impulse

To anyone reading this wondering how it's going to go for them: I came in on my 8th visit to Thailand since April this year. Arrived around 5:00 PM yesterday. In the "cattle car" area of immigration, not the special areas. No Queue. Walked right up to one of several IO stations and got stamped in in less than a minute. (American, visa exempt, on a monthly visa run from China) Also noticed the Chinese were pretty much independent travelers, without a flag lady to be seen on the plane.

Staying in China like I do, I get to fly on a lot of flights, BKK to China. And I am amazed at the suitcases full of goodies they haul back with them. My GF used to come with a shopping list from all her friends. She'd shop like a fiend while i was at work. Not to mention the queues at the VAT refund kiosks at the airport. They spend lots of money. Not always on the same stuff we'd buy. But spend, they do. And not all at Chinese owned shops.

Probably some of that going on. But Myanmar seems to have become the go-to country for all kinds of illegal activities. Not hard to believe some folks coming back need to be arrested for cross border scams, drugs, etc. Hopefully, more details will follow. I don't dismiss completely the possibility they were wanted just for getting crosswise with the junta...

Gotta love the way some posters don't mind seeing so many local businesses suffer because they don't like the Chinese. Or the Russians. Or the Indians. Or the...

When you pumped the water from the well, did you put the end of the hose directly into the pond, or did you spray it into the air to aerate it? Depending on a lot of factors, subterranean water can be depleted of oxygen. It gets pulled out of the water to react with the surrounding soils, etc. You can add some back by spraying the water into the air. Edit: I'd still have the water tested on the outside chance you have arsenic or something else in the well water and the dead fish are the canary in your coal mine. Could be a message from Heaven...

I can't take spicy and I do have a problem... Years ago, I forgot which magazine it was that rated Thai Massaman as the best food. They got it right IMO.

Who would have figured that, with so many snouts in the trough, there wouldn't be enough left over for things like development and growth?

Some of us thank you for the heads up, myself included.

Demonstrably untrue. We have a shop here that has sacks of about 20 diffeerent spices, all used in cooking. It's true that a few of them are more widely used though. If you've never been there, I highly recommend a visit to this shop in Chinatown BKK. In the small alley next to the new(ish) Wat Mangkon MRT station. About 50 meters into the alley. Amazing selection of hundreds of spices. I always end up with a dozen or so every time I happen by there. http://www.nguansoon.com/index.php?page=about&lang=_en

Pain mitigation is a great reason to pay whatever the upgrade costs. Knock wood, that's not something I need to worry about. Yet.

I freely admit that I'm a cheap bastard. And when it comes to airfare, I have a hard time ponying up $100 more an hour for a better seat when I remember scooping up dog poop for $2 an hour when I was a kid. It just doesn't seem right to me. (Unless I'm on the company dime and even then I feel a little guilty).

Acknowledging that I don't have a dog in the Euro fight, my question would be, how much extra would Business Class be worth if the choice is Business or Coach? Flying the other way to the USA, the incremental cost of Business per hour is rarely worth it for my cheap self.

I don't know of too many inmates whose untimely death could cause rioting in the streets.

My flights from north China to BKK are also generally full. There's just a lot fewer flights to choose from. I'm wondering how focusing on domestic tourism helps trade balance.

Thanks for the link. I'll watch it when I get to Thailand in a few days, where YouTube isn't blocked. Agree or disagree with the POV, it's pretty useful to understand the come-from of the other side. Edit: That said, sometimes it only takes watching the first 60 seconds to weed it out.

Someone help me out here. Perhaps I missed in in the many threads about illegal imported pork, but I don't recall ever seeing where it's being imported from.

I'm ambivalent about the guy myself, having started working in Thailand after his tenure in power. But spending a few extra baht to make sure he doesn't get (for example) knifed in the shower is probably worth it, just to prevent the mayhem if that were to happen.

Not sure I'd want to attach my dashcam directly to the battery. Mine (and I think all dashcams) record to SD cards with finite capacity. When it's full, the dashcam starts recording over what's already on the SD card. You can only do that so many times before the quality of the recording starts degrading. In fact, I swap in a new SD card about once a year just to make sure the recording quality isn't degraded. And that's driving a few hundred hours a year, with the dashcam turned off when the car's not running- after a buffer period upon shutdown. Connected directly to the battery, it would be recording 8,760 hours a year. Which is do-able, but I'm not sure the image quality would be there after it's been re-recorded so many times. Then, of course, there's the issue of battery drain...

I used COD on my first Lazada order, whereupon I figured out that I'd have to leave work to collect the goodies delivered to my apartment. That became a non-starter. My second (and through hundreds of other) Lazada orders, I paid in advance and never had an issue. Most times, the apartment office allowed Lazada to drop off the pre-paid orders if I was out when they arrived.

Thai PBS is blocked here in China. I wonder what the details are? Is visa exempt travel new for Japanese visitors? Does that mean a Japanese guy can come into Thailand, work at a joint venture factory for 4 weeks without a visa or WP? Or does he still need a WP to work? And is there a limit to the number of 30 day visits a year, or can he stay 28 days on, 7 days off (for example) all year long? Not that it matters to me. Just curious what's coming down the pike...

If you do decide to buy a 2nd hand scooter, of any ilk, there's usually a selection in good condition being sold by foreigners who are picking up sticks and leaving Thailand. As I recall I bought two from Bahtsold ads, one in excellent condition with low miles from a lady who had to leave and was in a hurry to sell, and another thrasher (2 stroke, 50cc POS- not even street legal because of the 50CC) for less than the cost of a pedal bicycle. Just keep your eyes open and don't be in a rush. Someone else may want to chime in with other "For Sale" websites to watch.

To the OP. Please post back with your results and any additional insights you may gain during the process. Thanks, from a lot of us.

Maybe he's down in Hades now and for eternity, getting a daily pineapple enema. What movie was that?

Automatic channels can check fingerprints and/or facial match and simply flag those with a questionable match for human inspection. Probably 1 in 50 ( though that's just a guess) The way I've seen it work is the machine spits out a receipt that I hand to a human. If the receipt says "good to go", it takes 5 seconds of face time. And it's not a bad idea to put eyeballs on each person, if only to see if they're packing 20 pounds of exotic animals in their skivvies. It's been known to happen...

True. My guess is that the ridiculous seeming terms is some kind of atonement on the part of the Brits for perceived past injustices. But I put that forward not because I know, but because I'd be interested in learning more from any Brits that want to set my thinking straight.