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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Noisest Massage Bradbury
Noisest Massage Bradbury
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 in Mandarin 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.

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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.

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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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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.

Nuru Massage Bangkok
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 (I never been to Iceland but that sounded cool), and dancing shrimps in Songkhla (true). A Nuru massage felt like the logical next experiment.

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 (that’s a quality influancer!), mostly the HAHA emoji. That 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 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.

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Usufruct Agreement in Thailand: A Simple Guide for Expats

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Usufruct Agreement in Thailand: A Simple Guide for Expats

A usufruct agreement in Thailand is one of the most powerful legal tools available to foreign nationals who want to secure long-term rights over Thai property without owning the land outright. Governed by Sections 1417–1428 of the Thai Civil and Commercial Code (CCC), usufruct grants the holder the right to use, occupy, and benefit from a property — including collecting any rental income — for a defined period or for life.

Whether you are a retiree seeking a secure home, a foreigner married to a Thai national, or an investor looking to protect your interests, understanding how usufruct works is essential before entering any property arrangement in Thailand.

What Is a Usufruct Under Thai Law?

Under the Thai Civil and Commercial Code, a usufruct (สิทธิอาศัย in broader usage, though more precisely defined under the CCC) gives the usufructuary the right to possess, use, and enjoy the fruits of property belonging to another person. This includes the right to rent out the property and keep the income.

Key characteristics of a Thai usufruct include:

  • Duration: Can be for a fixed term or for the life of the usufructuary. If granted to a company or juristic person, it cannot exceed 30 years.
  • Registration: Must be registered at the Land Department to be legally enforceable against third parties. Without registration, the agreement is only binding between the parties.
  • Non-transferability: A usufruct is a personal right and cannot be transferred, inherited, or sold to a third party — though the usufructuary can lease the property to others.
  • Obligations: The usufructuary must maintain the property in good condition and return it to the owner at the end of the term in the same state as received.

Why Foreigners Use Usufruct in Thailand

Thai law prohibits foreigners from owning land. However, a properly registered usufruct provides a legally recognised alternative that offers significant practical security:

  • Security of tenure: If registered at the Land Department, a usufruct binds any future owner of the land. Even if the Thai landowner sells the property, your rights remain intact.
  • Income generation: Unlike a lease, a usufruct holder may rent out the property and keep the rental income.
  • Long-term protection: A lifetime usufruct provides security for as long as the holder lives, without the need for renewal.
  • Simpler than company structures: Many expats previously used Thai nominee companies to control land, a practice that is legally problematic. A usufruct is a straightforward, legitimate alternative.

How to Register a Usufruct in Thailand

To create a legally binding and enforceable usufruct, the following steps must be followed:

  1. Draft the agreement: A written usufruct contract must be prepared, specifying the parties, the property (with Chanote title deed details), the duration, and any specific conditions.
  2. Attend the Land Department: Both the landowner and the usufructuary must appear in person at the local Land Department office (Samnak Ngan Thi Din) where the property is located.
  3. Pay registration fees: The Land Department charges a registration fee (typically 1% of the assessed value of the usufruct) plus stamp duty. Fees are modest compared to a property purchase.
  4. Annotation on the Chanote: The usufruct is annotated directly onto the title deed, providing public notice and protecting the holder against any future transfers.

Usufruct vs. Lease vs. Superficies: Key Differences

Foreigners in Thailand often confuse usufruct with other property rights. Here is a quick comparison:

RightDurationRental IncomeSurvives Land Sale
UsufructLifetime or fixed (max 30 yr for companies)YesYes (if registered)
Lease (30-year)Max 30 years (renewable)No (lessee cannot sublet without permission)Yes (if registered)
Sap Ing Sith (Superficies)Max 30 years or lifetimeN/A (relates to structures, not land use)Yes (if registered)

For more on the rights of Sap Ing Sith, read our article on Sap Ing Sith in Thailand. If you are considering property investment more broadly, see our guide on rules for foreigners buying condominiums.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Usufruct agreements in Thailand can be misused or poorly drafted. Watch out for these common issues:

  • Not registering the usufruct: An unregistered usufruct is only contractually binding. If the landowner sells the property, the new owner is under no obligation to honour it. Always register.
  • No clear termination clauses: Specify what happens if the landowner dies, if the relationship breaks down, or if the property is damaged. A well-drafted agreement prevents future disputes.
  • Confusing usufruct with ownership: A usufructuary cannot sell, mortgage, or subdivide the land. Any improvements or structures built on the land may revert to the landowner at the end of the term unless otherwise agreed.
  • Using outdated or generic forms: Thai land offices have standard usufruct forms, but a lawyer should tailor the agreement to your specific circumstances.

Tax Implications of a Usufruct in Thailand

Rental income earned by a usufructuary is subject to Thai personal income tax. The applicable rate depends on total annual income and follows the progressive tax scale (0%–35%). In addition, if the rental income exceeds 1.8 million THB per year, VAT registration may be required. For a full breakdown, see our guide to personal income tax in Thailand.

There is no separate usufruct registration tax beyond the Land Department fees. Transfer of ownership of the underlying land by the landowner does not trigger tax obligations for the usufructuary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I put a house on land I hold under usufruct?
Yes, but ownership of the structure is separate from the land. Without a separate agreement (such as a Sap Ing Sith / superficies), the structure may belong to the landowner. Always have a lawyer clarify ownership of improvements in the usufruct contract.

What happens to my usufruct if the landowner dies?
A registered usufruct survives the death of the landowner. The new owner (heir or purchaser) takes the land subject to the existing usufruct.

Can my usufruct be extinguished by court order?
A court can cancel a usufruct if the usufructuary significantly damages the property or otherwise breaches the agreement. This is rare with well-drafted contracts.

External resources: Thai Civil and Commercial Code (English) | ThaiLawOnline.com

Need Legal Advice in Thailand?

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a French-speaking lawyer based in Korat (Nakhon Ratchasima), Thailand, with extensive experience helping expatriates and foreign nationals navigate Thai law. Contact us for a confidential consultation.

Website: sebastienbrousseau.com  |  ThaiLawOnline.com

Frequently Asked Questions About Usufruct Agreements in Thailand

Can a foreigner own land through a usufruct in Thailand?

A usufruct gives a foreigner the right to use and benefit from land for their lifetime or a fixed period (up to 30 years), but does not confer ownership. The land title (Chanote) remains in Thai name. This is one of the legal ways foreigners can secure long-term use rights over Thai land.

How long can a usufruct agreement last in Thailand?

A usufruct can be granted for the lifetime of the usufructuary or for a fixed term not exceeding 30 years. Lifetime usufructs are non-transferable and expire upon the death of the holder.

Does a usufruct need to be registered in Thailand?

Yes. To be legally enforceable against third parties, a usufruct must be registered at the Land Office where the property is located. Unregistered usufructs only bind the original parties and cannot be enforced against future purchasers.

What is the difference between a usufruct and a lease in Thailand?

A lease (up to 30 years, or 50 years for BOI-approved projects) grants the right to occupy and use property. A usufruct grants broader rights including the right to the full use, enjoyment, and fruits (income) of the property. Usufructs can also be for life.

What happens to a usufruct if the landowner sells the property?

If properly registered, the usufruct is binding on any new owner. The new landowner must respect the usufructuary’s rights for the remaining term. This makes registration critical for protecting your investment.

Secure Your Property Rights in Thailand

A poorly drafted usufruct can leave your investment unprotected. Sebastien Brousseau drafts and registers usufruct agreements that stand up legally, clearly define your rights, and protect you if the landowner sells or passes away.

Get expert legal advice: Contact us today for a consultation on securing your property rights in Thailand.

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The Day My Bangkok Tower Swayed — The March 2025 Earthquake

On March 28, 2025, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake centred in Myanmar shook Bangkok. I was on the 43rd floor. This is what it felt like.

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I was on the forty-third floor when it started.

Around 1:30 PM on March 28, 2025, I felt the strongest earthquake I have experienced in my life. I live in a tower that is approximately fifty stories. I was near the top. The building moved in a way that buildings are not supposed to move — a slow, lateral sway that kept going far longer than you expect these things to go.

Bangkok high-rise residential towers seen from a pool deck
The kind of tower the engineering is designed to flex. Watching it move from inside is a different sensation.

What It Felt Like

The first sensation was confusion. Living in a high-rise, you get used to subtle movements — wind loads on the structure, the building settling. What happened on March 28 was not subtle. The sway was wide enough that objects moved on surfaces. I could hear the walls making sounds I did not want to analyse too carefully.

I did not go under a table. I went to the doorframe, which is what you are supposed to do, then immediately questioned whether a doorframe in a fifty-story Bangkok tower was offering me anything structural. It probably was not. But you do the thing you remember from earthquake safety training even when you cannot fully justify it.

The movement lasted approximately ninety seconds. It felt considerably longer.

After

Some residents on the upper floors found they could not open their doors — the building had shifted enough that door frames were no longer quite square. The pool, the onsen, the sauna, and the gym were all closed while the building was inspected. Half the elevators were taken out of service.

Bangkok condominium notice asking residents to inspect their units for earthquake damage
The day-after notice — every Bangkok tower had some version of this.

Someone posted a TikTok video showing my building swaying. I watched it from my apartment. Seeing your building move from the outside while you are inside it is a strange perspective. The tower I live in is the middle one in the video — the slightly yellowish one. It moves. The engineering is designed to allow it to move. That is correct and safe. Knowing this intellectually and watching it happen are different experiences.

Detailed condominium management notice in Thai and English requesting damage reports after Bangkok earthquake
Bilingual damage-report request from building management — the bureaucratic afterlife of a 90-second sway.

The Earthquake

The earthquake was centred in Myanmar — a 7.7 magnitude event near Mandalay on March 28, 2025. It was one of the deadliest earthquakes in Myanmar’s history. The death toll in Myanmar reached into the thousands. Buildings collapsed in Mandalay and surrounding areas.

In Bangkok, the shaking was felt strongly across the city but structural damage was limited mostly to older buildings that were not constructed to the seismic standards introduced after Thailand updated its building codes in the 1990s. The tall modern towers — built with base isolation or designed to flex — performed as designed.

Several buildings in older parts of Bangkok sustained damage. There were deaths and injuries in the city, mostly from falling objects and stairwell accidents during evacuation. The scale of what Bangkok experienced was minor compared to what happened in Myanmar.

What I Did Next

I moved to the coast. Not immediately — I stayed in Bangkok for a few more days while the building was assessed and the facilities were reopened. But the earthquake had done something to my concentration. My working rhythm in the apartment was disrupted. I found myself listening for sounds I had not noticed before. The floor had not moved again but I kept waiting for it to.

This is a normal response. After a significant earthquake, many people experience hypervigilance to building sounds and movements — a kind of sensory recalibration that takes time to settle. Knowing it is normal does not make it less real. After about a week, I needed a new environment to reset my routine. The coast provided it.

On Living High

I chose a high-floor apartment in Bangkok for the view and the relative quiet above the traffic noise. Those reasons have not changed. But March 28 added information to my understanding of what that choice involves. A high floor is further from the ground during a seismic event. The sway at forty-three floors is more pronounced than at ten.

Bangkok is not in a high seismic risk zone by global standards. The March 2025 event was felt strongly because of the alluvial soil beneath the city — Bangkok is built on a thick layer of soft clay that amplifies seismic waves, transmitting energy from distant earthquakes more efficiently than harder ground would. The city has felt earthquakes from Myanmar and the Andaman Sea before. It will feel them again.

I would not move to a lower floor because of this. But I now know what the upper floors feel like when the ground moves, and I understand that knowledge in a way I did not before March 28.

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A Rainy Afternoon at the BACC — Art, Massage, and Cat Videos in Bangkok

A day at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre: contemporary art, a 600 baht Thai massage, three contracts reviewed, and a cat video for a law firm.

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It was raining. Bangkok rain in the afternoon — the kind that arrives without warning and makes the city smell like wet concrete and something floral underneath. I went to the BACC because I was already on the BTS and the rain made the decision for me.

The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is a round building at the Siam intersection, all curved white corridors and open atria, surrounded by a city that does not always know what to do with contemporary art but fills the building anyway because it is free to enter and air-conditioned and there is a coffee shop on the ground floor.

Spiral atrium of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre with golden bird sculpture
The BACC’s spiral ramp from below — escalators, floating bird, and the curved white corridors that anchor the building.

The Art

I walked the spiral ramp that goes from the ground floor to the upper galleries. The current exhibition was Thai contemporary art — large canvases, some installation work, a video piece in a dark room that I watched for six minutes without fully understanding and then found I was thinking about for an hour after I left. That is either good art or I was in a susceptible mood. Probably both.

Golden bird sculpture suspended in the central atrium of BACC Bangkok
The golden bird that hangs in the middle of the building. You walk past it twenty times before you really notice it.

The BACC is not the grand museum that Bangkok deserves and does not yet have. It is a mid-size gallery space with limited permanent collection, running on a combination of municipal funding and commercial tenants on the lower floors. But it is the best contemporary art space in the city and it anchors a neighbourhood — Pathumwan, around the Siam and National Stadium BTS stations — that has become Bangkok’s most interesting cultural district.

Modern stairwell inside the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre
Stairs between gallery floors. The kind of architecture that quietly insists you take your time.

The Massage

After the galleries I found a massage place nearby. Two hours, 600 baht. The therapist’s name was Maii. She worked without speaking, which is my preference — the kind of professional silence that acknowledges you came for the bodywork and not the conversation. Two hours of Thai massage for 600 baht is approximately seventeen dollars. There is a point at which the Bangkok cost-of-living calculation stops making sense and just has to be accepted as a different system of value.

The Work

I had brought my laptop to the coffee shop before the massage. I reviewed three contracts in ninety minutes at a table near the window with the rain still going outside. Twenty to thirty clients at any given time, three contracts reviewed in an afternoon at an art museum cafe. The city keeps moving around the work.

I also made a cat video that day. For a law firm. A client had asked whether we could produce short video content for their social media — something that would make their posts visible in the algorithm. The answer was apparently cats. We made a short video with a cat explaining a legal concept. It worked. The algorithm liked it. Madness works.

What the BACC Area Is

The blocks around BACC — stretching toward MBK on one side and Jim Thompson House on the other — contain a concentration of things that do not usually sit this close together: contemporary art galleries, a major shopping mall, a heritage silk house museum, street food on the canal, the National Stadium, and a series of small independent shops and cafes in the lanes between the main roads.

It is also where Bangkok feels most like a city that contains multitudes simultaneously. You exit the gallery and there is a street vendor selling grilled pork skewers for twenty baht. You turn left and there is a boutique selling handmade ceramics for twelve thousand baht. Both are authentic. The city does not resolve this tension into a coherent aesthetic. It just holds all of it at once.

I walked back to the BTS in the rain that had slowed to a drizzle. I had reviewed contracts, seen art, eaten something, had a two-hour massage, made a cat video, and the day was not yet over. Bangkok days compress differently than days in other cities. More tends to fit in them.

“And parts of me are shrinking,” I wrote in a note that afternoon. I am not entirely sure what I meant. Something about the gap between the life the city offers and the life you are actually managing to live inside it. The art had probably done something to my mood. The massage had loosened something else. Bangkok on a rainy afternoon will do that to you if you let it.

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Hong Kong in Three Days — The City That Never Lets You Rest

Three days in Hong Kong in January 2025. The Monster Building at Quarry Bay, a junk boat on Victoria Harbour, and a city that moves faster than anywhere else on earth.

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Three days. That is how long I had in Hong Kong in January 2025. I knew it wasn’t enough — nobody ever leaves Hong Kong feeling like they saw enough of it. But I also knew I’d seen cities for years, and sometimes three days of total immersion beats two weeks of half-attention.

Hong Kong moves differently from everywhere else in Asia. Faster, louder, more vertical. The moment you step out of the MTR the city is already at full speed. No warming up. No slow mornings. Just this constant, relentless forward motion that somehow never feels hostile — it’s almost exhilarating.

Quarry Bay Monster Building Hong Kong — massive apartment block from below
The Monster Building at Quarry Bay — officially Westlands Gardens, informally one of the most photographed buildings in the world.

My first full day I went to Quarry Bay to see the Monster Building. I had seen photos of it for years — those five massive residential towers packed together so tightly they look like one single organism, windows and air conditioners stacked thirty stories high, laundry hanging from balconies on every floor. Standing underneath it in real life is something else. The scale is almost incomprehensible. You crane your neck back and the building just keeps going.

The official name is Westlands Gardens but nobody calls it that. The Monster Building became famous partly through architecture photography, partly through its appearance in Transformers: Age of Extinction, and partly because Instagram discovered it and turned it into a pilgrimage site. On the day I visited there were photographers everywhere — a Korean couple with a tripod, a French guy doing long exposures, a local kid with a film camera. Everyone making their version of the same image.

Sebastien Brousseau selfie at the Monster Building Quarry Bay Hong Kong January 2025
January 8, 2025 — under the Monster Building. The building fills the entire sky behind you.

What strikes you most is not the size but the life inside it. Real people actually live in those apartments. You can see them — someone cooking, someone watching TV through a window, laundry on every balcony. It is not a ruin or a monument. It is a working building full of working people who have simply gotten used to their home being one of the most photographed places on earth. I wonder how they feel about that.

The food in Hong Kong surprised me. I had eaten Cantonese food in Thailand and across Southeast Asia, but the real thing is on another level. Dim sum in the morning from a place that has been open since before I was born, char siu bao that actually tastes like something, wonton noodle soup at a counter with twelve seats and a line out the door. Hong Kong has this particular pride in its food that you feel in every bite — like they are daring you to find better.

On my last day I took a junk boat across Victoria Harbour. I had never done it before and it turned out to be the best decision of the trip. From the water the city looked completely different — the skyline stretching the full length of the horizon, the IFC Tower rising above everything, the mountains behind Kowloon turning purple in the afternoon haze. Hong Kong from the water is a city that is impossible to comprehend all at once. You just sit on the boat and let it happen to you.

Traditional red junk boat on Victoria Harbour with Hong Kong skyline and IFC Tower
A traditional junk boat on Victoria Harbour — the Hong Kong skyline and IFC Tower behind, mountains of Kowloon further back.

There is a thing people say about Hong Kong — that it is caught between two worlds, neither fully Chinese nor fully Western, and that this ambiguity is what makes it interesting. I do not know if that framing is right or fair. What I know is that the city feels singular. There is nowhere else like it. The density, the efficiency, the food, the harbour, the way twelve million different things seem to be happening simultaneously in every direction — it is a city that refuses to be summarized.

Three days is not enough. But then, neither is a month. Some cities you visit and then you understand them. Hong Kong you visit and then you realize you need to come back.

I am already planning the return.

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