Shah Jahan

Actually the cheapest way hands down to call overseas is to get a decent internet connection and download Yahoo Voice/Messenger

I use it form my 1mps/512 dsl and i get perfect call quality to US for 1 cents a minute

Hi all,

I was at my gf's friends wedding the other day. it was a nice day out but unfortunatly late afternoon at the reception after drinking a couple bottles of the 'vino tinto' i got sick over my new suit and a little over my gf's blouse.

Needless to say it is now heavily stained with a reddish hue (its a cream colored suit )

anyhow, anyone got any tips how to remove a large red wine stain. ( my gf is not returning my calls since the incident )

thanks in advance for info

check into a 4 star business hotel for 2000 baht a night and give it to them to clean....

Its intresting going into the Warm up, because as Falang we are used to places where they treat us as something special because we are different. There on Nimehamihn, we are just another dude trying to get laid. The formula for getting your rocks off generally works like this

1. you go in and stand around and nobody talks to you.

2. some thai university boy with a funny haircut decides you will be his friend and parades you around as his pet falang and introduces you to his friends.

3. one of the girls in his group decides she likes you and harmlessly flirts and dances with you as you buy the table drinks

4. at the end of the night, despite your insistence she wont go home and sleep with you, but rather gives her phone number and tells you to call tomorrow

5. you go home, rub one out and call her the next day. you agree to meet for dinner at some place by the river that is fairly nice, but not to public either. she keeps drinking until she relaxes a bit and follows you back to your hotel/apartment without a word.

6. you have semi-passionate condom sex, then she goes home and writes in her diary that she slept with her first falang and you never hear from her again

sometimes its just either to goto spicy with a thousand baht in your front pocket.....

she is either pregnant or her ex-boyfriend called her and she forgot her job (you)

go get her a pregnancy test. if she has a baby then you know

if the pregnancy test comes out negative then take her cell phone when she isnt looking and throw it in the river

when she asks what happened to her cell phone just play dumb and offer to buy her a new one.

that should solve the problem without having to raise your voice or confront

10 baht.

I wouldn't even let the boyfriend come on the same street that we live on, and if you see him throw rocks.

If she wants to see him make her walk to the highway, and then think twice about letting her come back on the property

but really why let her have an outside boyfriend?

just do as a Thai man would do.....

There seems to be much resentment against the Limo guys by the rest of airport inhabitants... every time I arrive I am accosted by the touts and simply point towards the downstairs taxis with my finger.

On a few occasions another thai person watching this exchange has given me the thumbs up and expressed that those 'Limo people' are no good 'Jai Dam'

having the limos like this also causes resentment among the Taxi drivers who will then try to rip off the tourists with the mentality that

"if those Limo guys get 800 baht' why shouldn't I?

the AOT wireless connection is free and works fairly well despite having a problem with VPN's

if you have a 12-call Sim card

you can connect to the AIS Hotspot and SMS for your free password as well

as for other airports, sitting outside 1st class lounges usually does the trick if you need a signal

I commute to almost every country in Asia and sometimes the US. I live in the north am gone from home approx %50 of the time but never gone for more than 2 weeks at a time.

Yeah their site is a mess - it seems to work best with IE (Internet Explorer)- I normally use firefox and it doesn't seem to like that

Buying land for your Thai boyfriend is about equivalent to placing an envelope filled with money on a small bonfire.

If you do decide to do it, better to think of it as a donation/payment for his services and that you have no attachment to the land. Anything else would just be trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it.

Anyone travelled in Kashmir lately? Out of Srinigar - is it safe-ish for travellers yet?

i was in Srinigar two years ago

took a bus in from Punjab and then a 2 day car ride out to Leh Ladakh

physically i felt very safe - never felt in any danger - however those kasmiries are relentless with their barginning/hustling

I stayed on Dal lake, though I heard Lake Nageen is a nice quiet getaway

if i have a AIS prepaid card and travelled overseas, will i be able to send smses and make calls back to thailand? and if yes, how much would it cost?

thanks!

I have roamed in Korea and US with AIS prepaid. I could do SMS and get calls in and out no problem - they charged somewhere around 4o baht a minute for calls in or out

If you need your phone filled up when out roaming you need to have somebody in thailand do it by them dialing

*130 becuae you cant recharge from your phone when roaming

I have to buy several baht of gold (getting married), and have several questions that I hope the experts on TV can answer. In no particular order:

1. What is the current cost of a baht of gold (and where can I find it on-line for future reference)?

2. Is the cost inclusive of tax and VAT, (or can tax and VAT be avoided)?

3. Where is th best place to buy in Bangkok (I heard that the shops in MBK will rip you off)?.

4. Is it cheaper to buy gold up country?

5. Is it possible to get a better price if you are buying more, i.e., 7 baht as opposed to 1?

6. If you use a credit card is there an additional fee, and if so can that be avoided?

7. Is there a discount for a cash transaction?

8. Does the craftsmanship of the gold result in a difference in price, or is it sold strictly by weight?

9. Are certain shops certified or regulated by the government to avoid ripping off the tourists?

While I have many questions, this is a good start. As stated, I am getting married to a wonderful Thai woman (and the fiancée wants gold as opposed to a big diamond ring). I think that several baht of gold will be far less expensive so I am relatively happy about this (in the states I would have probably had to pay almost two months salary for a ring according to the women I know).

Gold is a commodity - just like putting money in the back - in Thailand there is nothing sentimental about it - its just like giving your wife a savings bond that she can cash in at anytime. understand that when you buy somebody gold in LOS, you are essentially giving them a pile of cash to wear around their neck.

1. check BKK post http://www.bangkokpost.com/ for current rate - shops will have 3 different rates- buy rate, sell rate and buy back rate(if you bought it there

2. I never heard about tax or VAT on gold - if there is then its included (or maybe its cause i live upcountry...)

3. Cheapest place is the one with the best rates posted -

4. it is a commodity

5. not really

6. Usally they charge %3 on all CC transactions in LOS

7. The posted price is for cash

8. NO weight only

9. If you do go to a 'regualted' government store you are sure to be ripped off. Better to goto one of the Red walled chinese gold shops - they are all pretty much the same

They did this S**T in pai after having the hotsprings free for years. What actually happened was that the man in change in BKK petitioned to have the Thaepe Hot Springs annexed into Huai Nam Dang National Park so that his office could apply an entrance fee. So suddenly one day it was 20b for thai and 400b for whitey.

this is a place where tourists and locals go to bathe everyday. Well what ended up happening is all the local falang organized and refused to pay and started sneaking in, then they started doing Ghandi protests where they parked their motorbikes on the outskirts and calmly walked into the gates and went to bathe while ignoring the curses and shouting of the guards.

the funniest thing was when they shouted that they would call the police

i would love to see the police get off their butts to drive 10km to respond to a call of a falang refusing to pay 400b to get into the always free hotsprings

in other cases there were verbal confrontations and even a physical confrontation where the guard involved was never seen again. (not good face to assault a falang backpacker)

well eventually the people that ran the hot springs on a day to day basis called a truce and kept trying to charge the fee, but locals or people who put up a fuss, they just started ignoring.

but its still not good for tourism - because all the tourists will still have to pay the fee to get in and approx %90 of them turn right around and dont enter with a crappy feeling in their stomachs. Way to kill tourism guys.

Depends if 'impounded' means stored or used by the MiB for 3 years until its no longer worth driving..

Definately needs looking at.. But 140k for a 4 door 4x4 is under value..

One thing I am thinking is if he only had 140k left to pay on it, it must have been a few years old at time of impound ?? Wheres it impounded ??

from my understanding it was less than 6 months old when it was impounded by the police. He has paid almost cash for it and left a small amount to be paid on credit - it has been in 'police impoundment' for the past 3 years. 3 years in police custody for a truck can mean anything, and i doubt that it has just been sitting under a cover in the police yard. Even if the police chief gave it to his wives little brother to haul garlic for a few years, still a 4 door 4x4 for 140k may be a good deal and we could even flip it fast

It is somewhere in Chiang Mai and we have the letter they sent, and my wife spent over an hour calling yesterday and still couldn't figure out exactly where it was or how to get to it as she kept getting the Thai telephone shuffle-around

we will try again on monday

about 3 years ago my wifes sisters husband was thrown in jail for a very long time - before this happened he had purchased a Toyata 4x4 4 door and paid off all but 140k. (700k new i think)

We have just got a letter from the bank telling us if we want the truck we just have to pay 140k and it is ours (its in the sisters name). Right now we cannot see the truck as it is far away and it has been in police impound for the last 3 years just having been released back to the loan company.

Does anybody know exactly what happens to these trucks when they are in police impound.

Basicly I can have the truck for 140k, but what i want to know is if this is even worth it, or is it just a a big can of monkies?

If it would give them any 'advantage' NOT to steal your ideas then they wont.

however if they liked your ideas and we not bound to you to implement them - of course they would borrow them.

So unless you can hold them hostage, dont tell them

We just had a baby last month in CM and the doctor told us that if my wife and I weren't married then the baby couldn't have my surname. But it may differ for hospital to hospital doctor to doctor

Fat farang tourists contribute much more to the Thai economy than some scrawny backpacker....

Yeah, but don't forget, it's the scrawny backpacker that has the verve to write all those travel books on Thailand; which find their way into the suitcases (and more backpacks) of the 20-somethings and 30-somethings party crowd who unload their dollars and pounds at The Full Moon Party and Bangkok's Discos; who, eventually, when they finally turn 40 & 50, find the BG of their choice, settle down on some Isaan rice farm, pouring their fat retirement/welfare check into the local economy (consisting of 3 beers a night, and a 50-baht movie ticket once a month).

THAT's the fat, balding farang, who thinks he can live it up for a few hours on his once-a-decade flight to the home country to renew his passport.

But remember, it all started with the scrawny backpacker.

So there.

The backpackers who enjoy their stay also return for their honeymoon, family holidays, business trips, and when their wife finally gets the brains to dump them because their lack of social skills leads them to refer to women as "fat cows", they return again and blame western women for their woes.

Actually i came to thailand as a dirty backpacker, doing 30 day visa runs for years, having no money in my pockets and liked it so much that i stayed and now i drop at least 100k every month into the Thai economy for my various enterprises.

but anyways back to stewardess. I routinely commute from CNX-BKK and can afford to fly Thai Airways no problem, but choose to fly Nok because they are so much nicer and younger and prettier and have nice white skin and are happy to see me.

And not to mention that Thai Airways flight are normally filled with a bunch of sweaty red faced falang with uncovered shoulders and un-powdered armpits, here on a 1 week holiday, being corralled by a bunch of tired looking and jaded 40+ stewardess.

the 'bribe' will actually be used to pay off somebodies else's unpaid telephone bill and then you get their line. If you dont do it this way, you need to get in the queue and just forget about it.

On a side note, if you ask nicely TOT will install a DSL line in your house even if their are no phone lines available.

This is what happened where I lived, I asked for a phone line and they told me it may take many months. I then asked for DSL and they installed the lines and cables to my house for about 4000 baht and I had DSl up and running within a week

Dress and behave clean and polite. If they accost you be very polite and dumb. if they ask you where you are going tell them where you are coming from. Pretend like you are French and dont speak good English but still be polite. They will try to avoid a confrontation that will arise because you cannot communicate and allow you to pass.

^ But useful advice, surely, from Shah Jahan nonetheless.

But however, and absolutely disgusting way to describe a woman no matter what she does for a living.

It might be acceptable to refer to woman like in the States or wherever but not in thaivisa.com

maybe its a difference in language as there are many sensitive Europeans on this board

anyways, i will respect the sensitive feminist aspect of this forum and in the future i will refer to these women as 'prostitutes' or 'individuals who exchange sexual and/or emotional favors for cash, gifts, gold and 12call top up cards'

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I have found that you can get away with alot if you stay on the other side of the tracks as your wifes crew. So if your wife has friends or relatives who work Nana, Soi, pattaya or falangs in general then if you go to any place catering to falang, you will be spotted and reported.

however if you go to one of the places on rachada - the places where Asian men go....the pick a number fishbowl places or massage parlor where they only see a few falang a month if that, then you can get away with alot more as the white skin ho's (ones catering to Asian men) dont mix so much with the dark skin ho's (ones catering to falang)

and if you go to one of these places catering to asian men, none of the girls will know you, but if you give them your real name and details then you are in danger...better to just be a 'David from Canada' or something like that

But - 5 children missing after being abducted by a white van is ANYTHING BUT a rumor. Such a thing is an obvious fact that anyone who cares to check can verify, it's not some sort of nefarious rumor.

Tell us the source of this 'obvious fact' and I will do some fact-checking myself.

last night in Pai the police set up a roadblock on the outskirts and were checking cars, trucks and vans. They shined their flashlights on the floor and said they were looking for 'missing people'

everything else can be considered hersey, but this is a fact

In my experience, Nok Air and China Airlines have the best looking Air Hostesses hands down.

and besides that they are much more pleasant to be around and seem happy in their jobs

(Thai Airways....no comment.)

what about other airlines around Asia, who has the nicest goods?