cooked

I brought my Almera home yesterday and discovered that my usual filling station only has gasohol 95. The lady that handed the car over to us told us not to use gasohol 95, but 91, as this would damage the engine. Is this correct? It is not always easy to find 91 apparently, so I am interested in the opinions of you guys.

Thanks.

The koi's u see for alot of money dont come from thailand, here in buriram u can buy a 2 kg koi for 30 bath, so i dont think its a good way of making money, there are better aquarium / ornamental fish to be bred, giant siam carp, julien golden carp, red tail catfish, alligator gars, arapaima etc..

Well none of the Koi come from Thailand originally, but they do well here and people do breed them here. In fact last time I asked about koi in a shop the lady had expensive ones from Thailand and really expensive ones from Japan. Never seen a koi go for less than 100 baht a fish though, your Buriram fish must be goldfish.

You are right, that there are a lot of ornamentals that can be raised here. What i need is some inside info. Thailand is one of world leaders in providing fish for the aquarium industry. What I would love would be an opportunity to talk to a wholesaler and find out some facts.

We bought some very nice smallish Koi for ฿25.- in Buriram, now 6 or 7 inches long. Transporting live fish to Europe must cost a fortune. I heard that certain patterns (heart shape on the head, for instance) were going for thousands of Euros in Switzerland and America.

He's looking a bit older than last time I met him. Don't look such a tough guy now, how can he do thus without being sorted out by the big boys?

My wife, ex-(we think) marriage broker still gets telephone calls, gets stopped on the street asking her to 'get them a Farang'.

Meaning money.

I see these girls going to market on the train every day with stuff from their gardens or picked in the hedgerows/fields, and sometimes come back with all their produce unsold or ฿40.-. They all have a Thai husband, maybe a kid or two, sometimes it is he that pushes the lady to get a Farang, a lot have done Pattaya?Phuket/Bangkok and come back with diseases and/or babies. They like the idea of combining sex with money making, so marriage with an old guy isn't likely to last long, we have seen girls splitting up after 3 days of foreplay and no nitty gritty.

You want to find a good lady? Put 'big heart, small wallet' on your dating site profile, that's what I did after getting so much contact from 19 year old massage specialists.

I believe that their exists a law requiring Farangs to report to the police station every year. So if you don't go they are entitled to come see you. I may be wrong.

I have had two visits from Nissan reps since I ordered a car, they looked around the house and took photographs. You get used to it.

Nissan reps?

You let people look around your house and take pictures?

Please clarify before I say something I'll regret ....

They are checking if I am worthy of credit. If I want the car, I go through with it. What did you expect me to do, make them sit down on the grass?

I believe that their exists a law requiring Farangs to report to the police station every year. So if you don't go they are entitled to come see you. I may be wrong.

I have had two visits from Nissan reps since I ordered a car, they looked around the house and took photographs. You get used to it.

You should have clarified that by saying that they say "you speak very good Thai" in English! Like most people who speak reasonable Thai I almost give up speaking the language. Certainly in places like decent hotels and with airline staff, they really hate you to speak thai with them. Black canyon and the likes is usually ok though! I can read and write and have been able to speak thai for well over 12 years and yet I never get fluent. I can understand almost anything but not if they speak fast. Ask them to repeat a sentence is like asking them to fart. Just so frustrating.

I think it depends on your Thai ability whether or not Thai people in good hotels etc want to speak with you. I agree they want to show off their English skills if they have them. I am the same with Thais who want to speak English but they can't speak well, I'd rather talk in Thai. I got security cameras in my house yesterday and the guy who installing them was determined to explain things to me in English. I had to tell him to stop and speak Thai as I couldn't understand him.

Doctors are the worst at speaking Thai to foreigners who can speak Thai. It's a face or ego thing. Once at Bamrungrad before my wife was giving birth, the doctor spoke to me in English and I translated to Thai for my wife. My wife spoke to the doctor in Thai and the doctor translated for me in English. The doctor spoke Thai to my wife then I'd say something in Thai to him and he'd reply in ENglish then have to translate for my wife, I spoke to the doctor in English and Thai, I spoke only Thai to my wife, man was it frustrating.

I find that it an elementary courtesy to make an effort to speak the other guy's language, as he should be doing also. You speak Thai, he speaks English.

I moved to Switzerland at the age of 24 and found out all about racism. I reserve the right to talk about different peoples in racist terms, but I am not obsessed about it. As an employer I got to the point that I was asking which part of Portugal or Spain people came from, some regions were populated by stubborn, lazy and unfriendly people. You get like that after a bit, it makes life easier for you even though you may be causing injustice to some.

At home?

The floors in public toilets are generally being cleaned all the time. Looking above floor level things are often looking as though nobody has touched things (no naughty jokes please) since they were opened. No way will I touch anything, apart from myself, like taps, flush levers or door knobs. I use my elbows and my feet a bit.

I am talking as someone who got the romantic job of lifesaver and found out that a large part of the job was cleaning toilets.

IMO you can 'get by' with a few hundred words in any language. Understanding what is being said is generally easier, as long as you are alert. When I am tired or drunk, I understand almost nothing, at other times I suddenly latch on to what is being said and can follow up to a point. From previous experience learning French and German however, this can frequently lead you up the wrong path.

I agree that being able to read is important. One guy I know still can't work out which pump is the diesel pump, could get him into trouble one day. Traffic signs, (exit, entrance...), local tourist destinations that are often written only in Thai, menus... I can read a lot more than I can write and a hell of a lot more than I can write.

My best teacher is our 7 year old little girl.

I think there may be other areas in transport that should be looked at first, such as law enforcement, constructing roads that don't fall apart after 18 months, possibly lining minibus drivers up against a wall and shooting them 'to encourage the others'.

If the staff are not aware of this, you can shop around the airport for the cheapest possible flight out of Thailand (Phnom Penh probably).

I read a few times on TV that one can stay for free at temples.

Might give that a try.

Get back to us and confirm.

You can indeed, at least around here in Isaan. Sleeping outside I imagine, but under a roof. For food, you get what is left over after the monks have finished eating. I have heard of mothers with kids doing this. How long you can do this for I don't know.

I will buy 5 packs of Chang beer and make sure the fridge is full. No car diving in this period either.

The term 'damp proof course' comes to mind.

I was told to go to Immigration to get a certificate of my place of residence. I paid ฿500.- plus 4 hours drive for this piece of paper but then all was ok. Just do what they tell you...

I plan on selling my Almera after 5 years, which will presumably get me far more than the 25% of new price as deposit that I am paying now. I will be seventy then so that will then probably be my last car.

Whew, took some reading to get through that lot, some sensible comments and some ridiculous ones, conspiracy theorists get everywhere these days, I wouldn't let my daughter marry one.

Anyway, my views on Thai food have changed radically since I got here. Shrimps and prawns: raised artificially, subject to decimating diseases that need heavy doses of antibiotics to fight off.

Vegetables: I can just about manage avoiding the use of chemicals in my own garden using traditional treatments. However as I water every day these products get washed off.

I did buy some weed killer once and had GREAT difficulties finding a measuring cylinder, 'Farang fussy' I was told. Out in the field even the small peasant doesn't spare with spraying chemicals, I have seen and smelt this regularly, and you can't blame them, they don't want to see months of hard work disappear overnight. However, even if they had a measuring device that they were capable of using, they go for three or four times the recommended dosage.

Fish: fresh water fish from small farmers is generally ok, but even here run off from the heavily fertilised and sprayed rice fields supplies the water that they live in.

Sea fish: the Gulf of Thailand is heavily polluted and overfished, the Pacific will soon be full of Caesium 137 thanks to Fukoshima http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HStCM2l83Cc.

Chicken: only thing that we eat with confidence, as we have our own. As mentioned above, our fish is not above reproach.

Cooking oil: a lot of the cooking oil, at least in Bangkok on the street, is recycled, bought from restaurants and treated with bleach. There's a guy that buys it for converting into a diesl substitute but he's not making much impression on the street level vendors. http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?43618-FDA-warns-of-used-cooking-oil

The school shop where we take our little girl every day is full of junk, either over salted or over sugared. Outside on the street it is even worse, full of brightly coloured sugary mysterious stuff.

If we do go buy stuff at the market, my wife buys stuff with flies milling around as this hasn't been recently sprayed! Anyway no serious food poisoning up to now unless you count beer.

The remarks about poor people being forced to buy preprepared junk food isn't really true; I spent a miserable two years on low income after an accident and started buying fresh produce, making my own beer and bread, preserves and cakes, muesli and sauerkraut. Generally only one emergency tin of food in the cupboard.

Anyway: as long as you mix your diet, exercise, get plenty of sex and stop worrying about your food too much I reckon we should be ok as far as health is concerned.

Edit: beer: I once read that people that drink beer have an increased risk of bowel cancer. The following week, same newspaper: beer drinkers have less risk of heart disease. Stop worrying!

Cialis will probably be more what you need.

The more you fail at the task, the more you lose confidence and almost expect it to happen. Been there, done that. An easy, relaxed approach helps ok, my wife got me through my crisis of nerves when we first got together, ok now.

We had a rule at home, that the kids speak Swiss German with their mother (their mother tongue, very important) and English with me. When we moved to the French part of Switzerland later, the dinner table got tri- and occasionally quadrilingual. Both sons have good jobs in part because they are so polyglot, don't worry about the age, just do it. I am sure the OP would pick up his Portuguese and Spanish very quickly if he needed to.

However in my personal experience I don't think that having too many languages milling about in the speech centre of your brain is good for you, there is only so much room in there for goodness' sakes!

Weird how this stuff comes down the grapevine... the neighbour just came in and told us 20 people were dead in a coach crash near Kanchanaburi.

I'm not a big motor expert although I have been driving accident free for 40 years now. Reading the above posts it seems to me that the best solution is to buy a new car and resell it after 5 years? I had been planning on doing this any way but had never thought about the insurance side of things. Either that or buy a wreck and drive/thrash it into the ground?

Sorry to pose this question: have you been in Thailand for a long time? I have become used to this stuff but I know that when I started visiting I was a bit taken about by this attitude. It all fits in with the Thai way of life and thinking about life, takes some time to 'get it'.