Songkran 2026: An Expat Ranking After 22 Years in Thailand

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Songkran is Thai New Year. Officially “April 13 to 15”. In 2026, that landed on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, which looks neat on a calendar. But the weekend sitting right before it stretched the real celebration from April 12 to April 19 in many places. Eight days of water warfare. Some cities pushed even longer. This is one of those moments when Thailand quietly refuses to respect its own rulebook, and nobody complains. This year I did something I had not done in a while. I travelled for it. Three French-Canadians loose in Pattaya, then back home to Cha-Am, then one last run in Hua Hin.

Pattaya: Beautiful Chaos with a Cold Edge

Pattaya in Songkran is its own animal. The water starts flying around 4 PM and, in some streets, does not stop until 2 AM. Think about that. Two in the morning. Grown adults still ambushing each other with Super Soakers and buckets of ice water. There is no other city in Thailand, or the world, where the water fight runs on a nightclub schedule.

The tourist mix has shifted heavily. I noticed a much bigger wave of Indian, Chinese, and Russian visitors than in past years. More than I have ever seen. Walking Street looked like a soaked United Nations. The bar density is also off the chart. Whatever you think of Pattaya, the city has reinvested seriously since COVID and you can feel it.

Pattaya Songkran 2026
Pattaya Songkran 2026

But here is the thing about Pattaya Songkran. A lot of the tourists are not really playing Songkran. They are playing revenge. High-pressure jets aimed at your face. Ice water loaded like ammunition. It stops being a festival and becomes a combat sport. For me, that is the wrong spirit. Songkran is not about proving who has the biggest water gun. It is about sharing a moment, laughing with strangers, maybe blessing someone with a splash on the shoulder. The Thai version of that gets lost when everyone around you is treating it like a paintball tournament.

Cha-Am: The Quiet Return

I came back to Cha-Am and went for a run. Strange choice on paper, but after four days in Pattaya it felt like a reset. Cha-Am during Songkran is calm. The real action clusters around Soi Bus Station and Beach Road, and even there it stays gentle. Small town, small festival, small crowds. If you want to experience Songkran without being baptisedevery five minutes, Cha-Am is a good entry point.

Songkran Cha-Am 2026
Songkran Cha-Am 2026

The Hua Hin Finale

The best day of my Songkran 2026 was not in Pattaya. It was on April 19 in Hua Hin. We went to Soi Bintabaht, the famous bar alley just off Naresdamri Road, and that place is perfectly designed for this festival.

Here is why. The alleys are narrow. No cars. No motorcycles. Just people. Nobody is dodging a pickup truck full of teenagers with a fire hose. No motorbike is weaving through your battle. You can actually enjoy the festival without watching for wheels. The crowd was dense but not suffocating. The music was good, the atmosphere was warm, the fights were playful, not vengeful. The right size, the right energy, the right spirit.

I have done Songkran in a lot of places, and Soi Bintabaht on the 19th was the closest thing to how Songkran is supposed to feel.

My Personal Ranking

After doing Songkran in Bangkok, Nakhon Ratchasima, Pattaya, Cha-Am, and Hua Hin, here is where I land.

1. Hua Hin. Soi Bintabaht specifically. The scale, the vibe, the pedestrian-only alleys.

Hard to beat.

2. Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat). I lived there for about 17 years, so yes, there is sentiment. But the action around Yamo and Chomphon Street is some of the best street Songkran I have ever seen. A Thai crowd, not a tourist crowd, and that changes everything.

3. Pattaya. Crazy in the best and worst sense. Worth doing once. Maybe twice. Pack goggles.

Bangkok does not make the list. Khao San Road and Silom are where most of the action concentrates, and Silom this year reportedly pulled in around 200,000 people. That is not a festival. That is a compressed panic. I did it years ago and once was enough. Too many people, too much pushing, too little of the thing that makes Songkran actually Songkran.

Why Songkran Beats Coachella

Here is something nobody talks about. Coachella was happening at the exact same time as Songkran this year. People paid thousands of dollars to fly to the California desertand stand in the sun listening to music. Fine. Great artists, good experience. But for the same weekend you could have flown to Thailand. Slept in a decent hotel for

30 USD a night. Eaten for almost nothing. And been part of a national street festival that cannot be replicated anywhere else on earth. The social experience of Songkran is the real product. You are dropped into a country that has collectively agreed, for a few days, that everyone is on the same team. Strangers laugh with you. Kids ambush you. Elders bless you with scented water. There is no ticket, no wristband, no VIP section. Songkran itself costs nothing.

If you are thinking about travelling to Thailand, plan around Songkran. Pick a city that fits your energy. If you want wild, go Pattaya. If you want tradition, go Chiang Mai or Korat. If you want the sweet spot, go Hua Hin. If you want calm, go Cha-Am.

Just do not bring your expensive phone without a waterproof case. And do not expect to stay dry for a single second.

Highly recommended. It really is the kind of experience you do not find anywhere else in the world.

I Spend $600 a Month on AI — And It Is the Best Investment I Have Made

I pay for 8 AI services per month. 60 email agents. 225,000 legal embeddings. 50 years of Thai Supreme Court decisions in 2 minutes. Here is why every cent is worth it.

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I Spend $600 a Month on AI — And It Is the Best Investment I Have Made

I pay for eight AI services every month. The total comes to approximately $600 USD. When I tell people this, the reaction splits cleanly: either they think I am foolish with money, or they understand immediately why.

At my laptop. Most of the $600/month is invisible — sub-agents running in the background while I work on something else.

Here is why.

What $600 a Month on AI Actually Buys

The services span different categories. There are the large language models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — which form the backbone of most of what I do. There are specialised tools for research, for legal document analysis, for code generation. There are agent orchestration platforms that let the tools talk to each other and operate autonomously on tasks I define.

The result is not just faster work. It is a different category of work. Things I could not do before — not because of skill, but because of time — are now possible.

60 Email Agents

My email system is built from 60 AI agents. This is not an exaggeration for effect. Sixty agents, each with a specific role: one reads incoming messages and categorises them by urgency and type. Others draft responses based on context and relationship history. Others follow up on unanswered threads. Others summarise long email chains before I read them.

One screen for the work, one screen for the system that does the other work. Most days, the second screen has more activity than the first.

I do not spend my mornings in email. My mornings are for thinking, writing, and the work that requires my actual attention. The agents handle what agents are good at. I handle what humans are still necessary for.

This was one of the reasons I left Bangkok. I needed time to build this system properly. The city’s social gravity — dinners, events, the constant friction of urban life — made focused building difficult. I removed myself, built the system, and then could re-enter the city with the system working.

225,000 Searchable Embeddings

I built a custom database of 225,000 vectorised embeddings covering Thai law, legal cases, court decisions, and legal doctrine. This database can be queried in natural language, cross-referenced, and filtered in seconds.

A Python terminal showing pip install errors while setting up notebooklm-py for AI legal research
Where the law firm’s AI infrastructure actually lives — a terminal, a few Python packages, and a lot of patience with externally-managed environments.

The practical application: I used it to analyse 50 years of Thai Supreme Court decisions involving foreigners — cases spanning from the 1970s to the present, covering property law, family law, criminal matters, commercial disputes. A human lawyer working by hand — reading, categorising, cross-referencing — would need months to do this analysis. The AI system did it in approximately two minutes.

The value is not in replacing the lawyer’s judgment. The value is in giving the lawyer complete information before the judgment is made. I can now answer questions about Thai legal precedent that would previously have required weeks of research, if the research was possible at all.

The AI That Analyses My Travel Photos

This one surprised me most when I first used it. I asked an AI to summarise my travel history based on my photo library — geotagged images from 15 years of trips across 30+ countries. It mapped the journey, identified the patterns, told me things about my own travel history that I had half-forgotten.

“I asked AI to summarise my trips abroad based on my pool of pictures. Even me, I cannot remember the dates.”

This is not a trick. This is what happens when you combine a large, well-organised personal data set with an AI that can reason about it. The output is a kind of structured memory — an external version of recall that does not fade the way human memory does.

What AI Cannot Do (Yet)

I spend $600 a month on AI tools. I am under no illusion that they are magic.

AI is excellent at processing, summarising, categorising, drafting, and generating. It is not yet excellent at judgment — the assessment of context, nuance, relationship, and ethics that makes a lawyer or advisor useful rather than merely informative. A system that can analyse 50 years of Supreme Court decisions in two minutes still requires a human to interpret what those decisions mean for a specific client’s specific situation.

The combination — AI speed and scale plus human judgment — is where the current value is. The people who will be left behind are not those who refuse to use AI. They are those who use AI as a replacement for thinking rather than as a tool for more thinking.

Why $600 and Not Zero

Free AI tools exist. They are good. They are not the same as paid professional-grade access.

The difference between the free and paid versions of the major AI systems is measurable in context window size, response quality, speed, and especially in the API access that allows you to build automations. The 60-agent email system does not run on a free ChatGPT account. The embedding database requires API access at scale. The research tools that surface legal cases require premium subscriptions.

If you are using AI professionally and relying on free tools, you are using a hammer when the job needs a crane. The investment is proportionate to the return.

2025: The Year That Changed Everything (My Honest Year-End Review)

2025 was the year ThaiLawOnline doubled in size, a Bangkok earthquake sent me to the coast, I had 10 dates with very few second dates, and AI became my most productive business partner. The honest annual review.

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Originally shared on Facebook · January 2026 · 68 reactions — my highest-engagement post ever

Every year I do a version of this exercise — looking back at what actually happened versus what I planned, and trying to be honest about both. This year, 2025, the exercise is more interesting than usual. More happened. More changed. And some of what changed, I did not see coming.

ThaiLawOnline: The Business Side

The headline numbers: ThaiLawOnline doubled in size in 2025. Four times more organic traffic than the year before. More lawyers on the team. More cases handled, more countries represented in the client base, more revenue. For a law firm that was running quietly for years without much investment in visibility, the growth was significant.

The reason for the growth is not complicated: I built an AI-powered infrastructure around the business. Not in the way that tech companies talk about AI — not as a slogan or a positioning statement — but practically, at the level of daily operations. Email handling, client intake screening, newsletter production, social media scheduling, legal research across 131,000 Thai Supreme Court decisions via a custom vector database. The AI does not replace the human lawyers. It eliminates everything that was consuming the human lawyers’ time that was not actual legal work.

The result is a firm that can handle more volume with the same team, respond faster, research more thoroughly, and do it at a price point that undercuts the competition. I pay roughly $600 USD per month on AI subscriptions. The return on that investment, measured in billable time recovered, is not close.

The Earthquake

In March 2025, I was living above the 40th floor of a tower in Bangkok when the earthquake hit. I felt the building move in a way that buildings should not move. I could hear walls cracking. Some residents could not open their doors. A TikTok video of my building swaying circulated widely — I recognised it because I live in the middle one, the slightly yellowish tower.

The pool, the onsen, the sauna, and the gym were all closed for inspection. Half the elevators were out. It took time to assess the structural integrity of everything.

I left Bangkok shortly after. Not because I was afraid, but because after the earthquake, my concentration dropped and I needed a new environment to reset. I moved to the coast. Cha-Am became my base. The sea is slower than Bangkok, and slower was what I needed.

An @Cha-Am sign with Thai script reading ชะอำ at the beachfront promenade in Cha-Am, Thailand
Cha-Am — the seaside town that became my base after the earthquake. Slower than Bangkok was exactly what I needed.

The Personal Scorecard: Honest Version

Health: I lost 3 to 4 kilos during 2025. I added 3,000 extra steps per day to my baseline. I implemented an 8-hour eating window. None of this was dramatic. None of it was a programme or a transformation story. It was small adjustments made consistently, which is the only thing that actually works.

Dating: I had about 10 dates if you want to know, and very few second dates. I have not found the right person yet. I say this without drama — it is simply the honest state of things. Dating in Thailand as a 56-year-old with specific interests and high standards for conversation is not simple. I am not complaining. I am being accurate.

Travel: Da Nang, Songkhla, Surabaya. Three cities that none of my friends were particularly interested in when I mentioned them. Three cities that gave me some of my best experiences of the year.

Cha-Am beach in Thailand on a sunny day with waves rolling in onto empty sand
Cha-Am beach mid-week — empty sand, slow waves, and Bangkok 200 km north as if it were on another planet.

The AI Year: What I Actually Use

By the end of 2025, my standard AI toolkit includes Claude (Anthropic), Gemini, Grok, Deep Seek, and Kimi. I dropped my ChatGPT subscription for the first time in three years — for the first time, ChatGPT felt behind the alternatives rather than ahead of them. This is a significant shift. OpenAI built the market. The market has caught up and, in several specific areas, passed them.

Cha-Am beach at night with a beach tractor parked under casuarina trees, Thailand
Cha-Am at night. The beach tractors come out when the sand is empty. So do the people who like quiet.

My AI system for ThaiLawOnline has 60 sub-agents. They write emails, send newsletters, post on social media, screen incoming inquiries, and maintain the legal database. I watch Netflix while three different systems work in parallel. I wrote about this publicly because I think the honest version of what AI can actually do — not the hype, not the fear, but the practical reality — is more interesting than either the utopian or the dystopian narrative.

One post on this subject got 19 sad reactions. Someone was worried. I understand that. The honest answer is that I am also slightly worried — not about my own situation, but about what happens when this technology reaches the parts of the economy where there is no equivalent of a law firm to restructure around it.

Hypnotherapy: The Surprise of the Year

I started hypnotherapy sessions in early 2026 but the groundwork was laid in late 2025. I had been sceptical about it my entire adult life. Then I tried it. The result surprised me. It works, at least for specific applications — breaking automatic thought patterns, accessing things that talk therapy surfaces slowly if at all.

I include this not because I am selling hypnotherapy, but because I think the pattern — I was sceptical, I tried it anyway, I updated my position based on evidence — is worth naming explicitly. It is a useful habit of mind.

What 2026 Looks Like

More travel. More writing. Continued investment in the AI infrastructure. A possible extended stay somewhere that is not Thailand, for a change of context.

More of what works, less of what does not. That is really the whole plan, and it turns out to be enough of a plan.

The year that changed everything did not feel like it was changing everything while it was happening. That is how it usually works. You look back and see the shape of it. You look forward and the shape disappears again into uncertainty.

That is fine. I have been navigating uncertainty for a long time. I am reasonably good at it.

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer and the founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has been based in Thailand since 2006 and writes about law, technology, travel, and life in Southeast Asia.

Da Nang in the Rain: Vietnam’s Central Coast When the Monsoon Hits

I arrived in Da Nang during October flooding. What central Vietnam teaches you when the monsoon hits — and why Hoi An demands a return visit in dry season.

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Da Nang in the Rain: Vietnam’s Central Coast When the Monsoon Hits

I arrived in Da Nang in October knowing it was monsoon season. What I did not know was that this particular October would bring flooding — the kind where streets become shallow rivers and the locals navigate intersections with philosophical calm while water rises past their ankles. It was one of the more memorable arrivals I have had anywhere.

Central Vietnam in the wet season is not for everyone. But it taught me things that a dry-season visit never could.

A wet street in Da Nang at night with people walking under umbrellas during October monsoon rain
Da Nang at night, October rain. Streets stay open, people keep walking, the food stalls put up plastic sheeting and carry on.

Da Nang: A City That Works Despite the Weather

Da Nang is a modern, well-organised city on the central Vietnamese coast — the kind of place that has been built with infrastructure in mind rather than charm. The Dragon Bridge crosses the Han River and breathes fire on weekend nights. The beaches stretch for kilometres. The city is clean and navigable in a way that Hanoi, with its labyrinthine Old Quarter, is not.

In the flooding, the city showed its character. Traffic continued, businesses stayed open, street food vendors added plastic sheeting to their stalls and kept serving. Vietnamese pragmatism is something to admire. Nobody panicked. Nobody stopped. The city just adapted and carried on.

DA NANG BEACH sign in front of palm trees on a wet, overcast day on the central Vietnamese coast
Da Nang Beach in the rain — the kind of day where the city stops being a postcard and starts being a place that has to live with the weather.

Hoi An: One Day Was Not Enough

On the second day I took a car to Hoi An, about 30 kilometres south. This was the single best decision of the trip.

Hoi An is what happens when a historic trading port is preserved almost entirely intact and then turned into a walking destination. The Ancient Town — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is a grid of yellow-walled merchant houses, wooden shop-fronts, Japanese covered bridges, and Chinese assembly halls that have survived centuries more or less unchanged. Even in the rain, it is beautiful in a way that stops you.

I had one day. It was not enough. Hoi An rewards slow exploration — morning markets, tailors cutting fabric by hand, lantern-lit evening walks along the river. One day gave me a preview. I left with the clear intention of returning.

What October Taught Me About Vietnam

October is peak monsoon season for central Vietnam. The north (Hanoi) and south (Ho Chi Minh City) are drier at this time, but Da Nang and Hoi An sit in a climatic pocket that catches the northeast monsoon hard. Flooding is not unusual. In 2025 it was significant.

The lesson: if central Vietnam is on your itinerary, plan for February to May. The coast is at its best — warm, clear, manageable. The beaches are swimmable. The ancient towns glow in the right light. October is the wrong answer.

But here is what I also learned: even Da Nang in the flood was interesting. The city’s response to adversity was a character study. The food was still exceptional — Vietnamese cooking does not pause for rain, and I ate some of the best bánh mì and mì Quảng of my life at stalls that were ankle-deep in water. The people were friendly in the unhurried way that central Vietnam seems to cultivate.

Da Nang vs. Hanoi vs. Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam divides cleanly into three zones, each with its own personality. Hanoi, in the north, is older, colder, more complex — a city with centuries of weight. Ho Chi Minh City, in the south, is relentless, commercial, electric. Da Nang sits in the middle, geographically and in temperament: easier than either, more liveable, less intense.

For first-time visitors to Vietnam who want the country’s highlights without the sensory overload of the major cities, Da Nang plus Hoi An is the obvious choice. Add Huế, just 100 kilometres north, for the imperial history, and you have one of Asia’s great short-trip itineraries.

Practical Notes for Central Vietnam

The Marble Mountains are worth half a day — limestone hills rising from the coastal plain, riddled with caves and Buddhist shrines, with a view from the top that stretches from the mountains to the sea. Avoid the crowds by going early morning.

Da Nang has a functional international airport with direct connections from Bangkok, Singapore, and Seoul. Getting around by Grab (the regional ride-hailing app) is cheap and reliable. Accommodation ranges from good budget guesthouses to high-end beach resorts — the cost curve is reasonable compared to Thailand’s beach destinations.

The interior of Da Nang International Airport, central Vietnam
Da Nang International — direct connections from Bangkok, Singapore, and Seoul. The easiest way into central Vietnam.

Eat mì Quảng. Eat bánh xèo. Eat the local white rose dumplings in Hoi An. These dishes are specific to this region and are enough reason to visit on their own.

Surabaya and the Asia That No Longer Exists

I went to Surabaya because almost nobody goes to Surabaya. A travel essay about Indonesia’s overlooked second city and the Asia that existed before mass tourism transformed it.

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Surabaya and the Asia That No Longer Exists

I went to Surabaya in September 2025 partly because almost nobody goes to Surabaya. The second-largest city in Indonesia, major port, industrial hub — not on the tourist circuit in the way that Bali and Yogyakarta are, not fashionable, not particularly photogenic in the way that algorithmically successful destinations are photogenic. People go to Bali. People go to Surabaya because they have business there, or because they live there, or because they are looking for the kind of Indonesia that has not been optimised for visitors.

I am that third kind of traveller. I have been that kind for as long as I have been travelling.

Surabaya City of Heroes sign in a green park in central Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia
Surabaya — City of Heroes. The second-largest city in Indonesia, and almost no foreigners on the sign’s plaza.

The Asia I Found Before Tourism Found It

I need to be careful here not to be the kind of person who resents other people’s travel. That is not the point. But there is something true that needs saying about what Asia was like before the infrastructure of mass tourism transformed it, and what has been lost alongside what has been gained.

In 2009 to 2011, I went to Myanmar — then Burma — when there were no ATMs and you had to bring cash like a drug dealer crossing a border. You carried hundred-dollar bills, pristine and unfolded, because crumpled notes were refused. Bagan — the plain of 2,200 Buddhist temples spread across 40 square kilometres — had almost no tourists. You could walk between the temples in silence. You could climb one at sunrise and see nothing in any direction except other temples and the Irrawaddy River and the mountains beyond. It was one of the most beautiful things I have seen anywhere. I loved it with an intensity that surprises me still when I think about it.

In 2005, I went to Angkor Wat when you could still be almost alone in the temples at sunrise. By 2012, there were five times as many tourists. The experience was still magnificent — Angkor Wat does not stop being Angkor Wat because of crowds — but the silence was gone.

When I lived in China from 2002 to 2004, I went to villages where children touched me because a foreigner was rare enough to be remarkable, possibly lucky. Those villages are connected to everything now. The children’s children have smartphones and probably know more about the world than I did at their age.

What Surabaya Is

Surabaya is a city of three million people that functions as a city rather than a tourism product. The old Dutch colonial quarter has faded glory — the buildings are magnificent and largely unmaintained, which gives them an atmosphere that perfectly maintained heritage districts sometimes lack. The Arab Quarter near Ampel Mosque is a genuine neighbourhood where people live and work and worship rather than a recreation of one.

A fountain at a roundabout in central Surabaya with a residential tower behind, Indonesia
Central Surabaya — a working city with three million people, a working economy, and almost no tourist infrastructure.

The food is exceptional and almost entirely unknown to the international traveller. Rawon — a dark, rich beef soup made with black kluwek nuts, served with rice and fermented shrimp paste — is one of the great soups of Southeast Asia and is Surabayan in origin. Lontong balap, rujak cingur, tahu tek — a city’s worth of dishes that do not appear on any “best food in Asia” list because no international food media has bothered to send anyone to Surabaya.

I ate extremely well. I paid almost nothing. I was the only obvious foreigner in every restaurant.

An Indonesian chicken and rice dish on a banana leaf with sambal and salad, served in Surabaya
A standard Surabaya plate — rice in a banana-leaf parcel, chicken in chilli sauce, sambal on the side. The food is exceptional and almost entirely unknown abroad.

The Traveller’s Paradox

There is a paradox at the heart of the kind of travel I have always sought. The places I love most are the ones that have not yet been discovered. But the act of writing about them — of recommending them, of sharing photographs — is itself part of the process that transforms them. I helped kill the secret of places I loved by loving them too visibly.

I do not think the answer is silence. The answer, I think, is honesty about what we are doing when we travel and what we are willing to accept as the terms. We go to places. We consume them, transform them, sometimes damage them, sometimes contribute to them. The best we can do is travel with attention — to pay for things fairly, to treat the places and people we encounter as ends rather than means, to understand that our presence has consequences.

I went to Surabaya because I wanted to find Asia that had not been fully processed into a product for people like me. I found some of it. It will not last. But for a few days in September, the rawon was extraordinary and I was more or less alone in the city that made it, and that was enough.

Songkhla: After 21 Years in Thailand, I Finally Found a Place That Surprised Me

After 21 years in Thailand, I finally visited Songkhla — and it became my most liked travel post. Dancing shrimps, a surprise ice festival, colonial old town architecture, and the best food scene nobody outside southern Thailand talks about.

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Originally shared on Facebook · September 2025 · 75 reactions (LOVE), 7 comments, 2 shares — my most engaged travel post

After 21 years in Thailand, I thought I had run out of new places to discover.

I was wrong.

Songkhla is one of the few Thai provinces I had never visited. It sits in the deep south, near the Malaysian border, on a narrow peninsula between the Gulf of Thailand and Thailand’s largest inland body of water, Lake Songkhla. Most foreigners have never heard of it. Most Thais from Bangkok treat it as a transit point on the way somewhere else. I went there with no particular expectations and came back with more enthusiasm than I have felt about a Thai destination in years.

How I Got There: Under 800 Baht Round Trip

AirAsia flies from Bangkok to Hat Yai for less than 800 baht round trip if you book ahead and travel light. Hat Yai is the commercial centre of southern Thailand — bigger than you expect, loud, full of markets and Malaysian day-trippers who come specifically to eat. From Hat Yai, Songkhla is 30 minutes by songthaew or taxi.

That combination — cheap flight, easy connection — makes the Songkhla/Hat Yai area one of the most accessible hidden destinations in Thailand. Yet somehow the foreigners looking for beaches and nightlife keep going to Phuket, Pattaya, and Koh Samui. Their loss.

The bronze mermaid statue at Samila Beach, Songkhla, southern Thailand
The Samila Beach mermaid — Songkhla’s most photographed landmark, sitting between the Gulf of Thailand and the old town.

Songkhla Old Town: The Thailand That History Left Behind

Songkhla’s old town is a Sino-Portuguese neighbourhood of extraordinary character. The architecture is colonial but not colonial in the way that feels like a museum piece. People actually live in these buildings. Shophouses from the early 20th century still function as family businesses on the ground floor with living quarters above. The streets are narrow, tiled, and unhurried.

There is street art in the old town — not the tourist-facing kind you see in every “discovered” neighbourhood in Asia, but work that engages with the specific history and culture of the area. Chinese, Malay, and Thai influences blend here in a way that is genuinely distinct from anything in Bangkok or the north.

A Sino-Portuguese building with red shuttered doors and a moon gate in Songkhla Old Town
Songkhla’s old town — Sino-Portuguese shophouses and walled compounds with families still living above the ground-floor shops.

The food reflects that mix perfectly.

Kung Den: Dancing Shrimps

I ate dancing shrimps in Songkhla. Kung den — live freshwater shrimps, still moving, dressed with fish sauce, lime, garlic, chili, and fresh herbs. You eat them whole. They are still very much alive when they arrive at the table.

Is it confronting? Yes. Is it one of the most intensely fresh, texturally interesting things I have eaten in 21 years of eating Thai food? Also yes. The sweetness of the live shrimp against the acid and heat of the dressing is extraordinary. It is the kind of dish that only makes sense in the place where it was born — a fishing culture on a lake that has been doing this for generations.

A wooden fishing pier and stilt house on Lake Songkhla in southern Thailand
Lake Songkhla — the largest inland body of water in Thailand. The fishing culture here is what makes the local food the local food.

The Ice Festival I Did Not Know Existed

One of the unexpected discoveries was finding an ice festival in southern Thailand. Ice sculptures. In the deep south. Near the equator. It sounds absurd, and it is slightly absurd, and it is also genuinely impressive — the kind of local event that happens because a community decided to do something extraordinary in a place that nobody outside the province was paying attention to.

This is what I mean when I say Thailand still has the capacity to surprise me. You find an ice festival in Songkhla, and it recalibrates everything you thought you knew about the country.

Hat Yai: The City That Southern Thailand Actually Runs On

Hat Yai is not a pretty city. It is a working city — commercial, dense, unfussy. But it has one of the most concentrated food scenes I have encountered in Thailand. The markets start early and run late. Malaysian visitors come specifically to eat, which is always a reliable quality indicator. The diversity of the food — halal southern Thai, Chinese, Malay, Indian — reflects a population that has been mixing cultures for centuries.

The floating market and the night bazaar are worth an evening. The coffee shops — southern Thailand has its own coffee culture, distinct from the Bangkok third-wave scene — are good and cheap.

Why Songkhla Matters: The Bigger Point

Foreigners who visit Thailand tend to converge on a small number of destinations. Chiang Mai. Phuket. Pattaya. Koh Samui. Bangkok. These places are popular because they have invested in the infrastructure of tourism and because the travel industry — guidebooks, booking platforms, Instagram — amplifies existing popularity.

But Thailand is a large, complex, and deeply varied country. Songkhla and Hat Yai are Thai cities that exist for Thais and regional visitors, not for a foreign tourist market. That is, in my experience, exactly where the most authentic and interesting experiences are found.

I went back once more to write about the floods — because that same area, so beautiful and alive during my visit, later experienced serious flooding that I had seen personally in other Thai provinces in 2004 and 2011. The beauty and the vulnerability exist in the same place.

Practical Information: Visiting Songkhla and Hat Yai

  • How to get there: AirAsia Bangkok–Hat Yai, from under 800 THB round trip if booked in advance
  • From Hat Yai to Songkhla: Songthaew (shared minivan) or taxi, 30 minutes, around 200–300 THB
  • Where to stay: Songkhla old town for atmosphere; Hat Yai for convenience and access to more restaurants and transport
  • What to eat: Kung den (dancing shrimps), southern Thai curries, Hat Yai fried chicken (kai tod Hat Yai), khao yam (southern herb rice salad)
  • Best time to visit: November to March — dry season in the south, post-monsoon clarity
  • Budget: Accommodation from 500 THB/night in Songkhla old town. Meals from 50–200 THB per dish. Very affordable.

After 21 years in Thailand, Songkhla gave me back something I had quietly started to lose: the feeling of genuine discovery. That feeling is worth more than most things.

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer, permanent resident of Thailand since 2014, and founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has lived in Thailand continuously since 2006 and writes about travel, culture, and life in Southeast Asia.

I’ve Always Liked Going Where Others Don’t

After 20+ years of independent travel in Asia — from Myanmar with no ATMs to Bhaktapur’s medieval streets to Pokhara’s mountains — this is my honest travel philosophy. Go where others don’t. Stay long enough. Eat on the plastic plates.

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Originally shared on Facebook · September 2025 · 54 reactions — the post that became a travel manifesto

Back in 2009 and 2010, I went to Myanmar when there were no ATMs and you had to bring cash like a drug dealer. I loved it. Bagan was pure magic — thousands of ancient temples spread across a dusty plain, and almost nobody else was there. I explored by car, by bicycle, and one afternoon by horse. I had an old BlackBerry. I had no Instagram. I had just the place and whatever I managed to notice.

When I went to Angkor Wat for the first time in 2005, I was almost alone in the temples at sunrise. When I returned in 2012 — my fifth visit — there were roughly five times as many tourists. The temples were the same. The experience was fundamentally different.

This is the paradox that every traveller who has been at it long enough eventually confronts: the places worth going to are the places before everyone else figures out they are worth going to. And once you have experienced that kind of travel — the unmediated, uncrowded, unfiltered encounter with a place — it becomes very difficult to be satisfied with anything less.

A view of the Mekong River from the Luang Prabang riverbank, framed by leafy branches
The Mekong from a quiet bend outside town — the kind of view you sit with.

My Travel Logic: The Framework

After more than two decades of independent travel in Asia, I have developed a set of preferences that might look contrarian but are really just the result of accumulated experience:

  • Laos: Luang Prabang over Vientiane. Mountains, French bread, the Mekong at dawn.
    • Wat Xieng Thong temple in Luang Prabang, Laos — gold and green Lao Buddhist architecture
    Wat Xieng Thong, Luang Prabang. Two visitors, no tour bus. Mountains, French bread, the Mekong at dawn.
  • Vietnam: Hanoi over Ho Chi Minh City. The food is better, the pace is slower, the history is denser.
  • Bali: Temples and rice terraces, not beach clubs. The beach clubs are fine. The interior is exceptional.
  • Nepal: Pokhara for the mountains, or Bhaktapur for the ancient city. I love Bhaktapur. It is one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Asia and receives a fraction of the attention that Kathmandu does.
  • China: Lijiang or Guilin over Shanghai. Shanghai is impressive. Lijiang is alive in a completely different way.
  • Cambodia: I am not a fan. I have been. Angkor is extraordinary. The rest of the tourist infrastructure around it is not.
  • Phuket: I do not like Phuket. Some beaches are fine. The development has consumed most of what made it worth visiting.
  • Hidden Thailand: Koh Kood, Amphawa, Chiang Dao, Songkhla, Phetchabun. These are the places where Thailand is still recognisably Thai.

I am not saying the famous places are bad. I am saying that if you travel for experience rather than Instagram, you will generally find more of it slightly off the main road.

An empty wooden village restaurant with thatched roof in rural Laos
A working village restaurant in rural Laos at lunchtime — no tourist menu, no English, just lunch.

The Most Memorable Journeys: A Personal List

People sometimes ask for travel recommendations. Here is the honest version: a list of the places and moments that have stayed with me, ordered by when they happened.

  • 2003 — Yangshuo, China. Teaching English in a small town beside the Li River during my Beijing years. The karst landscape at sunset still comes back to me in dreams.
  • 2004 — Koh Chang, Thailand. Before the resort development. Dirt roads, cheap bungalows, no Wi-Fi because Wi-Fi was not yet a thing you expected everywhere.
  • 2005 — Koh Phi Phi, Thailand. Before the current crowds. I will not elaborate because it makes me feel old.
  • 2005 — Siem Reap, Cambodia. Angkor Wat almost alone at sunrise. This remains one of the defining travel experiences of my life.
  • ~2010 — Bagan, Myanmar. No ATMs. No tourists. Three days with a local driver, a bicycle, and the temples. Pure magic.
  • 2011 — Kolkata, India. Not a touristic city in any conventional sense. Overwhelming, chaotic, generous, exhausting, extraordinary.
  • ~2014 — Hoi An, Vietnam. Before it became a lantern-factory tourist town. Still beautiful, but you have to look harder now.
  • 2014 — Lijiang, China. Return to China after a decade. Old town preserved, mountain backdrop, a completely different energy from the coastal cities.
  • 2018 — Okinawa, Japan. Travelled with Nathaon. The food culture is distinct from mainland Japan. The beaches are Caribbean. The people are unhurried.
  • 2018 — Bhaktapur, Nepal. My favourite place in Nepal. An ancient city that functions. Not a preserved ruin — a living medieval city where people go to work and school and worship in buildings that are seven hundred years old.
  • 2022 — Pokhara, Nepal. Lived there for over two months. The mountains, the lake, the momos, the trekking culture, the cost of living. Recalibrated my definition of a good life.

The Villages Where Children Touched Me for Luck

When I lived in China from 2002 to 2004, I often took trips to rural villages where foreign visitors were genuinely rare. Children would touch my arm or my hair because, in some of those communities, it was believed to bring good luck. I was an object of curiosity, not a consumer of an experience designed for me.

That dynamic — being genuinely out of place, genuinely received as a novelty, genuinely encountering something not staged for your benefit — is increasingly difficult to find. The tourism industry has become extraordinarily efficient at packaging authentic-feeling experiences. But the real thing is still there if you go far enough off the package.

The Surabaya Principle

I recently spent time in Surabaya, Indonesia — Indonesia’s second largest city, almost completely absent from the tourist circuit. People ask why go to Surabaya when Bali is right there. The answer is exactly that: Bali is right there, with all the infrastructure and comfort and predictability that implies. Surabaya is something else. Rawer, stranger, more requiring of effort, and consequently more rewarding.

This is not about discomfort for its own sake. It is about the ratio of effort to discovery. In well-developed tourism destinations, the ratio is unfavourable — you do very little and get a pre-packaged version of the place. In less-visited destinations, the ratio inverts. You do a bit more, but what you find is the place itself.

What This Kind of Travel Requires

It requires being comfortable with imperfection. Not every meal will be excellent. Not every hotel will be clean. Not every transport connection will work as scheduled. You need to be able to hold uncertainty without it ruining the trip.

It requires genuine curiosity — not the performance of curiosity for social media, but the actual desire to understand a place and its people on their own terms.

It requires some knowledge. The travellers who get the most from off-the-beaten-path destinations tend to have read something about the history, the culture, the language. You do not need to be an expert. You need to be interested.

And it requires time. The best travel experiences I have had were not the result of efficient itineraries. They were the result of staying long enough in one place that the place stopped performing for me and started just being itself.

If You Travel for Instagram, Absolutely Not

Someone once asked me if going to places like Surabaya or Songkhla or rural Myanmar was worth it. I told them: if you travel for experience, yes. If you travel for Instagram, absolutely not.

The places I value most have terrible lighting for photographs. They have no designated photo spots. The locals do not pose. The food does not come presented on artisanal ceramics with edible flowers. It comes on plastic plates and it is the best thing you have eaten in weeks.

I have 58,000 photographs in my Apple Photos library. Very few of them would perform well on Instagram. Nearly all of them make me genuinely happy when I look at them.

That seems like the right metric to me.

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer and independent traveller who has been living in Southeast Asia since 2006. He has visited over 40 countries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. He is the founder of ThaiLawOnline.com and is based in Cha-Am, Thailand.

The Noisiest Massage in the World: Inside Bangkok’s Bradbury Massage Club

Bradbury Massage Club in Bangkok is unlike anything else — DJs, laser lights, Super Mario, and a surprisingly good massage. Only in Bangkok.

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The Noisiest Massage in the World: Inside Bangkok’s Bradbury Massage Club

There are things that only exist in Bangkok. Not because other cities lack imagination, but because Bangkok operates by its own rules — rules that seem to have been written in a state of beautiful, inspired madness. The Bradbury Massage Club is one of those things.

A friend invited me. “It’s a massage place,” he said. That sentence prepared me for nothing.

The neon-lit drink and food menu at Bradbury Massage Club in Bangkok
The Bradbury menu under UV light — the only massage place in Bangkok where the drinks list reads like a bar and the lighting is calibrated for a club.

What Is Bradbury?

Bradbury — officially styled as 世界最嗨馬殺雞, which translates roughly to “the world’s most exciting massage” — is a massage club in Bangkok unlike anything I have encountered in 20+ years of living in Thailand. I have been to hundreds of massage places in this country. Traditional Thai massage parlours where grandmothers crack every joint in your body with practiced brutality. Hotel spas with whale music and cucumber water. Foot massage shops on Sukhumvit where you watch Netflix on your phone. None of that prepared me for Bradbury.

Bradbury is a massage club where a DJ plays. Where laser lights sweep across the ceiling. Where, at some point during my session, Super Mario appeared — not on a screen, but as a person in a full Super Mario costume — dancing next to my massage table.

I am not making this up.

How It Works

The setup is deceptively normal: you arrive, you choose your massage, you are assigned a therapist. Standard Thai massage protocol. But the room is a club. The music is loud — genuinely loud, the kind of bass you feel in your sternum. The lighting is dynamic. People around you are also getting massages, but the atmosphere is closer to a party than a spa.

This should be chaotic. It is, somehow, not. The massage therapists are professionals. The technique is solid. The experience is just… also accompanied by a light show and a DJ who clearly enjoys his work.

And then Super Mario appeared, and I stopped trying to make sense of it and simply enjoyed the spectacle.

Why Bangkok Does This Better Than Anywhere Else

Bangkok has an exceptional talent for taking any concept and pushing it to an extreme that should not work but absolutely does. Massage, in Thailand, is both ubiquitous and endlessly inventive. You can get a traditional massage from a monk in a temple courtyard. You can get a massage in a pool. You can get a massage while watching a Muay Thai fight. Bradbury simply took the next logical step: what if the massage itself was a night out?

The genius of it is that it removes the po-faced seriousness that sometimes surrounds wellness culture. No one at Bradbury is pretending this is a meditative retreat. It is joyful, loud, slightly absurd, and completely entertaining.

Who Goes to Bradbury?

The crowd is mixed in the best Bangkok way — Thais, expats, tourists who stumbled in and are visibly recalibrating their expectations. The vibe is celebratory. Groups of friends. Couples. Solo adventurers who wanted something different. Nobody looks uncomfortable, which is a testament to how well the concept is executed. It could easily be overwhelming or gimmicky. Instead it is fun.

Should You Go?

Yes. Unambiguously yes. Not because you need a great massage (though the massage is good), but because Bradbury is a genuinely original experience in a city full of them. It is the kind of place that only exists in Bangkok, that requires Bangkok’s specific creative energy and its complete indifference to conventional category boundaries.

When people ask me what to do in Bangkok beyond the temples and the street food, I tell them to find the experiences that could not exist anywhere else. Bradbury is one of those experiences. Loud, strange, entertaining, surprisingly good — and featuring, for reasons never explained, Super Mario.

Time Left Bangkok — Three Dinners with Strangers and What I Learned

Three attempts at the Time Left rotating dinner concept in Bangkok: a Singapore fintech woman, a German life coach, and what the format reveals about how people present themselves.

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I tried Time Left three times. For those who don’t know it: Time Left is a dinner concept where strangers are seated together at long tables, given a set menu, and rotated every fifteen or twenty minutes so you end up talking to most of the room by the end of the night. The idea is that the format makes conversation easier than a dating app. You show up, you eat, you talk, you move.

Being single in Bangkok at my age means you try new things. Dating apps had started to feel like giving the same TED talk to a different stranger every night. Same questions, same answers, same performance. Time Left at least promised something different.

The First Dinner

The venue was a hidden bar in Thonglor, eleventh floor, no sign on the street. You have to know it exists. I took that as a good omen — a place that filters its guests by whether they can find it seemed like a reasonable proxy for people worth talking to.

Hidden bar on the eleventh floor in Thonglor, Bangkok with city view
The eleventh-floor bar with no sign on the street. The kind of place that filters its guests by whether they can find it.

The format works. The forced rotation removes the awkwardness of deciding when to move on from a conversation that has stalled. The bell rings, you thank the person you were talking to, and you slide three seats to the left. No explanation needed, no social negotiation. The structure does the work.

Quiet lounge area with leather chairs and warm lighting in a Bangkok bar
A quiet corner between rounds. The format does the work — the bell rings, you slide three seats to the left.

I spoke with a woman from Singapore who had been in Bangkok for two years working in fintech. We talked for twenty minutes about marketing, then about viral cat videos on TikTok, then somehow ended up discussing whether a law firm could build an audience with cats as its brand animal. I almost said “CatLawOnline” out loud. I did not. The bell rang.

The German Lady

The second dinner. I was seated next to a German woman who introduced herself as a life coach.

I asked — genuinely, with real curiosity and no malice intended — which university gives out life coach diplomas. I still want to know. It seems like relevant information. The academic pathway to becoming a person who coaches other people on their lives is not something I have ever been able to map clearly.

She did not appreciate the question. The conversation lasted approximately four minutes before a silence descended that no amount of food could fill. She was visibly relieved when the bell rang. I was also relieved. I still wait for a satisfying answer to my question.

Spicy spaghetti with shrimp and chili at a Bangkok dinner
Set menu, set place setting. The food is the same for everyone — only the conversation changes.

What the Format Reveals

The interesting thing about Time Left is not who you meet romantically. In three dinners, I did not meet anyone I wanted to see again in that way. What I did find interesting was what the format revealed about how people present themselves when they have fifteen minutes and a stranger across a plate of food.

Some people are remarkably efficient at being themselves in a short time. Within five minutes you know something real about them — not their job title and where they are from, but something that actually matters. Others spend the full fifteen minutes on the surface, delivering their profile as if reading from a dating app bio. A few people, when the bell rings, look slightly surprised — as if the conversation had just started getting somewhere.

The format is a good filter. It is not necessarily a good way to meet a partner, but it is a very efficient way to meet interesting people. Bangkok has more interesting people than most cities its size. The Thonglor and Sathorn and Silom neighbourhoods have layers of expat professionals, creative people, long-term residents with complicated histories, all living overlapping lives in a city that is not easy to navigate socially unless you know where to look.

On Being Single in Bangkok

I have been in Bangkok a long time. Long enough to know that the city’s reputation for easy social connection is complicated. There is a lot of surface availability — bars, apps, social events. Genuine connection is the same work it is everywhere else.

I went to ten dates in 2025. A few second dates. I have not found the right person yet. I say this without drama. Bangkok is a city where you can be very busy and very alone simultaneously. The city does not help you with loneliness — it distracts you from it, which is a different thing.

Time Left does something different. It puts you in a room with strangers who are also, to some degree, looking. That shared acknowledgment makes the whole enterprise slightly more honest than a bar where everyone is pretending they just happened to be there.

I would go again. Probably. Maybe not for the romance, but because a hidden bar on the eleventh floor with no sign and rotating dinner strangers is exactly the kind of thing Bangkok does well when it is trying.

My Nuru Massage Experience in Bangkok (And Yes, It Is Exactly What You Think)

After 20 years in Bangkok, I finally tried a Nuru massage — and posted about it on Facebook to 39 HAHA reactions. Here is the honest account, plus the Bradbury Massage Club where Super Mario showed up mid-session.

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Originally shared on Facebook · Bangkok, Thailand

Let me be honest with you from the start: I have been in Thailand for more than 20 years, I have had more massages than most people have had haircuts, and yet the day I walked into a Nuru massage was the day I genuinely did not know what to expect.

What Is a Nuru Massage, Exactly?

If you are searching for “nuru massage Bangkok” right now, you are probably already curious. Here is the honest breakdown before we get into my personal experience.

A Bangkok massage parlour menu showing prices for Nuru, oil and other special packages
The menu — VIP jacuzzi room, oil special, Nuru special. Bangkok writes its prices on the wall in plain Thai-English so you know exactly what you are signing up for.

A Nuru massage originates from Japan — the word “nuru” (ぬるぬる) means “slippery” in Japanese. It involves a special seaweed-based gel that is completely odourless, colourless, and surprisingly warm when applied to the skin. The therapist uses their entire body to apply pressure and sliding techniques. It is not a traditional Thai massage. It is not a Swedish massage. It is something else entirely.

Is it legal? That is a question worth asking. In Bangkok, like most things, the answer sits somewhere in the grey zone that defines this extraordinary city. There are establishments that offer it as a legitimate body-to-body therapeutic experience. I went to one of those.

Why I Decided to Try It

I have a simple travel philosophy: if something exists, and it is legal, and it does not hurt anyone, try it at least once. I have eaten scorpions in Beijing, fermented shark in Iceland, and dancing shrimps in Songkhla. A Nuru massage felt like the logical next experiment.

Also — and I say this with complete transparency — when you have lived in Bangkok long enough, curiosity stops being something you suppress. It becomes a muscle you exercise. The city rewards the curious.

The Experience: What Actually Happened

I posted about this on Facebook and got 39 reactions, mostly the HAHA emoji — which tells you everything about how my friends received this information.

The session started with a shower (mandatory, hygienic, sensible). The gel was warmed beforehand. The room was clean, dimly lit, and quiet. The therapist was professional — more professional, honestly, than some of the traditional massage shops I have been to on Sukhumvit where someone watches a Korean drama on their phone while working on your shoulders.

The sensation is genuinely unlike anything else. Because the gel removes all friction, your body stops fighting the pressure. Muscles that have been holding tension for years — the kind of tension you stop noticing because it becomes your normal — suddenly have nowhere to hide. It is disorienting at first. Then deeply relaxing.

Did I feel awkward? Yes. For about the first five minutes. Then the professional nature of the interaction took over, and it became simply a very unusual, very effective body experience.

The Bradbury Massage Club: A Different Kind of Bangkok Madness

Around the same time, I also ended up at the Bradbury Massage Club in Bangkok — which I need to describe separately because it is its own category of Bangkok experience.

Imagine: a massage establishment where DJs play. Lasers move across the ceiling. And somewhere in the middle of your session, a man dressed as Super Mario walks in and starts dancing next to you.

I am not making this up. I posted a video. 85 reactions, 7 comments, 3 shares — my friends were equal parts horrified and entertained. The venue is known as 世界最嗨馬殺雞, which roughly translates to “the world’s most exciting massage.” They are not wrong.

Only in Bangkok. That phrase exists for a reason.

And Then There Was the Massage Chair

At some point during my Bangkok years, I also entered into what I can only describe as a committed relationship with a massage chair.

I wrote about it publicly: “It’s official — I’m in a relationship with a massage chair. Yes, you heard that right. This sleek, leather-bound beauty doesn’t argue, doesn’t judge, and knows exactly how to hit all the right spots (literally). She doesn’t complain when I visit daily. 100 baht gives you 50 minutes. She doesn’t roll her eyes when I ask for a little extra pressure.”

My friends thought I was joking. I was only partially joking.

What I Actually Think About Massage Culture in Bangkok

Here is my genuine observation after 20+ years: Bangkok has built an entire parallel economy around human touch, relaxation, and the maintenance of physical wellbeing — and most tourists only ever scratch the surface of it.

The traditional Thai massage (nuad boran) is a UNESCO-listed therapeutic art form. The foot massage on Silom Road at midnight is one of life’s great affordable pleasures. The oil massage in a quiet Thonglor shophouse at 600 baht for two hours is genuine value. And then there is everything else Bangkok quietly offers for those who are curious enough to look.

I have no judgment about any of it. Bangkok is a city that decided decades ago that pleasure and wellness are not things to be ashamed of, and it built an entire infrastructure around that decision. As someone who came from Montreal and spent years in corporate legal environments where the body was essentially an inconvenience you carried your brain around in, I find this refreshing.

Would I Recommend a Nuru Massage?

If you are in Bangkok, curious, and approach new experiences with maturity and openness: yes. Go to a reputable establishment, not a tourist trap. Expect professionalism. Bring your sense of humour.

The most surprising thing about the whole experience was not the massage itself — it was realising that after 20 years in this city, Bangkok still has the capacity to surprise me.

That, more than anything, is why I stay.

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer based in Cha-Am, Thailand, and the founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has lived in Southeast Asia since 2006 and writes about travel, technology, and life in Thailand.