ollylama

Anyone know a place in Chiang Mai that can etch a drinking glass? There's a couple of threads on this but they all lead nowhere.

This old 2018 thread suggests a place but lacks clear directions. 

sorry about that. already pmed.

sounds great. i'll almost surely buy them. where are you located?

Where is the best place to buy a set of dumbells in Chiang Mai? They seem uniformly overpriced here. I need each one to be adjustable and come with at least 12kg of weights each. Thanks.

Thanks for the website. Which of these would you recommend? http://yunnansourcing.com/en/6634494-pu-erh_tea

Anyone know a good place to buy puer tea in Chiang Mai for home use? I'm also interested in buying some of that jasmine tea rolled into tiny balls. Also, japanese tea like genmaicha or gunpowder tea. Thanks for your help.

i tried to log in on that site but it kept rejecting me. then i saw that the url was wrong. i hope this isn't a way to steal passwords.

Does anyone know when this will be available in Thailand? Me likey.

This article sort of misses the point. 90 percent of the people who migrated to the number four city (Bangkok) are of Thai nationality. The migration is of rural Thais to Bangkok. There's no mention of Thailand being an especially important country to attract foreigners. Maybe that's just a bit of speculation thrown in to appeal to Coconuts' expat audience.

Anyone know anything about Houston?

That papaya leaf remedy keeps going around on Facebook. I can find no data to suggest it works. Only anecdotal evidence that after taking it, the fever went away, and given that Dengue always goes away after a week or so, it seems to be a case of "medicine distracting the patient while nature cures the disease." If it were otherwise, big Pharma would have isolated the active ingredient and sold it as a pricey pill.

Tests and public safety announcements will do about as much to curb reckless driving as pictures of cancer patients on cigarette packs has done to curb smoking. Fines and jail. That's the only thing that people will pay attention to. Not just in Thailand, but the whole world. Well, except for places like Sweden and Germany.

They can easily implement the one hour free wifi system that Wawee imposes. If there is unlimited wifi then they obviously don't consider it a problem.

If you want to play policeman, then why not try a more useful target? Like shirtless farangs. Or tourists who have no business on a motorcycle. Or chinese tourists who think the middle of the street is a normal place to walk. Or foreigners who make out in public. Or Thais who wear swastikas. Or clueless tourists who stand in groups blocking the sidewalk or the street and don't get out of the xxxxxxx way.

Anyone who runs a coffeehouse should be prepared for slackers taking up space. This is an international problem, not just a local one. I myself try to order a cup of coffee every two hours at least, plus something sweet. But I'm now unable to sleep at night and am getting fat. I wish Wawee and Doi Chaang would serve better food. It's just too nice to work in a coffee house. Maybe they should make the chairs less comfy.

There may be no better forum on earth than this to publish an April Fools story and watch as hundreds of grumpy expats complain about the government's incompetence before realizing their own. Or perhaps, incontinence.

Jeezus. Lighten up fellas.

Actually it was a different America Restaurant. It was on Tha Pae (not Ratchadamnoen), just around the corner from you, Ulysses. It then became a jewelry store or a gift shop but still had the sign for a long time. They had amazing enchiladas. The owner was a blonde guy from San Francisco I think.

Actually you may have read me wrong (or I wrote unclearly) - I think Miguel's is great. The closest thing to Los Angeles style Mex in Chiang Mai. Haven't tried the other place on Canal that everyone's raving about though.

One of the nicest things in CM are the sonoran style tortillas you can get in the supermarkets. Very elastic and tasty. Easy to make your own mexican food. Just pick up some Danitas sauce, some chicken, tomatoes onions and cilantro, sour cream avocados etc from Makro and make a feast. Mexican is super easy to make so long as you have good tortillas and sauce.

mexican food is a strange animal. people have even more divisive opinions of it than of burgers or italian. you can't begin to compare burrito house to miguel's. according to old legend, burrito house was started by a thai who used to work in taco bell in the US. i love taco bell, but it's not reallly mexican food, rather an american fast food interpretation of mexican food. burrito house basically takes the taco bell recipes and uses higher quality ingredients, sort of a "homestyle" fast food. if you tried to make a big mac at home it would surely taste better than the ones at McDonalds. You get my drift. At the old location near the University they even had ripoffs of other US dishes, like Denny's Grand Slam breakfast. So surely it was someone who was familiar with low end US cuisine and wanted to bring it over here. I'm pretty sure there's a new owner now, though.

One gripe with burrito house is that they're really stingy with cheese. They barely dust each dish with the tiniest amount. You can buy a huge brick of cheddar in Makro for very little so there's no excuse for this (though true mex should have a mixture of cheddar and jack).

One recommendation - the taco sauce at Burrito House is amazing. You can buy a small bottle from them for 50 baht. It has no preservatives so goes back quickly, or I'd suggest getting a bigger bottle. Maybe you can freeze it. It's superb, goes well with everything. Except maybe ice cream.

Miguel's is much more authentic mexican food, of the sort you'd find in real mexican restaurants in the States (and parts of Mexico). But there are many types of "real" mexican food. I find that most Europeans don't like this kind of mexican food and consider it "inauthentic" because they're used to some other interpretation which is more prevalent across the pond.

The mexican food at Art Cafe is absurd. It's sweet and sour sauce in a tortilla. Or at least it was the last time I tried it. Not even close.

There used to be a great place called The American Cafe (or something like that) on Tha Pae road that did the best mexican in town, but it's been long gone.

Okay, that's my anuncio de servicio por la publica regarding Burrito House, et. al.

coffee is generally expensive because the espresso machines are expensive. anything with a big up front investment will clear away the entrepreneurial bottom feeders. also, same as in the west, people tend to hang out for hours with one cup of coffee. so you pay for renting the chair as well. plus there's perceived value - a mocha caramel soy latte can cost four times as much as a regular cup of coffee and cost only a few cents more to produce.

i'm surprised to hear everyone so lovey dovey about the songthaews. a few years ago everyone thought they were the spawn of the devil, impeding progress, causing accidents and polluting the air. i guess they must have stepped up their PR campaign. What happened? Are they running TV commercials showing a sweet old guy driving a girl to her home and giving her a flower, soft music in the background as the tagline "Songthaews. We go all the way for you" flashes over the screen?

I don't think this is a case of being a cheap charlie. The OP only asked why the price was higher and he was afforded informative answers by some and outright rudeness by others. It agree that it is good value for what it is, but it must be very expensive for the average Thai who until recently earned 175 baht a day (half of what someone guessed a songthaew driver makes).

Chiang Mai could benefit from a better, cheaper transport system but no one knows how to engineer it. And one of the main problems has always been that the songthaew business is so profitable that they can prop up a mafia that prevents the government from fomenting any real change. When the air con bus system was implemented 7 years ago one of the reasons it failed was it was crippled by the demands of the songthaew mob.

So get off your high horse, unless you're willing to offer someone a ride on it.

Jeez people. Sorry about my wording, I didn't mean to offend anyone. I'm not "trolling", was just trying to be helpful. I didn't know this is common. I didn't know that I am driving illegally (I figured one of the rental shops would have told me). I am obviously a somewhat ignorant Farang.

I have rented motorbikes many many times in Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, etc) and never been pulled over by the police. So this seemed like a new thing to me.

It felt like a "sting" in the heat of the moment, and it felt like that to some of the other ignorant Farang that I talked to in the station. It also sure seemed like they were targeting foreigners because almost every person I saw them pull over was a foreigner, while Thais wizzed by without helmets.

Can I change my title to make it less controversial (I can't figure out how to edit the original post)?

Anyways, I am sorry. I was driving without a proper license. I got a small slap on the wrist in the form of a ticket and visit to the station. I applogize if my original post sounded like I was whining or trolling. My main purpose was to document the incident in case it wasn't a normal thing and to educate other ignorant travelers who are in the same boat as me. Thanks for setting me straight.

Sincerely,

Shawn

I was more annoyed about your racist references than anything else.

And the fact you should have been arrested and jailed for driving a m/c without a m/c license.

If it were racist to identify characteristics of a culture that you find unpragmatic or dangerous then much of civil discourse in the world would be stymied. Plus, ThaiVisa would have to shut its doors. The naysayers here really befuddle me - this site is chockablock with people bitching about aspects of the local culture, not to mention American culture, middle east culture, European culture, etc. When people do this with a dismissive and unreasoned attitude then I say, yes, that could be construed as racist because it blindly denigrated the "other". But the OP's post didn't do that. If anything it was the opposite - he may have been crying "racist" himself in that he felt the Thais were targeting foreigners over Thais, which most of us know not to be the case at checkpoints (if anything we get a pretty wide berth).

Maybe I'm missing something here, but most of the responses seem out of character with the general tone and attitude of the majority of Thai Visa posters. I'm baffled. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we're all a little pissed off about the traffic situation in general and would like there to be less dipshits on the road. Or maybe it's just mob mentality.

I don't always drink Dos Equis, but when I do, it's Chang.

though many folks disagree with the actions of the US, attacking an embassy is akin to shooting the messenger. let's not confuse one for the other. if i don't like a thread on thaivisa, do i throw tomatoes at their office? well, i might if they were suffering a severe tomato shortage inside, but otherwise, not.