Jump to content

The Oracle

Member
  • Posts

    44
  • Joined

  • Last visited

1 Follower

Profile Information

  • Location
    On a huge rice farm five hours from tourists

Recent Profile Visitors

930 profile views

The Oracle's Achievements

Apprentice Member

Apprentice Member (3/14)

  • 10 Posts
  • First Post
  • 5 Reactions Given
  • Week One Done
  • One Month Later

Recent Badges

41

Reputation

  1. I had a crack at all of them over the last twelve years or so and settled on Leo. I found that the other two most popular beers, Singha and Chang are, respectively, too heavy and too gassy for me. The others are average at best. Including a few that aren't listed like "My" beer and some of the wheat and fruit beers. However, for the last eight months or so, I honestly don't know how long it has been - maybe a year, I have been giving Leo No. 8 "Strong Brew" a decent flogging, eschewing the prime Leo unless suppliers are out of stock. of the new kid on the block For *my* taste, it is one of the best lagers I've had. On the rare occasion I'm in a city with a pub, I'll drink either the "normal" Leo - haven't seen Leo "Ber Paed" in the few places I've been - or the locally brewed Heineken.
  2. I was giving advice and a warning to a guy on how grotesquely inept the bureaucracy is in comparison to Australia One gets to learn to live with it but if Chris is coming here to retire, I wanted to warn him not to expect a level of service based on efficiency. Or logic, for that matter. My mindset is fine. I don't care about 90 day reports or all that - I'm not in Bangkok or some province with a huge foreign population so I have to queue for hours to prove I'm still alive and give someone a job. I mean, for my two first visa extensions (yes, visa extensions, not extensions of stay, I was under 50) I had to drive almost three hours to another province because this one didn't have an Immigration office. It was what it was. Now it's an hour up the road; maybe a five minute wait; ask the guy how his daughter was going in uni (she's graduated now) get some stamps; go to Makro for some cheese and salami; and back home. The ridiculous bureaucracy surrounds the complete lack of critical thinking in education. There's no written procedure for a foreigner renewing their driving licence but there IS for applying for one. I went through the whole Certificate of Residency thing three times in five years (2-year licence, 2-year licence, 5-year licence) because they don't recognise their own driving licence - issued at their very office, the scan of original photo for my 2017 licence was on their screen - as a form of identification. Or trying to get a Yellow House Book to then get a Thai (foreigner) aka "Pink" ID Card. "Sorry, you need to be married" because she couldn't find how to do it in her binder - she'd been at the Amphur for three days so she made it up. No, that's just laughable. The issue here is that after the initial three months or so in 2016 when I was stared at, things were great for years. I was invited to weddings and ordinations, I attended funerals, retirement parties, Songkran ceremonies at the river, and so on. Just a regular member of the community. The closing of the borders in March 2020 affected us little. However, the shutdown of entertainment in April 2021? People that had been away longer than I'd been here came back, bringing their disdain for the sex tourists and ignorant expats from Down South back. And I'm the only foreigner for at least 40km that I know of so all the "dirty foreigner brought the virus here" <deleted> was rehashed. Very late year and about six weeks ago, we had two covid-related deaths. I was blamed by some woman with three-inch black-rooted blonde-dyed hair-gone orange with a thigh and a shoulder tattoo - in a 7-Eleven - that I had brought the virus to the village and killed the woman. Of course, she was yelling this in Thai and she assumed that, like most foreigners I've met here, I was too lazy to learn the language to understand her. And, while you may be "married to a Thai" it means very little to Thais. I'm not married. But I speak the language - I don't rely on a filter of what is being said to, or about, me. I have been talking and cruising the morning and afternoon markets solo for six years. I've been invited to stall-holders' children's weddings (sure, probably in some way to get 500 baht in an envelope) but they went to the effort of giving me a printed invitation. I was welcome here. I assimilated. There are no bars, restaurants, or pool halls. It's a working village. However, I do rent out half a house with the (head of the family) owner of a 4700 rai (yes, two zeros) rice farm with some portions (probably 50 rai or so, total ) set aside for pet projects like cucumbers and taro. I think one cousin may also grow 20 rai of corn. What my point is, I have been outside the bubbles most foreigner create for themselves and travelled the country extensively. Although born in Australia, I grew up in a developing country before returning. There's no "socio-economic shock" for me. And, as to your final point, I never said I was going to back to live "where the grass is greener" in Australia so I don't need luck. I'll probably end up in Cambodia near the Thai border or in Laos. But a holiday in the UK and Europe followed by a visit to Australia for the first time in three years is next.
  3. Great advice. And one more bit to add to it. Be prepared for bureaucratic stupidity and inefficiency. The rules were made when Thailand was dragged kicking and screaming out of the 14th century in the 1960s and 70s. And nothing has changed except since around 2014 on how to get more money from the filthy foreigners. The things you have to do here are mind-blowinging inefficient and double, triple, even quadruple handling a sheaf of paper you could trip over only for it all to be entered into a computer as well and then have a hand-written carbon-paper receipt given to you. I've been here full-time six years; the last three as an O-A (I'm 53) retiree. With the massive changes to health insurance premium costs, the 800k lying useless in a bank account until I die, and the ever-increasing requirements to stay here, I'm pulling up stumps at the end of the year. I live comfortably, have a car, motorbike ( I rent my accommodation) and multiple TVs and computers along with my furnishings I brought from Australia. Been coming here since 2010 but I moved to an isolated place very similar to the "10km from Roi Et" except I'm "80 km from Phetchabun". I'm also a beer-drinking Australian. But here? No English. No other foreigners. Which WAS good. Now disgruntled ex-employees of now-bankrupt foreign pub owners are returning, bringing their bigotry with them, and the belief that all foreigners are the cause of The Plague. The village's perception of me has changed to an uncomfortable level of disquiet and distrust because according to their returned daughters I (being the sole foreigner) am to blame for everything since January 2020 and their loss of job. I won't put what I've been called (I speak Thai although the women and men returning from Down South don't know that) but it is getting bad. I've been threatened with a machete, and had a mango thrown at me by some bloke telling me to, er, "go away with much haste you undesirable person" in a quite impolite manner ???? Along with the continued blame-shifting on TV every night at 1800, the poison is seeping, albeit slowly to this once quiet haven. I'll be making the most of my car over the next six months to see as much as I can an especially get to Chiang Mai again and to drive down toward Phuket. I spent a lot of time, money, and emotion here but I'm not going to die of old age here as I once thought.
  4. Second reply but very brief. I've been here for just over six years. I'm single. At the end of 2020, my landlady had a stroke - fortunately she was with me in the car when it happened so I got her straight t he local hospital. She made it clear to her extended family that I was to continue to be allowed to live in this house if she died. And I would stay, too, to begin with at least and see what happens. I would expect the surviving members to take the car and motorbike which I bought (but are in her name as they were bought before I turned fifty) and sell them. I reckon I'd stay in the area, though if I could find a place - there are no rentals here in rural Phetchabun - but failing that I'd probably move to Nong Khai (if I had the car) or Chang Mai as six years here is getting a bit too isolated even with my frequent "English and Foreign Food" trips to foreigner infested cities.
  5. WARNING! Text Wall I moved to a rice farm in the Bowels of Nowhere in April 2016. I had started learning basic Thai using Google Translate prior to my move here. My landlady - who I had met during a holiday in 2015 where she was a tour guide for a Chinese bus tour company and her cousin was a cashier at a pub - spoke very little English which she had learned twenty-plus years prior while in Hong Kong as a Thai-Chinese translator. When she moved back "home" in late 2015, she contacted me asking if I wanted to rent out the top half of her house. I thought, "why not?" I was recently divorced (that was actually finalised over the phone here in this house to the Family Court in Australia) and I was in a share house (at age 47) in Melbourne. I came over for a week in January 2016 to have a look around. Moved here that April. There are no other foreigners here. At all. I maybe see one at the small Phetchabun Immigration Office every second 90-day report. But I don't talk to them. I have a few friends in Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Phuket, Nakhon Ratchasima, Kalasin, and Sakon Nakhon. Korat is the closest, about four hours. Pattaya and Kalasin around five hours; Chiang Mai and SN are seven-eight. I try to get to see them each a couple of times a year and I travel extensively at other times. But here's the difference. I'm single. I spend all my time outside in a sala I had built, watching television or reading. I eat, sleep, and travel alone. There are no restaurants, no social places like pubs, nothing. Having said that, I am a very social sort of bloke and I miss face-to-face interaction. Sure, I can (and do) go down the road and have a few lao khaos with the farmers and builders after their work day every now and then but, let's be fair here: my language level even after six years isn't up to fluency level and my background both work-wise and education-wise is completely different to my friends - while I have learned a lot about sharpening ploughshares and welding, I can't impart any of my knowledge back as they have absolutely no point of reference. They're all 55-60 years old and the primary school has only been here since 1974 so many were taught how to read and write by their parents - even now some of them still can't do either. After travel restrictions were lifted in July 2020, I went touring again. Pretty bad in most places but it was my trips around mid-2021 after the April 2021 nationwide shutdown of entertainment venues that really struck it home. Nobody. Nothing. You cold cross Beach or Seconbd Road in Pattaya without even looking; something suicidal in July 2019. I was hardly inconvenienced by any restrictions. Unless I'm going inter-provincial for English and beers, or to Immigration 80km away, I'm at home or I on my motorbike to the market for food twice a day. Even prior to the Plague, from as early as 2010 when my wife and I brought our kids here, I had seen numbers slowly dwindle as people decided to go elsewhere to avoid being scammed by locals, or expat bar-owners in Phuket padding bills. And it got worse, Then service and politeness - even the Smile for which Thailand was famous - slipped. Markedly more so since the pandemic when the only people I saw were older White guys glaring out from pubs in the delineated "farang strip" in Khon Kaen and Udon Thani, or in Phuket, or Jomtien, or wherever and they were about as welcoming a dose of chlamydia. So I went to Thai bars. Also since the pandemic and the resultant disintegration of many businesses, a lot of the younger generation have been returning here. Pretty much this place didn't have anybody (especially female) aged between around 18 and 40. But they have brought to the village is bigotry and hatred. When I first arrived six years ago there were a few raised eyebrows but after four weeks I was at the markets buying fruit and vegetables solo. I was pretty much accepted after about three months - I was no longer a freak - and my regular appearances at weddings, funerals, and ordinations were now normalised although people coming from other provinces all wanted to know what I was doing here. Until then end of 2020, it was great. The Covid returnees have been gone from the village for so long - longer than I've been here, at least - that they're shocked that a foreigner is in the village. More than a few have decided to suggest to their friends and family at the market, all the while calling me all the worst names I can be called, insisting to each other and those around them that I should go back to wherever I came from. And take my virus with me. I shake my head at them, look straight at the bigot and say, "I can understand you. Your mother must love your mouth." That shocks them even more. The old ducks at the stalls have a great laugh. But, after all that, moving my stuff from Australia in 2019, I'm leaving at the end of this November. The roadblocks to staying here are getting worse. Changes to visa requirements - I'm on an O-A - around health insurance will only get worse. There are no grandfathering clauses which means changes to new applicants affects those who had already been accepted. And the chance of the insurance company reneging on payment is astronomical, too, apparently. The requirement for me to have 800,000 baht in a bank account earning 0.5% until, basically, I die here and then it jut gets taken by the government is a bit rich. The *ridiculous* hoops we jump through for basic services like a drivers licence or internet or water is farcical. And if a government employee doesn't know something, they'll just lie about it so they don't have to do anything except get paid to sit in air-conditioned comfort, going through rainforest's worth of trees a year, and embossing everything with a rubber stamp. As I said, I was lucky during the pandemic at its peak but the residue of virus misinformation, their disdain for their erstwhile foreign employers, and general racism that the disgruntled people brought up here and spread around during the last year in particular has made staying in this place untenable. What made this a nice, comfortable haven - albeit, in hindsight, a little *too* isolated - devoid of scammers and schemers and backstabbers and profiteers in the larger communities has gone. I have spent a lot of time, money, and emotion here. My landlady's daughter, who was just finishing Grade 1 when I got here, starts Grade 8 next week, my Thai is pretty darned good but not fully-conversational as I have few occasions to use it to a high level, and I leave behind a lot of stuff not worth paying $4000 shipping back to Australia. My landlady is a great friend and I will sorely miss her and her extended family on this massive farm. I've considered Cambodia, near the Thai border so I can continue using a language I spent close to seven years trying to learn (alone, and I'm also partially deaf and rely on reading lips which is hard to do with face masks on everybody) a language which is useless pretty much anywhere else in the world outside a Thai restaurant. But what I won't miss is the insidiousness being spread by disgruntled "masseuses" and the Minister for Public Health which have begun to threaten my own security.
  6. Hello. Your expectations of what you want to get out of learning Thai will put you on different paths. I used Google Translate for nouns to begin with. I had the hello, thank you, numbers, days of the week, some basic foods and so on learned before I moved here. I live (alone) in a village where the only English spoken is "Hello" when they answer the phone. My nearest English-speaking friend is a five-hour drive away. So, needless to say, when I arrived here in April 2016, I had a very sharp learning curve. Added to that the fact that I'm "hearing impaired" (bit PC, I'm deaf as a post in my left ear and my right ear is pretty much stuffed as well so I lip-read a lot). I can't read Thai. The last two years with mask-wearing has slowed my learning as well. And I live in a fairly low-educated area as well. Up until about ten years ago, it was rare anyone did past year nine high school. The primary school up the road has only been there for fifty years. My landlady's three eldest siblings (59,57,56) never went to school but learned to read and write from their father - their mother couldn't read or write. The main issue with learning from a language school is they will teach you how to read and write as well. Something that, seriously, will eat into the verbal learning which is far more important. If something is written in Thai, I can ask someone what is says. I know my car's and motorcycle's number/registration plates, though. Now, Chiang Mai or Bangkok? First, be clear: you want to learn Central Thai - the language taught at Thai schools, the "national language", okay? A person speaking the local dialect in Chiang Rai won't be understood by a person in Phang Nga. Similarly, Lao is spoken quite widely, especially across the north and the NE (Isaan/Esan) down as far as Nakon Ratchasima (Korat). You want a Central Thai language school. Everybody speaks that. It's also what the vast, vast majority of Thai Language Schools teach but you must be sure. Additionally, although Thai is a purely tonal language, regional accents do exist so getting a teacher from the provinces around Bangkok might be better - or one with extensive experience if they're from elsewhere - especially if you can get a teacher with business experience. Don't learn from a foreigner; their native accent will skew their tones and you end up learning their bad accent as your own. Now, back to the reason why you want to learn Thai. If it's because you want to retire here in the future, you'll lose your knowledge as time goes on when you go back to your home country after your year here. You need to speak it daily. Do you really want to spend a fortune going to school every day for a year to learn a language pretty much no-one outside Thailand uses? You'd be better off with a phrase book and bussing around the country learning as you go with Google Translate. YouTube has a few channels but unless English is your first language - the teachers mostly teach/translate in/from English - then it's going to be hard because their accents can be quite strong. Again, don't learn from a foreigner. Anyway, Chiang Mai is cheaper and prettier than Bangkok even if over the (Western) New Year, the air quality is often the worst on the planet. Dabble a bit with Google Translate. Look at a few YouTube channels. Get a feel for it. You'd be better off coming over here on a 60-day tourist visa and see how well you've done with those methods first before getting an Education Visa and forking out thousands of dollars/pounds/Euros/whatever to a school where you'll be cooped up inside learning how to read and write and missing out on what the county offers. Learn on the go. Learn the popular food names. Numbers. Colours. Basic phrases. Names of fruit and vegetables. Because, seriously? Local markets don't have any signage anyway; street names are written in English as well; and if all else fails find someone under twenty - twenty five years old; they'll probably remember enough English from school to help you with the basics. You can always learn to read (and maybe even write) later after you know what all the sounds are. Best of luck.
  7. An absolutely *cracking* beer. I tried it when it came out and haven't looked back. It's 55 baht per bottle where I am (a five baht discount on the original Leo to stimulate sales ,I assume) but I buy it by the box at 585.
  8. We still going on about strawberries as a sign of economic health? Bought this 600g punnet half an hour ago from the local morning market. Eighty baht. Taste the same as the ones I used to eat from my backyard in Australia. There were punnets of "jumbo" ones but, even though they might be sweeter, they looked a tad over-ripe and not last long in the fridge.
  9. Warning: text wall. ???? With fewer tourists, their are fewer tools. Aside from the recent dramatic increases in fuel and pork prices, everything has remained pretty much the same. I live in a village. I'm single. There are no English-speakers and, as far as I'm aware, no foreigners for about 40km. I have friends in widely-strewn provinces which take at least five hours to get to from my place in the sticks. Due to these distances, I eat at the roadside Mum and Dad restaurants quite often. Prices haven't changed in the almost five years I've had the car. The differences in prices and quality of the fresh fruit and veg I buy from roadside and market stalls varies depending on the province I'm in. People going on about strawberries obviously haven't eaten the spectacular varieties from Chiang Mai. While I'm at it, there are several varieties of banana, mango, and papaya, too. I'm going out on a limb - which one should never do on the internet - and suggest people go to the markets as well and not leave it up to their other half. And don't buy from the supermarkets; they're flavourless due to cold storage. The only vegetable I buy from Lotus is potato. Everything else is from the market. As for "what's it like" here? As I said, I'm rural. Nothing has changed here since I first moved here coming up to six years ago. But I have driven across a lot of the country - of course, since January 2020, I think I've only taken four or five inter-provincial trips to see friends. I can't speak for the poor sods that put their life savings into businesses in tourist areas but I sympathise with them in this difficult time. I drove to Pattaya late last year - as I had in July and October 2020 as well - and enjoyed being able to walk around without the slow-moving or steroid-pumped masses blocking the way, being able to get a seat in a bar or restaurant, and being able to identify and avoid the various lethal objects and holes on the footpaths before treading on/in them. The June re-opening of restaurants lasted until the Delta variant hit in December 2020 and businesses were shuttered again in April 2021. It was bad in 2020 when I went to a retirement party, very slow and lots of businesses closed but when I went back in December 2021, it was horrific. Udon Thani was similarly quiet in February 2021but everything seemed open. The bar owners and their punters, like Pattaya, were generally welcoming, happy to see a new face after months of travel restrictions. A single White male walking down the strip of Khon Kaen at 4 PM? Not so much. I really felt like I was encroaching on some tribal turf by the looks of the expats' faces staring out from the bars so I continued walking past, noting that many places were shuttered. After a half-hour or so, I ended up at a bar-restaurant overlooking a lake. I was driving back home from Sakon Nakhon and dropped in for a night to break up my journey. Might try Nong Nua Lamphu next time. At least until there's enough of an increase in tourist numbers in KK that someone under 60 doesn't stick out as much. The other major thing I saw during the Delta wave was a lot of 25-35 people returning to the village. They had obviously been away a long time because they were surprised to see me walking around the market. And what they brought back to the village was the *open* racism. I'm used to a snide remark here and there, usually because I misunderstand a word. A couple of tattoo-thighed ladies were getting off their motorcycle and one asked of the other, "what's that [very bad word] doing here?" The old duck selling the fish looked at me, shocked, embarrassed and possibly horrified as to what my response was going to be. I didn't disappoint. "I'm buying breakfast. You come from Pattaya to give your vagina a holiday?" Auntie almost blew a valve laughing. Another group were whingeing that their boss stopped paying them and shut his bar permanently in Bang Lamung. I didn't respond to that, as I'd overhead them talking to a vendor, not to me. To put this into context, he'd been paying these two (and I assume others) from April to October 2021 while not getting any business until he ran out of money. There's one fried chicken seller here that used to switch to Lao when I went to buy something, pretending he couldn't speak Thai. Needless to say, I haven't bought anything off him since 2016.
  10. The hospitals issues the certificate The Thailand National Certificate of COVID-19 Vaccination under the auspices of the Department of Public Health, the symbol of which is on the certificate. MOPH is the Thai national health authority.
  11. Yes, it is common in many places not frequented by foreigners. A group will buy a bottle of (usually blended) spirits and use just the one shot glass between them. Even in Hi-So places - although it wouldn't be Blend 185, Hong Thong, or Sang Som, it would be Johnny Walker or Jack Daniel's. It is rumoured that is how the Thong Lor outbreak which caused the third wave started: customers and hostesses sharing glasses. But I don't put much weight into unsubstantiated speculation. Also Bucket Drinks in the sports and themed bars which cater for the Shorts, Singlets and Thongs/flipflop Brigade are often shared.
  12. They do pick more than just blueberries. Blueberries grow on bushes - even trees in some climates - so I don't know what the woman in the photo is supposed to be doing. Cloudberries (or golden berries) grow almost at ground level, so that's more likely in the photo and it's miscaptioned. The only reason I comment isn't to disagree but offer some information. My landlady's friend lives in Finland and sent some photos of the fruits she'd picked. I thought they were just yellow raspberries but, no. I took ages googling. However, they were cloudberries: expensive as they and lingonberries are a delicacy often well over $12 a pound. https://nwwildfoods.com/product-category/wild-berries/
  13. Sure it wasn't a leech? (Or "pleeng" in Thai) ปลิง They can be small, flat and grey. Or enormous and black.
×
×
  • Create New...