some kind of job doing whatever, so they're here long-term, and I'm dating an English girl at the moment just kind of casually who is here as a teacher. So a lot of the girls that you find in clubs here are here for longer-term, so if you're looking for something more steady that might be a better bet for you.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent. Okay, I thought what we’d do… actually, since we're talking about backpackers quickly, what about like Koh Samui, Ko Phi Phi, Koh Phangan? And I think people have heard about like Full Moon Party and the other islands. Just quickly, I know that… and then Pattaya and Phuket. I know that one of my friends—he used to be a pickup artist—he goes to Ko Phi Phi all the time because he loves Swedish girls, and there's more Swedish girls on Ko Phi Phi than any other place in the world partying for two weeks. So he actually goes there for like basically two weeks a month sometimes. He gets stuck there.

And it's kind of strange, it's like I think all Swedish girls and maybe a lot of Scandinavians in general have figured out that Ko Phi Phi is a place that they all like to go and party, and so it just has tons and tons of people partying every night of the week. So if you want to go and party somewhere and you like Scandinavian girls, there's lots there. There are some other countries, but it's really lots of Scandinavian girls there.

I've never been to the Full Moon Party in Koh Phangan, so I can't talk about that. I've been to other islands that are quieter like Koh Tao and it's more just for relaxation.

[Jackson]: Yeah, I haven't been to the Full Moon Party either. Next year when it's more of the dry season, that's one of the things that you might want to do as well if you're planning on coming to Thailand, is do some research on rainy season and dry season. If you're just coming here for a short holiday like around this time of year, I think it's… or is it between August and November-December. Is January rainy season? Dry season is more in the new year onwards, is that right?

[Angel Donovan]: Charlie?

[Charles]: I don't know.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] It's so funny…

[Charles]: I should know that but I don’t. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it's so funny. I should know that too. But I think it rains a lot around October-November because the floods come in October.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Isn't it October till December or January?

[Jackson]: I get different girls telling me different things. Some of them tell me it's like August to November. Some say it goes on up till December. I don't think they really know. It just sort of varies, but generally from August and September to the end of the year is pretty much there's a lot of rain here.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that's what I just said. There's a lot of rain in Thailand.

[Jackson]: But if you're looking to… Yeah. If you're wanting to go to the islands and go to the beaches and party, your best bet is to go during the dry season, and that's what I plan to do next year and do a tour around some of the islands. If you're looking to go to the Full Moon Party, Koh Phangan is definitely the place to go. From what I've heard from some of the girls who have been there, there's a lot of Western guys. One girl was telling me that the Full Moon Party was 70% to 80% Western guys.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I've heard the same. I've heard, to put it in Charlie’s words, it's a bit of a shit storm. It's a bit of a mess.

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And there's way too many guys. And if you're into the drug scene maybe it's better…

[Jackson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But I think that's why people go there. Charlie, have you been before or you know anything about it?

[Charles]: I went like 10 years ago when I was backpacking, so imagine it's quite different, and I don’t really remember, so no, not really.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] So it was a bit of a drug shit storm.

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Since we're all kind of on that subject, like quickly, there's a few kind of major events you might want to be aware of that I really like is Songkran, which is New Year in Thailand, which is… basically, it's an excuse to run around with a huge water gun for a week I think it is.

[Charles]: Yeah. No, I think it's five days, or… Yeah, it's five days.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: Crazy.

[Angel Donovan]: Five days. And it's a lot of fun. It's a great time of the year to go because all the clubs are open. All of the clubs have like lots of people running around with these. You know, you buy these water pistols and you run around, so it's a lot of fun. It's maybe not the best time to, you know, if you're looking to pick up girls and meet girls, because everyone’s kind of having so much fun in their groups that it's maybe not that. But you know, it might work out too. But it's definitely a really fun time and it was one of the things I looked forward to every year.

[Charles]: Yeah, definitely. So basically, like five days the whole country turns into a giant water fight, and like Angel said, there's water guns and buckets. Like people get buckets and hoses. Everybody’s just soaked and it's a huge shit show. Yeah, and everybody’s got this like powder, like what is it, talcum powder or something? And they smear it all over your face.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: And I think the whole thing started because it's like a Buddhist thing. It started off with monks would bless you by pouring a little bit of water on your head or something like that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Charles]: And then it just got carried away and now it's like this huge countrywide shit show. It's really fun. If you are planning to come to Thailand and you're flexible with your dates, yeah, I'd say try to come in April because that’s when it is.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. The other one is Loi Krathong, which I bring that up because it caught me out one time. It's kind of like a Valentine’s Day, but they have the Valentine’s Day and then they have Loi Krathong and they put these little boats, kind of like floating flowers and stuff, in the rivers. But it's an important couples’ thing—you're supposed to do this together—so it's a bit like Valentine’s Day. So basically, if you're in a relationship, it's something you should do together and to be aware of that. Otherwise, it may cause a little bit of drama, like as if you weren't going to do anything for Valentine’s Day, basically.

There's two other topics I thought we should cover, which is kind of like the darker side, the go-go bars and all of this and kind of a few safety topics just around there, things to maybe avoid, like how to approach things in Thai clubs.

[Charles]: Yeah, okay. Like as far as safety goes, if you come to Thailand, you might want to check out the go-go bars. Basically, it's just like you go in there and there's a bunch of girls dancing and they all have numbers like on their bikini or whatever, and you can call them over and you pay the bar if you want to take them home.

And there's also the thing called ping-pong shows and you probably heard of that before, and it's kind of like there's a naked girl on the stage and she pops a ping-pong ball in her vagina and just like shoots it out. And they do all kinds of tricks, like they put darts in there and they pop darts out and they shoot balloons with darts.

[Angel Donovan]: They blow flutes.

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, they blow this flute thing and they ask you… well, it's kind of like a piano thing but you could blow it.

[Charles]: With darts.

[Angel Donovan]: So you can tap on the keys to play different notes, and she actually asks you to come up and start typing on the piano thing while she's doing that, which is disgusting.

[Charles]: Oh wow. Did you do that?

[Angel Donovan]: I definitely did not. I was like, “Ah, that guy, ask that guy!” [Laughs]

[Charles]: [Laughs] Yeah, there's one place I went to, like every time somebody from out of town comes to Bangkok they want to go to these places…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: …and so like I took my friends to this one where there's a live sex show. And I didn't want to see it. Like I got really uncomfortable and I just got off and left before it start…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: I mean, before it started.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Charles]: But a word of caution, guys. If you want to see some of these shows, there's like a lot of problems with foreigners getting ripped off at these ping-pong shows, like some guy will heckle you on the street and he'll like invite you in to see a ping-pong show. And you might be like, “Oh yeah, cool. I want to see one of these,” and then you go inside and then they don’t let you leave, like they don’t tell you there's a cover charge, and then they kind of trap you inside and they don’t let you leave till you pay some ridiculous amount of money. And that amount of money can just be whatever they think that you have…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Charles]: …and if you don’t pay it, then they’ll beat you up. I've heard people say like, “Don’t go to any ping-pong shows that are…” what, I think that they're upstairs? Like I guess the ones that are upstairs tend to be the shady ones. But you know, I guess they're all shady, but they tend to be the ones that are more shady. So yeah, just be real careful if you go to those shows. Watch your back.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and those are mostly in Patpong. That’s the area where most of those things… And in Patpong in general I think you have to be a lot more careful. It tends to be where a lot of tourists go and where they get ripped off.

[Charles]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: Yeah. They’ll often do things like they’ll say, “Come into the club, there's no cover charge,” but then the prices of their drinks are hugely inflated, like even if you just want to buy a Coke. A girl was telling me—Australian girl—she went in there, they tried to charge her 500 baht for a little can of Coke, which you can buy for 30 baht in the 7-Eleven, Not even that, if that, probably 20 baht. So they’ll give you the bill at the end and might not tell you what the prices are when you're buying it because you think that it's just regular bar prices, and next thing you know you've built like a 3000-, 4000-baht bill after you've had a few beers…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: …and they're not going to let you leave until you pay it. So always ask them what the prices are before you buy a drink.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and the other to say about those ping-pong shows is that if you're expecting young hot girls to be in there, you're going to be very, very disappointed because what happens is the go-go girls…

[Charles]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Well, what happens to go-go girls when they're 40, 50 years old? I mean, if they didn't manage to get providers and stuff?

[Jackson]: I think they go to the ping-pong shows.

[Angel Donovan]: They go to the ping-pong shows. So you've got, you know, you're looking at basically a lot of ex-prostitutes who are very old and they're doing strange things with their vaginas. And for me it wasn’t something I wanted to do, but one of my friends, you know, as Charlie said – a lot of your friends when they come into town they want to do it, one time you're going to get dragged there for sure, and I actually got us all to leave halfway through it. I was just like, “This is retarded. It's not fun, and these guys look like they're going to scam us if we stay longer and we buy more drinks and stuff. So just be aware of that thing, whatever dangers.

So I think there are some other kinds of Patpong scams, but I don’t really know the details of them. I have heard of… this is kind of through the grapevine, but for people who have lived in Bangkok for a long time, is like if you do go to a go-go bar, it's probably better to go with a friend if you're going to start asking girls to come home with you or have heard like… so be careful how much you drink. You don’t want to get inebriated to the point where you don’t know what’s going on and you're in one of those bars. Because you have to realize, it's kind of like the dark side of Bangkok. There could be negative elements, especially in Patpong I think, but also the other two places are Soi Nana and Soi Cowboy along Sukhumvit.

And so one of the stories I've heard is one of the guys got really drunk one night in one of the go-go bars in Soi Cowboy where he usually goes, but he was particularly drunk. He doesn’t remember but he must have taken one of the girls, paid for her and took her back. But he thinks they put a roofie in his drink in the bar, which is easier to do if you're very drunk, and he ended up back at home. He kind of woke up and he was kind of beaten up in his place back home and everything was gone.

And so that's kind of one story. Another negative story, he was there for a while in Bangkok and he was actually living there with his boss. And his boss was getting hookers back every night different ones, and he had a safe in the room and he was paying the hookers from this safe. So the hookers were seeing where he had his money, basically. And one night when our friend and his boss—actually, his boss was out. And so our friend was home, two guys came to the front door, broke in got him to give the numbers to crack the safe and took all the money and stuff. So he got beaten up out of that.

And you know, he hadn't been involved in that. It was unfortunate for him because he hadn't been involved in that element at all, but because he was living with the guy who was involved in that he got in that situation. So it kind of goes like, you know, obviously you have to be, if you do get into that side Bangkok, you have to be super-careful about what you're doing because you are getting involved in the darker side, the less legal side of the Bangkok world.

[Jackson]: Yeah. For me personally, I wouldn't go to those places with the intention of getting drunk…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: …simply because the more you have to drink, the more you set yourself up as a target. So if I'm wanting to go out and have a lot to drink, focus on girls, I'm going to do it more in the reputable nightclubs like in Soi 11 and some of the more upmarket places where I know that they're not going to slip drugs into my drinks. If I'm going to like Patpong and ordering a bunch of drinks, what I would want to do is go to the bar, order a beer, see them actually open the bottle, take it from them, not have the drinks brought to my table where who knows what they put in it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: You might think that it's being overly cautious, but I've heard all sorts of stories from people about getting robbed, getting beat up, people slipping stuff in their drinks. Like it's not worth the risk if you go to these places. So I think it's okay if you go there have two or three drinks, have a good time, but if you're going to go then get absolutely smashed, then you're just asking for trouble, in my opinion.

[Angel Donovan]: Certainly. What do you think about it, Charlie?

[Charles]: Well, I've had a lot of fun at those places. Like for a while there I was going to those places a lot. Some of my friends like to get hookers, and so we’d go to those places and my friends would pick up like a girl, and I would try to get the girls for free. And you can do it too. It's kind of hard, but yeah.

And I don’t want everybody to get all scared about going to go-go bars because you can have a lot of fun there. Like I got drunk a lot and nothing bad ever happened to me. Just keep your head on your shoulders. Like both these guys said, don’t get too drunk, and yeah, just don’t do anything stupid. And don’t be obnoxious. Don’t be like the loud drunk idiot who’s groping all the girls because they're probably more likely to put a roofie in your drink if you're that guy than if you're the polite guy who like says please and thank you. So yeah, like don’t be an idiot and keep your head on your shoulders.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And, I mean, that's a really important point. We talked about the culture in Thailand earlier, which is kind of nonjudgmental, accepting and very polite. So if you come in and you're very obnoxious, you're shouting and you're just being arrogant and you're looking down on the Thai people, the Thai guys and the Thai women… and unfortunately you see a lot of foreigners that come to Thailand, especially around the go-go bars and stuff, you see a lot of these guys acting like this, and you can understand how it would get on the Thai people’s nerves, right? Even though they are pretty accepting and stuff, there's a point.

So what I want to bring up here is that I've seen this myself in my last year in Bangkok where there's like a bunch of Thai guys who will jump on you, right? And something that people say is like, “Never fight with a tiger,” and one of the reasons is that they don’t have limits. I think that's the way to put it, is like whereas like we don’t want to damage people too much, like we're not going to smash a glass and shove it in his face and cut his throat, and I've seen more guys, you know, more like where a guy smashed a glass, shoved it in the guy’s throat over some small argument, and it just escalated into something which was… it just seemed really extreme, but it's kind of something that you hear about a lot in Thailand.

In my situation, and I think this is… it's an unfortunate aspect, but I was in Route 66 in RCA, which there are a fair number of foreigners there. I was in a Thai group with girlfriend, her friends and everything. A big Thai guy was really drunk and he was near us. He felt that one of the foreigners in the group—there was a couple of foreign guys—was being obnoxious or arrogant to him. I think that the guy hadn't really seen him, but what happens is that the Thai guy has felt this some time before from some other foreigner who has come, and there's many of them, you know, foreigners, that act like this.

So unfortunately, even if you're being nice, a Thai guy who’s been around foreign guys who have been assholes to him in the past, he's going to be thinking of you that way no matter what you did. He used a small excuse, you know, the guy pushed past him or something, we're trying to get to our table, and he picked up a few glasses and started throwing them at everyone. One guy got shards all through his face, on the side of his face. I held the guy from behind, was trying to pull him back from some other guys. He was a really big guy and he was like plowing into people.

And then you see the other element, which is that I had my back to the club and I wasn’t thinking that I was going to get attacked by random people. But the club was full of Thai people, and if they see a white guy holding a Thai guy, what do you think is going to happen especially with this kind of element I've just been talking about? And so I started getting bottled and hit from like every direction and I just had to get out of the club as quickly as possible to just kind of prevent myself from ending up in a hospital. And we all ended up in like hospital with various degrees of harm that night.

But I've heard of much worse situations where a guy has been arrogant, Thai guys have left him, but they followed him later and they’ve got him later. And it's not going to be one on one – it'll be like four guys against one. They don’t have the same rules.

So that's something to be aware of and it's another reason, like even if you don’t want to be respectful, like for your own safety, be respectful. Be nice to people and treat them how you would want to be treated, because there is that element as well. What do you guys think of that?

[Charles]: Yeah, there you go.

[Jackson]: Yeah, definitely. I guess don’t give people reasons to want to kick your ass. If you're respectful to people and treat them nicely, I don't think anything’s likely to happen. You should be fine.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[Charles]: And it's not like it's super-dangerous here. Like every place has its dangers. Like back home I've been jumped on the street many times, and like I feel more safe in Thailand and I've never been jumped here, and I've been like drunk, walking in the middle of nowhere like so many times. Generally, I feel pretty safe in Thailand, but like Angel said, like at a nightclub in a setting like that, yeah, just don’t be an idiot and just be a little more careful about what you're doing and don’t be like the obnoxious, drunk foreigner guy.

[Angel Donovan]: So another aspect is police in Thailand. When you're in a taxi going home, you often get stopped by police. They have these junctions where they stop you and everyone’s been through this a lot actually, but it depends on which routes you're taking. Like my home used to be somewhere Sukhumvit Soi 11, so when I was getting a taxi home I’d always get stopped, and they're looking for drugs so they're going to search you. Obviously, there's no problem if you don’t have any drugs, but I have heard of people who had cocaine or… getting into serious trouble. Pretty scary. I'm sure you've heard like the issues with the illegality of drugs in Thailand and how serious it can get. So that's just something to be aware of and, you know, I think drugs are a bigger risk in Thailand than in other places because of it. Anything to add, guys, on it?

[Charles]: Oh yeah. Like, okay, near Narz — we're talking about Narcissus Club. I used to go to that club a lot and like walking home… I didn't walk home but like I walked to some… like the 7-Eleven. That was near there. Every time… like there's a few months where every time I was walking down that road I got stopped by cops. And it wasn’t on the street - like it was on the sidewalk, and cops would just come up to me and they'd search me for drugs. They'd ask me questions.

And you know that they're looking for cocaine or something, and if they find cocaine then they're going to take you to like, I don't know, some room or like a station or something. They're going to put you in a room. They're going to try to get you to bribe them, pay them off so like you don’t get thrown in jail. And like they're not trying to throw you in jail—they will—but what they really want is a bribe. So if you get in a situation like that, then just remember you can probably bribe the cop.

Like one time I was driving home from the bar with this girl I was dating. It was her car. She was driving and she was pretty drunk, and we got pulled over three times on the way back. I don't know what was going on that night but there's three roadblocks and we got stopped each time, and she had to pay the cops each time.

And another time a friend of mine got caught with drugs and, yeah, he had to pay the cops off. Like they held him for a few hours and eventually like they took him to the ATM machine and he pulled out… I think he paid like 500 bucks or something like that. Yeah, that’s all I got. Jackson, do you have anything to say on that?

[Jackson]: I got stopped by the cops a few weeks ago when I was around the Soi Cowboy area. I wasn’t even out drinking, I was just getting some food. And around that area, Soi Cowboy, there's a lot of foreigners, a lot of people partying, so the cops know that there's a chance they're going to find people with drugs there. So I was walking along the street and the cop pulled up on his motorcycle, pulled me aside, asked to see my passport, which I didn't have, so he checked by driver’s license. And then it was, “Empty your pockets, take off your hat, pull out your wallet,” search the wallet.

One thing you want to be careful of, like Charlie was saying, they're looking for drugs. When they go into your wallet, just check their hands beforehand because I have heard stories about them planting drugs on you so that they can blackmail you. So if they're putting their hands in your pockets, make sure their hands are open when and you can see they haven't got anything. Make sure they're not putting anything into your wallet when they're searching it.

One of the first things that the cop did when he was looking in my wallet was pull out all my money and count how much money I had, so… because I've heard stories like sort of try not to take too much money out with me, so I try and take a minimal amount of cash on me that I need. I think if a cop pulls you over and he sees that you've got 10,000, 20,000 baht in your wallet, he's much more likely to try and plant drugs on you, try and arrest you so he can see how much money you've got on you. With me, if I've got like 500 baht on me, which is like less than 20 bucks, that's not really a big payoff for him unless he can take me to an ATM, and at that point it's probably not really worth your time.

So if you're going out in certain areas like the Sukhumvit areas, definitely don’t even think about taking drugs on you. It's not worth it. And just be careful. If you get pulled over, ideally, if you're with a friend, have them watch to verify.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Jackson]: And just, you know, just say to him, it might sound rude but say, “I can't see your hands. I want to see you have nothing in your hands,” and you should be fine. Nothing happened with me but it was like a 10-minute thing. He was very thorough. He was searching every little place that he could look for a tiny little package of drugs. If you don’t have anything you should be fine, but if you are going out taking drugs with you, then you're asking for trouble.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, so you know, I've always been careful about making sure they're not putting anything in my wallet as well. I haven't heard of a specific story where that's happened to someone – it's very possible given the level of corruption.

[Jackson]: I was talking to a guy here, his parents are diplomats and he spent a bit of time here, and he knows quite a few police officers and he told me firsthand that it happens fairly regularly around Sukhumvit area. So just keep that in mind when you're going out.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent. Alright so let's talk sexually-transmitted diseases in Bangkok. I bring this up because I've had conversations with guys in Bangkok where they’ve caught gonorrhea like eight times or something which is like…

[Charles]: Oh yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Which is like you're just like facepalm, [laughs] right?

[Charles]: [Laughs] Yeah. Dude, like I got that once when like just a condom broke for just a second, and I pulled it out and that was it. Like I think I washed it off and I put on another condom, but then yeah, a few days later I had to go to the hospital and take antibiotics.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So we were talking about, like I guess each of us has a different approach to this, so like you guys… Charlie, do you want to go first? What do you think of the STD situation? What precautions do you take? What are you concerned about or not concerned about? Like just kind of an overview.

[Charles]: Well, you should definitely be more careful in this country than… well, you should always be careful. I know in Cambodia like I read that I think 30% of the working girls, like the girls that work in bars in Cambodia, 30% have HIV. And Thailand is a lot better. Like there's active education about that. Like they teach kids about it.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that there's a higher percentage here. Especially if you're going to like sleazy clubs or clubs with girls with questionable morality, you want to be super-careful with that. You might want to even avoid girls like that just for that reason. Of course, wear a condom every time.

[Angel Donovan]: I know you have one story from a girl you knew in one of the bars relating to HIV.

[Charles]: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think… the girl I knew, she wasn’t even a prostitute. I met her online. And she was telling me about her friend who got HIV, and then she was still going out and going to clubs and going home with guys. And she would wear condoms, or I guess the guy would wear condoms, but like if a guy didn't want to wear a condom, she would just say, “Oh, okay, no problem.” And so, you know, like that girl, she probably gave HIV to more than one guy, and that's really scary to think about and that's just one good reason to be super-careful here.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and I think the situation was she was working in one of the go-go bars in Nana Plaza or whatever. And they have some kind of screens, is it every three months or something?

[Charles]: Oh, Angel, that's another story.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, okay.

[Charles]: And it's the same story, just a different person.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Charles]: So there you go, there's two stories. Yeah, okay, except that girl was working in a go-go bar and like she was going home with customers all the time. So I don't know if she was protecting… like if she was using protection or not, but Jesus Christ, man, like she's working in the sex industry, she has HIV, she knows it, and she's fucking a lot of guys, and yeah, that's really risky.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. There's an interesting dimension there, is because like I know that the go-go bars and the whole HIV AIDS situation was in the nineties because it was getting out of hand. And so they put these controls in for the go-go bars where they have to get these tests every three months or something. So what happens is a girl will get kicked out of her only source of income. So when the girl basically gets kicked out of the go-go bar because she's failed one of these test, that's been very effective for managing better the AIDS situation, the HIV situation.

However, now like she's lost her source of income, and I think what happens to those girls is that they become freelancers in the beer gardens and stuff because they can't go through that kind of regulated… the go-go bars are a bit more regulated. Then they go to the beer bars and they go more freelance, right? So you'll find them in the after-hours clubs, I guess. So I think there's probably a much higher risk in some sense from like if there are hookers in those kind of bars, if you meet them, there's probably a higher STD risk with the freelancers or the girls you meet outside of the go-go bars.

I don't know. Like I'm extremely STD-avoidant. I avoid them like the plague and I'm very careful. Like I know situations where I've heard that guys don’t use condoms in Thailand, and I think they're asking to die basically, and I've even heard of some of them brag about how they will sleep with hookers and they’ll ask them not to use condoms and stuff, which just seems pretty insane to me.

But you know, of course condom is like important, but there are some things you can catch even with condoms, right? Like Charlie gave the example of gonorrhea, is I think even if the condom doesn’t break, sometimes you can catch that because it's a bacterial one and if you get a bit on you it's easier to catch than a virus like HIV, for example. And there's also blowjobs. Like some guys don’t realize that you get that kind of thing straight off blowjobs as well as herpes and stuff like that.

And then there's just the gray area factor. So Charlie gave an example where he was basically in a relationship, a trusted relationship for six months with a girlfriend, and I don't know whether he was using condom or not, but once you've been in a relationship for six months you may stop using a condom, right? Because you're in a relationship. And in Thailand you just have to be aware, you have to be careful about that she hasn’t got that type of background, because then you could be exposing yourself to a risk that you're not aware of.

So as I said, I'm pretty extreme about this stuff. So any girlfriend, like for a long time I just said condoms, forget it, even if she's a girlfriend or whatever. I got into a more relationship about two years ago, so I went down to the hospital with her and we both got our STD tests. And that's not an easy to bring up with a Thai girl either because they're not used to STD tests like we are in the West. It's a tough subject. It’s like, “What, do you think I have something?” And it's not something that's spoken about easily, especially with the more traditional girls, I think. So that was actually a pretty tough conversation, and she actually went and told her mom about it, and her mom got angry at me. [Laughs]

[Charles]: Oh man.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, because she was pretty surprised about it. And I was very, very careful. I did it slowly over a period of weeks. I talked about the way I thought about that stuff way before I even talked about her getting a test, so she'd already got used to the idea of that because I am interested in my health and I want to be 100% healthy or whatever. So you know, it's a touchy subject and you've got to be careful with it, but it's something that I feel is necessary and that's the way I handle it. Jackson, you got any thoughts to add?

[Jackson]: Yeah, I think, you know, always assume responsibility for everything that happens when you're sleeping with a girl. So I always think that it's up to me to make sure that I'm wearing a condom and because one thing that I've found over the last few years is a lot of girls won't insist on you wearing condoms. In those cases they’ll actually try to persuade you not to wear one for whatever reason, like they might say it feels better for them or whatever reason. They’ll just say, “Oh, we could have some fun first and then you can put it on after.”

It's kind of scary when you think the lengths that they’ll go to to get you to avoid wearing a condom, and then you think how many other guys that they’ve done this with. And I know that most guys if given the chance probably won't wear the condom. So the girl might have sex with 20 guys in the last year so, you know, and 15 of the guys haven't worn condoms, so she could have all sorts of diseases. So it's always best to wear one. For the girl, if you think she's very innocent and she probably hasn’t got anything, you might be tempted, “I’ll be fine just this one time,” but it only takes one time to catch something.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Jackson]: There was this one girl that I hooked up with back in Australia shortly before I came over here, and she said to me that… she was quite insistent about… beforehand she'll like ask, “Have you got a condom? You need to wear a condom.” I'm like, “Yeah, I always wear one.” And she said that girls, they reach a certain point as well once they start getting turned on where they mind sort of shuts down and they don't think logically and she said there's a point of no return for girls where they don’t care if you're wearing a condom, right? They just want to get fucked. So if you haven't got a condom on, they're just going to have sex with you either way.

So if you don’t have one on you, if you're not prepared, if you don’t have in your pocket, next to your bed, wherever you happen to be, it's very easy to get caught up in the moment and you're just saying, “Oh, fuck it, I'll be fine. I'm not going to worry about it.” You see over here in Thailand the foreign guys come over, sleep with girls, lots of different girls, and pass things on without the girls even knowing that there's a huge chance that you can catch something.

I think there's… I've heard there's maybe a million people in Thailand who have got HIV, so out of that I think 60 million people , so like 1 in 60 people has got HIV. I don’t like those odds, so I'm not going to take any chances. Plus herpes, gonorrhea, Chlamydia, all the other things that are going around – just, yeah, don’t take any chances.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so like we're talking about the cheating, the Thai men, that they’ve got this whole culture of cheating there, and I think that makes it even more dangerous because what happens is you've got this Thai girl that could be very innocent and she hasn’t slept around or anything, maybe she's had one or two Thai boyfriends for example; however, so she's taken a pill or something, she's not using condom, but that Thai guy could very well be cheating, and a lot of the Thai guys also go to the go-go bar as well. They go to their Thai versions of them, right? So there's that kind of dynamic going on in Thailand where there's a lot of cheating, there's a lot of use of sex services because in Thai guy society it's more acceptable to use the sex services as well. So a lot of Thai guys are using those services, and so there's just that potential there.

[Jackson]: Mm-hmm. Definitely.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, does anyone want to say anything about Pattaya or Phuket?

[Jackson]: Pattaya is a very sleazy kind of place, like, so all the places that we've been talking about so far, probably the sleaziest place that we've mentioned, maybe like Patpong, Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, like Pattaya is probably 10 times as sleazy as any of those places. If you go out around the center, around Walking Street, this is all go-go bars, prostitutes up and down the street everywhere. It's basically, if you go to Pattaya, let's assume that you're going there for a sex holiday.

Last time I was there with my friend we actually met these girls in Phuket and told them that we were going to Bangkok after we left Phuket, and one of the girls found my friend and somehow she found out where we were staying, and she was like, “What are you guys doing in Phuket? Are you there to fuck prostitutes and sleep with all these bar girls?” And we were actually there just to check it out. We didn't know much about it. We’d heard that it was an interesting place to go. But once we actually got there and saw what it was like, it was easy to see how she came to that conclusion. It's just wall to wall with prostitutes. A lot of Russian prostitutes as well there. Some guys, they love it there, they go there all the time, they're into that kind of thing, but it's not somewhere that I want to go back and see again.

[Angel Donovan]: Charlie, any different perspective or… on that?

[Charles]: No, I'm in agreement with Jackson there.

[Angel Donovan]: When I've spoken to girls in Bangkok and they mention the word Pattaya or they were in Pattaya or anything like that, I used to freak out about that at first. Kind of I'd be like, “Oh, she must be a hooker.” Then I realized there's one side of Pattaya where there's basically Thais go on holiday. So normal Thais will go in there because it's just a nearby beach. It's the nearest beach and they’ll go on holiday there, and it's got nothing to do with the other area.

And that’s pretty much it, guys. And like I just want to say like thank you for this like monster episode packed full of so much knowledge. You've both had a lot of experience in Bangkok and it's been a lot of fun.

[Jackson]: Yeah, it's been interesting. Good to catch up again. Hope the listeners get something out of it.

[Charles]: Yeah, I had a good time. Thanks, Angel, and nice talking to you again, Jackson.

[Jackson]: Alright, cool.