CLIPS

The 13 girls you’ll date in Bangkok

Whether you’ve just moved here or have already dated all 13 types, find out more about the ladies you’ll meet in Bangkok.

The 14 guys you’ll date in Bangkok

From English teachers to average Thai guys to the one you had to “import,” finding love in Bangkok can be a bit tricky for the ladies.

Dating Despair: Why finding love is hard in Bangkok for Thai men

Dating Despair is a four-part series about why dating in Bangkok, well … sucks. This story is a collection of anecdotes from Thai men who live in the capital.

Dating Despair: Why finding love in Bangkok is hard for foreign women

Dating Despair is a four-part series about why dating in Bangkok, well … sucks. This story is a collection of anecdotes from foreign women who live in the capital. From recycling men to culture clashes with local boyfriends to guys that forgot to mention their wives and kids, navigating love for foreign women in this

Dating Despair: Why finding love in Bangkok is hard for foreign men

Dating Despair is a four-part series about why dating in Bangkok, well … sucks. This story is a collection of anecdotes from foreign men who live in the capital. Blah, blah, blah, yes, we’ve seen every lad article, bro blog, sexpat soliloquy, and beyond singing the praises of dating in Thailand for foreign men. Want

Hype, swipe and gripe: Sparking some love with Tinder in Bangkok

For the past year, one topic has seemed on the tip of every tongue and swiping finger – Tinder. Tindering is casual and can happen anywhere and at any time. I’ve had a friend meet a guy in the middle of Songkran water-fighting on Silom Road, and another randomly announce

Bill Bensley on Style, Shopping, and Shinta Mani Wild

In the far reaches of hotel designer Bill Bensley’s Bangkok design studio sits a warehouse holding a menagerie of unusual items that will – eventually – end up being used in one of his wild

Jungle pool villas are a perfect city break at Mövenpick Asara Hua Hin

It’s a jungle out there — and that theme continues inside at Mövenpick Asara Resort & Spa in Hua Hin. From the moment you enter the open-air lobby, overlooking wooden bridges darting through a lagoon,

Stop and Sniff: Bangkok’s blooming, fragrant, colorful 24-hour flower market

Bangkok’s historic flower market operates indoors and out, around the clock. For generations of Thais, the market’s been running for as long

9 things to do on Pattaya’s famous Walking Street (that aren’t go-go bars or ping pong shows)

The Walking Street in Pattaya is known the world over as a go-all-night red light district. But lots of other attractions have sprung up on the street to accommodate male and female vacationers

Bensley Goes Wild: The prolific hotel designer on nerves and nature ahead of Shinta Mani Wild opening

Bill Bensley once said, “Never do anything twice. Experiment. Do weird things. Once you start repeating yourself, you’re through.” True to form, the iconic hotel designer stepped

Espresso and an exorcism at Bangkok’s witchcraft cafe

Bangkok has a wide array of spiritual services for sale. Want to pump up your rack with “natural breast enlargement” courtesy of a chest-slapping shamaness? Can do. Interested in dropping $2000 on an illegal doll that houses an aborted fetus who predicts lottery numbers? Bangkok has you covered. In a society that loves

Spirits and Shrines: Appeasing Thailand’s Multitude of Ghosts

Belief in ghosts, spirits, and superstitions are rife in Thailand. Concern for keeping supernatural beings happy affects everything from personal practices to politics to the real estate market. Even the country’s current leader, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, boasts about his collection of magical amulets, whose power he purportedly relies on for his success. Most Thais will freely admit that they believe in phi (the Thai word for ghost)

Mae Nak: Visiting the weird, wonderful shrine dedicated to Thailand’s most famous ghost

Thai lore has it that Mae Nak was a pregnant young woman living along Phra Kanong Canal in central Bangkok with her husband during the mid 1800s. Her husband, Mak, was drafted into the military. Nak and her baby

Coffee and Coffins: Bangkok’s death-themed cafe brings awareness to the end of life

Kid Mai Death Awareness Cafe is serving up more than just lattes and smoothies. This new cafe in Bangkok, founded by Professor Veeranut Rojanaprapa, offers philosophy classes

Bangkok is Burning: Voguer Amazon Sun Brings Ball Culture Realness to Thailand

Strike a pose, shante, work it, throw shade, fierceness — these phrases have their origins in gay ball culture. If you’ve watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, seen the documentary Paris is Burning, or recall Madonna’s Vogue video, then you already know

Grace Baey’s intimate portraits of Yangon’s trans population

Some photographers are able to capture the most delicate moments deftly. With her project Living Choices, Singapore-based shooter Grace Baey showed her ability to do just that. Baey spent one month in Yangon taking pictures of the city’s trans population

Teacher allegedly fired for being trans shares message of love and acceptance

A Filipino transgender teacher in Bangkok was recently fired from her job, allegedly because of her gender, which the Thai school claimed to not realize when they hired her.

I Dug Up Peyote in the Mexican Desert

In the fall of 2012, I set off from my apartment in Mexico City and traveled nine hours through rough terrain to the Chihuahuan Desert to illegally dig up and take peyote. Growing up in Connecticut, I’d heard of the hallucinogen but not of anyone actually doing it. Back then, I wasn’t even sure what it was. Though like many teens

Sexual Heil-ing: Nonthaburi love hotel’s ‘Communism’ room features Hitler mural

You thought you’d seen the last of the viral stories about Thai people’s weird and inexplicible love of Hitler? Nah. A recent internet search for love hotels (don’t ask) brought us straight to the website of Love Villa Hotel, a new-ish property in Nonthaburi that’s about an hour and a half drive from downtown Bangkok. Love hotels are rife in

Farang Deaths is the grimmest website we can’t stop reading

Farang Deaths catalogues the dark side of life in a sunny country. It’s a morbid curiosity filled with scorned lovers, empty bank accounts, suicide notes, desperation and many, many balconies.

Celling It: Pay to get locked up at Bangkok’s new prison-themed hotel

While Thai prisons are nowhere anyone wants to end up, a new hotel in Bangkok features a jail theme and a cartoonish riff on life behind bars for its guests. Located just off Sukhumvit Road in the up-and-coming Udomsuk neighborhood, Sook Station is a hotel with a very unusual theme.

PlateCulture Unites Amateur Cooks With Foodies for Home-Style Meals

Think of PlateCulture as an Airbnb for foodies in parts of Asia: Keen home chefs open their home to interested diners, who pay a per-head fee for a family-style meal. Guests, who can book solo or as a group, get the home-cooked cuisine and

Eating Weeds: Foraging in the Forest with Wildman Steve Brill

I felt a little alarmed as I watched a guy wearing a pith helmet and a pickaxe pop a yellow dandelion into his mouth. I’m pretty sure my mom told me they were poisonous when I was a kid. A few minutes after swallowing, he showed no sign of vomiting plant matter or dying, so when he picked

Is this Vacant Lot Restaurant ‘Bangkok’s Most Unique Dining Experience?

Near the top of Soi 7, which has been dubbed “Soi Public Toilet,” there’s a vacant lot behind a scary corrugated tin wall. In front of it is a Pinterest party-style chalkboard sign proclaiming that, if you walk through a break in the wall, you can experience the “Vacant Lot Restaurant — Bangkok’s Most Uniqueh

This secret cafe deep in Bangkok’s flower market will astound you

Deep in Bangkok’s ancient flower market, secreted away above a working flower shop, is the most enchanting cafe we’ve ever seen. The hidden retreat requires visitors to walk through the florist, called Napasorn, and up a set of stairs at the back to enter Floral Cafe, a wonderful world

Under the Sea: Bangkok’s viral Mermaid Cafe lets visitors frolic like fishes

Bangkok’s new Mermaid Castle Cafe is nestled into a slim, four-story building in hip shopping destination Siam Square, and it’s the place where all your underwater dreams can come true. The first three floors are dedicated to shopping. Swimsuits, mermaid pajamas, phone cases, makeup,

Sorry Ladies: Bangkok bar hosts night where men drink for free

It’s been a long time coming in the global fight for drinking equality but W Hotel’s Woobar has made a stride forward on behalf of the guys: men’s night. That’s right. Free booze. For dudes. While women around the world have been getting lit for free at ladies’ nights for decades, dudes have had to

Bangkok Poutine: A taste of home, community, and local celebrity for the city’s French Canadians

By some estimates, there may be as many as 100 — but French-Canadian expat Sophie Mottet guesses there are just a few dozen of her fellow Quebec natives living in Bangkok. She’s only met a handful of Francophone countrymen in her year

Thai Architect Duangrit Bunnag on Life in Bangkok

Thai architect Duangrit Bunnag’s work is recognizable by strong, simple lines that create a continuity between the outdoors and indoors, such as the resorts Costa Lanta in Krabi and the Naka Phuket. He has recently attracted the admiration of Bangkok’s young, hipster set with the Jam Factory, an artsy outpost that opened

Bangkok’s Swing-Dancing Scene Takes Off

Girls in hair kerchiefs and guys in suspenders stand in a circle clapping to the beat of a Count Basie song. A couple bounces through the middle, performing a frenetic Lindy Hop. The woman’s full white skirt flies during swing-outs. The man’s gangster-style brogues gleam, polished to a high shine. He moves his hand across her back to start a Charleston. The onlookers cheer. A guy in granddad

Crowdfunding platform helps human trafficking victims come home

Mira* was 14 when she was lured away from her impoverished Indonesian hometown with promises of lucrative restaurant work in nearby Singapore. Instead, she was given false documents that identified her as 19 and spent two years serving wealthy Singaporeans—performing sex work in a hotel instead of the waitressing work she was promised.

Shows, selfies, and shaming: Experts weigh in on elephant tourism in Thailand

Most people that vacationed in Thailand a decade ago were eager to ride an elephant and proudly show the photos to friends back at home. Now warnings about the cruel conditions many captive elements live in abound and elephant tourism is a whole other animal. Today, the same scenario will get you elephant-tourism shamed by

Thai Illustrator Tuna Dunn’s Cute Comics Are Surprisingly Dark

With three published graphic novels, over 50,000 fans, and a handful of beloved GIFs, Bangkok illustrator Tuna Dunn has come a long way since she began publishing sweet and painful comics about crushes, relationships and heartbreak to a Facebook page three years ago. Despite reaching an almost exclusively Thai audience, Dunn writes only in English. She says her mother tongue doesn’t

The Soberly Psychedelic World of Archan Nair

Archan Nair gets about ten messages a day from fans asking him what kinds of drugs he takes. Sometimes people even ask if they can buy acid or shrooms off him. He usually replies, “Sorry dude, I’m not into psychedelics.” Despite his cult following amongst fans of surreal art, New Delhi-based

Two-price Thailand: Why Thais think the dual pricing system makes sense

If you’ve been living in Thailand for a while, you’ve probably been overcharged for something. You might have screamed at a vendor when it happened, but here’s what you should have done.

The surprising similarities between students and expats

The excitement of a new city, the terror of being alone, a built-in community and the ability to reinvent yourself. Most people will only experience life changes of this magnitude once—when