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I was going to thailaind to train for the first time and was unsure where to go. With so much choice I decided to post a thread asking where would be best to go. After a recommendation by Kevin on this forum I decided to just give it a go and visit this gym in Chaing Mai. I messaged the gym and they were really helpful with recommendations for accomodation. Location: The gym is located a few minutes by taxi from Chaing Mai Airport. There is accomodation approximately 100 metres from the gym that is a reasonable price. I stayed in a hotel a bit further away that was right next to the mall. The mall is about a 15 minute walk from the gym and it pretty big. In terms of training it is really easy to get to your accomodation and the gym. The main city is about a 10 minute taxi ride away. Its pretty easy to get around and far less traffic than Bangkok. So if you wanted to live in the city centre and commute to the gym it's easily possible. In terms of things to do in the city there is loads of places to eat and markets seemingly everywhere. Other than that you can look things up in a guidebook for things to do or something. Training: Classes are 7am and 3pm with optional training before this. The classes consist of skipping, pad work, bag work, sparring/clinching. The class is well structured and you are always given something to do. Thailand will often show techniques throughout the session and this knowledge is absolute gold. I also did a few private sessions and got lots of corrections to various techniques but he didn't teach too much so I could retain it. He is an extremely good teacher and would highly recommend private lessons with him. I felt a huge improvement very quickly. It's hard to explain how much my technique improved within a couple of weeks but he managed to improve the fundamentals of pretty much everything I was doing. Thailand is a highly gifted coach and he really cares about everyone in the gym getting better and enjoying training. I cannot recommend this gym highly enough. The vibe at the gym: Everyone here is really friendly. The Thai guys who live at the gym are quite young but this makes no difference, they are technically superb and a lot can be learnt sparring them. The foreign visitors who were also there were all really cool and we all made friends right away. There is absolutely no ego here which was really nice to be a part of. Summary: A highly technical gym conveniently located with a genuinely caring and motivated head coach. Seriously, Thailand is a technical genius. The people at the gym (in my experience) were all friendly which really helps if you're visiting to mainly train as you will be at the gym a lot. There seems to be plenty of fighting opportunities if you want them. I didn't explore this and mainly visited to learn as much as I could. Thanks Kevin for being so active on this forum and making this recommendation.

Yep that makes a lot of sense considering the different perspectives and priorities of the promoters, gamblers, and fighters. Ah yep, by Boran I did just mean anything that would be perceived as being more in line with 'traditional artistic movement' than contemporary muay. I perhaps complicated my question by using 'Boran' given the technical specificity that might suggest, as my main interest was just whether the bonuses had any kind of 'cultural promotion' angle (regardless of how superficial that might actually be) and why I was connecting it to Thai P.E lessons that might have a similar element of drawing upon/constructing that sense of historical connection and identity. Thanks very much for following up on this, though please don't bother digging around for that handbook on my account! Yep, so I'll try (I unfortunately lost a 3 paragraph draft as gmail/doc's autosave as made me complacent with leaving my pc, so attempt #2. P.S. aaaand I wrote more than I intended, apologies). By everyday meanings I mainly mean in contrast with the kind of heavily political and quite abstract analysis that I find Vail gives of Muay Thai as political economy/history (I'm thinking particularly of 'Muay Thai: inventing tradition'), where the focus is on how the fairly poorly documented historic martials arts of Muay in the Thai precursor states came to be understood as distinctly Muay Thai due to conscious efforts by various political elites constructing a nationalist mythology around it as a military defensive art (according to Vail and the Thai scholars he draws on). Rather than this quite historically extended analysis, what I'm interested in are the understandings and meanings at play in Muay Thai as it is instantiated locally, reliably recreated as actual events, e.g. people achieving the doing of Muay Thai. In Bourdieuian terms this something like how the relevant acquired habitus, field, and doxa supervene/coconstitute one another. By 'everyday' I'm also pointing to the ethnomethodological nature of social institutions as a continually ongoing accomplishment of tacit communication and organisation that, remarkably, generates this sense of stable order, normality, and everydayness - Muay Thai, as a combat sport, is very jarring to people who don't understand this order, just as encountering any institutional field for the first time can be (e.g. airport security, a courtroom, a psychiatric ward). By meanings plural, I mean the fantastically dense and rich set of meanings that Muay Thai has: religous, economic, gendered, national, rural-urban relations, not to mention personal and aesthetic meanings in terms of the different kinds of agency one can pursue through it. By performing I mean the way that fighters in Muay Thai acknowledge and represent this dense set of relations through things like the wai khru, ram muay, and of course their muay. Bodies have their own culturally dominant meanings and expectations too of course, and playing with or against these expectations strikes me as being central to how fighters enact their agency and actually 'do' muay thai, such as through fighting with or against the dominant meanings and expectations of your background, gender, body 'type', size etc. I'm drawing on Thi Nguyen's 'Games: agency as art' here and his notion of the aesthetic spaces made by the roles, rules, and values of games as being spaces of possible agency that people can explore (games and play being how we first simulate so many things, like 'defeating' a parent in chess or monopoly, practicing misdirection, deception, observation etc). Nguyen gives his own experience of learning to rock climb as an adult as being the first time he ever felt 'graceful', for instance (Muay, for me is at least, is full of little moments of this where you feel like you just found out a new way you can do something, and so have expanded your possibilities of expression/performance). I imagine gambling likely has these kinds of experience too, though perhaps more cognitive and straightforwardly 'game' like than embodied. Hopefully that kind of makes sense and isn't too laboured. To situate that within the context of my essay, I'm trying to 'show' the sociological basis for what I take to be the particular aesthetic make up of Muay Thai, in terms of its particular judging system and norms of conduct as being reflective of the rich network of social locations and cultural meanings it has historically connected as an institution. I want to note that I'm absolutely not an expert in either the practice of Muay Thai nor Thai culture and that this is a bit of a passion project for me, as I find Muay Thai both fascinating and underresearched, particularly in terms of the kind of mid-level analysis I'm hoping to give. I find the existing literature is kind of frustratingly split between either auto-ethnographies by academics who are more aless just discussing how they experienced it and then using it to talk about their main research interest (usually through being in a western gym) or are very macroscopic in terms of historical political-economic organisation, such as what I've read by Vail and Rennesson (though I haven't read Vail's phd thesis which appears more anthropological).