A passport photo is NECESSARY! Unless... - Hong Kong

An old 20 HKD banknote and a passport picture

Usual stop in Hong Kong to get a Chinese visa. Usual stay at the Nathan road mansions, where the foreign hasslers who come here to start a new life are getting more and more annoying and the smell more and more pungent. The beehive cell-like rooms haven't gotten bigger by a bit though. Only the prices might actually have been increased. 
The Forever Bright agency at the New Mandarin plaza by Tsim Sha Tsui East MTR station is way more crowded than the last time I was there. They have even hired a guy who wears a suit and a tie and stands by the door and mounted a movable structure for the customers to form an ordered line. 
The situation at the counter is chaotic: it's a mess to receive the forms, to get information about the fees and to hand in the application papers.  I was planning to get a six-month, multiple-entry, business visa but in just a few years the fee went from 600 to 2000 HKD. I opt for the three-month, single entry, tourist one which only costs 500 HKD. 
"You need to give me a passport picture."
"Here you go!"
"No, this one has a white background, we need one with a blue background."
Shit, the blue background...

They just have different rules - Thailand (with some photos)

Everything...no rules! Actually they only seem to have guide books

One arrives to Thailand and soon starts to spot the differences. How hot…in December! It was snowing back home. Everything is so cheap, you can eat with a dollar…with that money I can't even get a coffee where I come from. And finally the most surprising of them all: everything that is forbidden where we come from is allowed here, or at least tolerated. In the worst case scenario you can buy it with a bribe.
You can purchase pirated DVDs and software in broad daylight. Fake driving licenses, university degrees and membership cards of various type. Imitation jeans, shirts and bags. You can display the sign of an illegal business and nobody says anything about it. You can spot four people without helmets and a dog riding a motorbike, and the police is fine with that. Twenty kids in the back of a pick up truck, instead of hiding, are all laughing and singing. After 2am bars cannot sell alcoholic drinks but if your beer is poured in a paper cup or a coffee mug then it's alright. Nightclubs are competing for who pays the biggest bribe to the police, so that they can stay open until late and the competitors are forced to close early. And then sex, orgies, viagra, cialis, kamagra, women…young, old, fantastic, horrible, shameless or chaste women. Yeah, here you can even find chaste hookers. And then homosexuals, bisexuals, transexuals. Even asexual ones.
Hey, I can do anything I want here - the newcomer inspired by promises of freedom and impunity will be thinking - this is great! Hooray! And his holiday soon turns into a sequence of troubles.

The grotesque artist street - Pattaya, Thailand

Christmas in Pattaya

There is a little street in Pattaya: it's the last section of Walking Street, on the port end. If Walking Street were an intestine, a long bowel full of feces and sludge (both metaphorical and real), we would be talking about its rectum, its sphincter...in short, its asshole. 
It's a rather dark place (not surprisingly, considering the anatomic analogy), without bars, restaurants and clubs. Just the sea on one side and a few hotels on the other. The music is muffled: you could almost say that this is a silent place. In the evening a few Thai guys come here with their guitars, they sit on the curb and start singing some songs. Not in Thai or in English, as most of us would expect, and as they used to do until three or four years ago. They sing in Russian. The young Russian tourists who come to Pattaya like to go to a couple of discos (Mixx and Lima Lima) located a few meters away and they are the ones these buskers are performing for. In Russian, of course. Groups of Russians stop by and the boldest among them start to sing along. Not very well to say the truth, but as they leave good tips they are born with and pardoned. 
A few meters away there are some portrait and caricature painters: they produce the usual second rate stuff that can be found pretty much everywhere. Just before the big lighted banner, with a little luck one can run into two of the most picturesque characters of the area.

The house with a nice view...in Asia

No...you can forget about this view...

If you've just moved to Asia and you have based the choice of the apartment you're renting on the great view that you can enjoy from the bedroom window...you might have made a gross mistake. 
Check the adjacent lot. In case it's empty, or used as a parking area, a new building can pop up and darken your house in a matter of few months.
And you'll regret the other option, the one with a view on tangles of electricity cables and a trafficked thoroughfare, the one you rejected with haughty contempts, taking your leave from the agent that recommended it with one of your hateful sarcastic jokes.

An original character, maybe in spite of himself - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

...he slowly walks away.

Among the herds of businessmen, office workers, tourists, shopping girls, immigrants looking for a better life, losers of various types (and this is the category I belong to), looking carefully once in a while in Kuala Lumpur one can spot some original characters. Original in spite of himself maybe, as in this case.

Jackson 5 hairstyle, a pair of trousers ripped right where his asshole is, stitched (so to speak) with a piece of ribbon of the type used for christmas presents. One of the numerous patches on his torn jacket is a fake dollar bill: a sadly ironic detail, considering the guy's conditions. He's wearing a sport glove. Only one. Maybe he's a discus or a javelin thrower. I've been looking at him for some minutes and he's never stopped sucking his fingertips. I don't know whether he's only imagining that they are smeared with chocolate or whether there actually was some, a few hours ago I mean, as right now his fingers are as polished as German sausages: come to think about it that curious optical illusion might exactly be the reason why he's licking them. 
After a while something captures his attention, he takes his hands off his mouth and, with penguin-like step, leaning left and right, he slowly walks away. 

Thoughts/18

- Some people trade freedom in exchange for wealth. Whenever I can I do exactly the opposite.

- A a young boy I was such a failure with girls that, when overcome by frustration I finally decided to masturbate, I found it hard even to seduce my hand.

- You are reluctant to use a muzzle and then you train him like a Gestapo dog? That way you are not only caging his mouth, but his whole soul!

- Yeah, sure, making decisions is easy...when they are not your own.

- Some say that a reasonable dose of stress is good for one's health. However, while they're saying it they shiver, stutter and wriggle in a dreadful way.

What...what...what? What do you totally understand? Bangkok, Thailand

The 0 km marker near Democracy Monument

There are some expats in Bangkok - not all of them of course, but still a lot, I would say too many - who walk, move and even stand still with an arrogant air, as if they had a tight grasp on the city's handles. As if they had looked at it for long, studied it carefully and finally managed to understand it completely. Grasp on the handles? Sure! The city's love handles, maybe. Or rather the sex ones, probably those of the local prostitutes. The other types of handles, well, I'm very skeptical about that.
I think that is a very feeble illusion. Few immigrants find themselves in as shaky a position as those who live in Thailand, or most of the nearby countries for that matter. Looked at with hostility by a relevant share of the local population (you don't really believe that all those smiles are a display of cheerfulness), with precarious visas and statuses, forever non-completely-welcome guests of a society that maintains clear barriers between itself and those who are nicknamed, sometimes with a bit of contempt, farang, which actually means "French". There actually are dozens of rights granted by most western countries to their least desired guests that even the richest, most cultured and cunning foreigner can't aspire to around here. How could such a pride and touchy nation reveal itself so easily to a bunch of arrogant know-it-all braggarts of that sort?