Friday 22 May 2026

Good morning Bangkok. Happy Friday.

🌡️ Weather: 29-35°C (84-95°F). Hot through the afternoon with possible isolated thundershowers. TMD forecasts a drier stretch for Bangkok through the weekend before rain returns next week. Good evening to be outside.

🌫️ AQI: 70-151 (Moderate to Unhealthy). Wide range. At the lower end, genuinely decent air. At the upper end, mask recommended. Check your local sensor, particularly if you are planning an evening out.

Manchester City drew at Bournemouth on Wednesday, and with that result, Arsenal sealed the 2025/26 Premier League title, ending a 22-year wait that stretches all the way back to the Invincibles of 2003/04. For a club that spent the better part of two decades watching Chelsea, City and Liverpool pass them by, the confirmation felt less like a celebration and more like the release of pressure that had been building since Mikel Arteta took charge and began the rebuild. The title was won through consistency rather than spectacle, with Arsenal's defensive record and set-piece efficiency carrying them through a season where City's dominance finally cracked.

For Bangkok, the timing matters. The city has one of the largest concentrations of Premier League fans in Asia, and the expat pub scene on Sukhumvit, Silom and across the city is built around English football weekends. Arsenal's fanbase in Bangkok is deep and vocal, and the pubs that cater to them will be packed from Friday evening through Sunday. If you support Arsenal, this is your weekend. If you don't, avoid the sports bars unless you enjoy being outnumbered by people in red who have been waiting 22 years to feel exactly this way. The celebrations have started and they will not be quiet.

Bottom Line: Congratulations to every Arsenal supporter in Bangkok. It has been a very long time. Enjoy it. The rest of us will be listening from the next bar over.

"She wasn't careless," Alin says of his grandmother. "If someone tried to trick her face-to-face, she would be quick to identify it. But online scams work differently. They manipulate trust, kindness, and unfamiliarity with technology." That near-miss became the starting point for WhosSafe, a community initiative that has now reached more than 300 elderly people across rural Thailand through hands-on workshops teaching them to recognize and resist digital fraud. Alin secured a partnership with Whoscall, one of Southeast Asia's leading scam-detection platforms, to provide free app subscriptions to every workshop participant. He then built FraudGuard, a companion app that simulates real scam scenarios, fake SMS messages, suspicious links, impersonation attempts, in a consequence-free environment where participants can practice making mistakes without losing anything. "Even if they understand the information, they need to be able to put it into practice," he says. "FraudGuard lets them make mistakes where the cost is not as high as it would be in a real scenario.

But scam protection was only the beginning. When Alin's grandmother later underwent knee surgery, he watched her skip rehabilitation exercises at home because of the pain, and identified what he calls "the 99 per cent problem": almost all post-surgical recovery happens at home, unsupervised, yet the healthcare system focuses its attention on the brief clinical visits. His response was a wearable rehabilitation tracker using dual IMU motion sensors that monitors patient movement over seven-day cycles and feeds data back to physicians through a companion app. The project earned second place at the MIT Media Lab Visionary Pitching Competition. He then co-founded Sudor, a concept for a low-cost, non-invasive glucose monitor that reached the global Top 30 out of more than 23,000 entries in the Blue Ocean Competition. Across everything, his three consecutive Thai National Robotics Championships as team captain of Steel Panthers 8861A, his MIT recognition, his community workshops, the philosophy stays the same: "I do not want technology to only be advanced or impressive. I want it to be practical, affordable, and useful to communities in need."

Bottom Line: Thailand lost ฿115.3 billion to scams in 2025. Elderly residents are among the most targeted. A 16-year-old in Bangkok looked at that problem, started with his own grandmother, and has now taught 300 people to protect themselves. The technology is real. The impact is measurable. And Alin is 16, which means the best of what he builds is still ahead of him.

The Crimson Room is the kind of bar that makes you wonder why you have been spending Friday nights anywhere else. The space is a jazz, blues and soul cocktail lounge with live bands playing every night, and the difference between this and most live music bars in Bangkok is that the room was specifically built for sound. The acoustic design is deliberate, the result being that when the band plays, you hear the music rather than the room's air conditioning fighting the bass. The decor is elegantly swanky without tipping into costume: think low lighting, rich tones, the kind of interior that makes everyone at the bar look slightly better than they did when they walked in. The cocktails are genuinely good, crafted with the same attention the venue gives to its music programming. The bands rotate across jazz, blues and soul, and the quality is consistently high enough that you can walk in on any given Friday without checking the lineup and trust the evening to find its shape. For a Friday night when you want something that feels like an event without requiring a plan, a reservation or a dress code strategy, The Crimson Room is the call. The atmosphere builds naturally from around 8PM, and by 10PM on a Friday the room is exactly where it should be.

TIP: Arrive by 8PM for a good seat near the stage. The sound is best from the middle of the room rather than the sides. Friday and Saturday open until 1:30AM. With 4.4 stars on Google with 576 reviews if you like live music it’s worth checking out.

Have a great weekend, and see you tomorrow morning.

— Devon