The Cavern, the new gogo on Walking Street replacing Sisterz will open either on 4th May or 10th May.

The decision is based on Buddhist auspicious days.

I can't help but think that they will end up having to make their own good luck. Which the owners have managed to achieve so far with Happy, Peppermint, Beach Club and Baccara

A new bar is taking shape on Soi 6 with a banner proclaiming Ruby 2. It is on the other side of Soi 6 to Ruby in the central section.

Betty Boup Dance Club has re-opened after a few weeks being dark. Betty Boup, and sister bar Passion opposite, open depending upon customer demand and supply of girls.

Horny Bar in the central section has turned itself into an open bar. This appears a bit of a fad at the moment, but I am not sure that it is particularly wise given that Pattaya seems to be suffering a bit from global warming. Bars with no aircon are quickly slipping out of my radar anyway.

So What! Bar towards the 2nd Road end of the soi has been dark for quite a while so presumably now up for recycling.

There is a new bar soon to open on Soi 6 that will give Pattaya visitors a taste of Amsterdam.

As you may suspect, the bar is inspired by the red light windows of Amsterdam and from the experience of living nearby the fabled district known as De Wallen

The owners have tried to turn the bar into the same as you would expect in the dam ie girls in the windows, private booths inside (3), and mirrored short time rooms (3) all on-suite.

The girls are said to be very excited about the mirrors.

There will also be a dance stage at the front with a pole. There will also be welcome girls to usher customers in.

The beer prices will remain the same as the old Love Club.

Update: Opening Date

Amsterdamaged will be opening this weekend. There will be an official opening on Saturday 1st May and there will be a soft opening on Friday 30th April.

One of the oldest and best known bars in Pattaya, the Tahitian Queen has been destroyed by fire. An electrical fault inside the club caused the fire which spread quickly throughout the building, and destroyed part of the roof structure.

The TQ 1 Rock and Roll bar has been in existence on Beach Road since 1978. It's a popular bar particularly with American expats.

Regulars interested in keeping track of TQ1 dancers may like to try Club Nevada where at least a couple of girls turned up looking for a job.

There are now 79 GoGos operating in the Pattaya area with girls in bikinis or less.

Update: Re-opening

29th April 2010. From Pattaya Secrets

TQ1 is currently undergoing extensive refurbishment to put right the recent fire damage. The grand re-opening is pencilled in for the 6th of May.

Beer bars are closing on the Soi 8 block extending round the corner to Beach Road going south towards Soi 9.

The reason seems to be to make way for a more swish beer bar complex or perhaps another hotel.

Better news on Walking Street, the lights out at Paris A-GoGo on Soi Diamond turned out to be more blip than the closure.

The GoGo count is therefore restored to 79.

Just after 6am on Monday, Pattaya Police were on patrol along Walking Street and found a number of bars along the street which were still open for business in contravention of their licenses.

Police believe that a network of security guards and Police Volunteers assist these bars and notify them when the Police are about to conduct a raid.

Despite this, a number of bar managers were arrested and taken to Pattaya Police Station.

The bars that were targeted on Monday Morning are expected to be open for business on Monday Night.

Paris A-GoGo is located on Soi Diamond, a few paces from Walking Street.

Paris A-GoGo was dark on the night of the 25th April. Not sure yet whether this is temporary or permanent.

So last night at least, the Pattaya area gogo count dropped to 78.

Paradise A-GoGo towards the southern end of Soi Buakhao has closed.

The bar has had several periods of closure over the last few months so maybe it can bounce back. But it has to be doubtful.

There are now 78 GoGos in the Pattaya area with dancing girls in bikinis or less.

I noticed Betty Boup on Soi 6 was also closed but this seems to be a supply and demand issue. Betty Boup and Passion Club across the road are sister bars which open or close according to the supply of girls and customer demand.

As a Cal State Northridge associate professor, Kenneth Ng spends his days teaching students the principles of economics: markets, monetary policy, interest rates.

But in his free time, Ng focuses on a very different kind of market: sex tourism in Thailand. For the past year, Ng has been running a Web site that offers insights into the Thai bar scene, such as where to meet beautiful women and how to negotiate fees for their services.

But he was outed by a group of foreign businessmen who were outraged by what they considered a disrespectful Internet posting. They contacted his employer and colleagues, hoping Ng would be pressured into taking down his site.

It was a post he wrote on another Web site, run by owners of the Big Mango Bar in Bangkok, that triggered the organized campaign against him. In it, he instructed men to look for women near a particular Buddhist shrine. The Big Mango Bar owners said they found his post disrespectful.

University officials say they will not intervene or discipline Ng as long as his extracurricular activities do not involve public resources.

...Read full article

Update: Self Censored Under Pressure

24th April 2010. See article from bigbabykenny.com

An American professors website about Bangkok nightlife has been deleted bar a final explanatory posting:

For those not familiar with Bangkok, many bars, including the Big Mango Bar, are actually brothels. They employ girls who are paid a small monthly salary and get most of their pay from commissions on drinks customers buy them and from what are referred to as barfines in Bangkok. A barfine is a fee paid to the bar that frees the girl from working for the rest of the day and allows the girl to go out with the customers. Sometimes customers take girls dancing and to dinner but most of the time they take the girl home for sex. There are quotas and girls who don't get barfined enough or induce enough men to buy them drinks get their salary proportionately reduced.

It sounds worse than it is because the girls are all over 20, are free to quit whenever they want, go home with whomever they please, and, in the end, many actually end up marrying and/or girlfriending men they meet at the bar. Legions of Thai girls from poor, uneducated, impoverished backgrounds have found opportunity and a better life by working in Bangkok bars and meeting foreign men over the years.

The whole system sounds a bit unsavory to Western sensibilities but the system is ubiquitous in Bangkok among foreigners and native Thais and a form of the same system is prevalent in most Asian countries–Communist China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Vietnam. It is even rumored that the wives of several high Thai government officials and politicians started out as a hostesses in similar clubs. Before BigBabyKenny.com was turned off, you could have read through the many posts on the site for more information. Now that BigBabyKenny.com has been turned off, I'm not sure if an equivalent source exists.

The articles were too good at laying bare the economic underpinnings, the inter-personal dynamics, the nuts and bolts, and even the humorous side of The Thailand Girl Scene.

The discussion of The Thailand Girl Scene was too interesting and too revealing about the realities of life in a third world country where the usual ways women advance themselves socially and economically in The World are blocked off.

The photography was too good at documenting the nitty gritty nature of the various nooks and crannies of the Thailand nightlife industry.

The realities of life, love, dating, marriage, and sex in Southeast Asia and the politically correct western centric view of the world clashed.

Better to live in a make believe fairy tale western fantasy version of Southeast Asian culture and society than deal with an accurate, well documented truth.

Unfortunately, because I am a professor at a big public university, the popularity and publicity surrounding the ideas, the subjects and questions discussed and debated, and, of course, the ground breaking photography at BigBabyKenny.com became so great that the site had to be turned off.

Read the full article

University Statement

See article from bigbabykenny.com

Some of you may be aware of an issue that recently has received some attention related to a website run by a university employee on his own personal time with no connection to Cal State Northridge. I am writing with an update about this issue.

Professor Kenneth Ng informed me Thursday night that he is reluctantly taking down his web site on Friday. He will replace it with a brief account of the business dispute that led to the current controversy.

Professor Ng said that he is taking down the site because of the deleterious effect it had on the university's reputation, not because he considered the subject matter and content as unsuitable for public discourse, public discussion, or public debate.

I thank him for his reflection and removal of the site. I thank the University community for their comments.

I understand that some people will be disappointed that we did not force the site's closure; others already object that university leadership was critical of a university employee's speech.

We are trying to balance two principles that, in this case, clashed. Our commitment to gender equity compels us to see the site as offensive; our commitment to expression urges us to tolerate words and pictures we find intolerant. As university leaders, we believe open debate is critical to ordering our values and determining our acts. While belief in an absolute right to censor might initially comfort us; our and us has a way of quickly narrowing to you and me. Then the danger is that exclusion and exploitation, the acts that initially incited us to censor, become the rules of the day.

As with other incidents that have arisen on campus in the past, I encourage everyone to use the issues that have been raised in this matter as an opportunity to examine and talk about how we deal with values and perspectives that may conflict with our own while balancing the rights of others.

Harry Hellenbrand, Provost

Perhaps a good thing that Pattaya has had a day of rain. The main reservoir is looking severely depleted.

But the authorities seem to be keeping the taps turned on round my way presumably to ensure people can 'enjoy' manic Songkran day tomorrow.

It is a shame to notice that Moulin Rouge on Soi Yamato has closed.

One of the few beer bar refuges in the area where one could get out of the heat with some pleasant female company.

Nice 'n' Eazy on the same soi has recently put up the shutters too.

The clutch of beer bars in the middle Soi 13 has declined to just a couple, with the rest being converted to more Middle Eastern or South Asian friendly businesses.

It seems that the Soi 13 area us suffering more than most from a lack of westerners (or perhaps just a lack of spending power).

As you are probably aware, City Hall have been getting tough on street food sellers, shoe-shine boys, flower sellers etc.

There was a birthday party at my bar recently, with live entertainment and food on offer. As party of the food selection, I employed the services of a pig roasting firm, complete with a bar-b-q cooking a pig just outside my venue. Just as we were about to carve the pig, 3 uniformed police officers, attached to City Hall, descended on the area, scattering the street traders in all directions.

The officers nabbed a few, issuing them with fixed penalty notices at THB 500 a time. Then they asked to see my pig-man's licence. He could not produce one, therefore he was whacked with a ticket which had to be paid up at Soi 9 Police Station.

The motto is: - if you have a party, no problem offering food from your bar's property. If you offer food from outside your bar, you must ensure you have purchased a licence from City Hall prior to the event. I think the cost is about THB 50, or thereabouts.

The upstairs bar at What's Up A-GoGo on Soi 15 has been closed since the start of April.

One of the What's Up service girls explained that there weren't enough girls.

The downstairs bar continues to be popular, and was almost full on a visit yesterday at 11pm. Plenty of girls on hand too.

The old Limmatquai 80 lady bar on Soi Diamond is now a building site. It said to be the latest enterprise from the rapidly expanding Happy Peppermint group.

The same group are also rebuilding Sisterz with an ambitious looking project said to be called The Cavern A-GoGo.

There is a sign on the new Peppermint Palace taking shape downstairs from the current location and at the opposite side of the boxing ring. Presumably recruiting for both itself and the new Cavern A-GoGo

The very short appearance of Sapphire Club (previously Game Bird 2) on Soi 15 seems to have resulted in the buildings being called in. Hopefully for something that will last longer than a few days.