brummiebob

Klongtoey south of the market,

Lumphini on the little streets to the east of wireless roads, behind the police stations (actually pretty good shortcut to walk from Asoke to Lumphinipark)

Phra Khanong

Most of the time it's a few specific soi of that area, not the whole area

the water fights are no longer contained to certain areas now there are some random drive-by watersplash about now, just got drenched stopping at the redlights on Sukhumvit/Thepprasit heading south, a bunch of party goers on the back of a pickup

Food cart is a pretty nifty way to start a business, imagine back in the west trying to start some kinds of shop, you'd be buried in regulations, plus no rents overheads, except maybe for the cart, which you could use for personal transport, too bad you can't live in on one

different purity,

I just asked my goldsmith friends your 750gold is what known in Thailand as 18K gold

Their calculation for the price is

spot price 21,087 * 75%(the purity for 750gold) = 16,447.86 per baht weight

16,447.89/15.2 = 1,082 Baht per gram
Your weight 38.15*1082 works out to 41,278

(the actual deduction purity is a bit of a ripoff since thai gold is only for 96.5% not 100%, the shop would not deduct this for 96.5%gold)

In practice the shop has no obligation to buy at this price, for normal Thai gold, they will because they can sell it on for profits, but as 18K is considered inferior by Thais, there is no demand for it, unless it is a really good design and then you can sell at jewellery store prices

the national spot price is here

http://www.goldtraders.or.th/

left column is buy price right column is sell price

top row is bullions

bottom rows is processed ( jewellery ) gold

Here's the prices as of now

bullions buys21,400.00 sells21,500.00

jewellery buys21,087.56 sells21,900.00

Obviously this is for 96.5% purity gold

750 gold purity is 75.0% so obviously you would get less for that

To be fair my Thai neighbours took their whole family out to the place to watch the shows during the first few weeks when they are free, and they didn't spend a single Baht on any of the shops inside, to them 50 baht is probably fair price for entertainment

a better idea would be the 50 bht fee is refundable upon reciepts from say, restaurants, keeps the rubbernecker tourists out to manageable level and genuine customers doesn't lose anything.

Wheeled carts, even unmotorized ones have the same rights as bicycles on the road, imagine someone saying how annoying cyclists are, being slow and whatever...

BTW, a good idea would be for Chonburi to celebrate the same days as the rest of the country. That would reduce it to a more sensible duration, and also improve the party.

The Thai word for the day in Chonburi and Pattaya is actually 'Wan Lai' meaning 'Flow' day, not actual Songkran as in the proceedings 'flow' from Chonburi on the 13rd-15th and makes their way down to Bang Saen, Sriracha and whatever into Naklua on the 18th and Pattaya on 19th, Jomtien and Sattahip is on the 20-21st I think. The idea is that the revellers could move along to the different areas each days and could enjoy the whole week if they wanted

It used to be, just a few years ago that on the 13-16th Pattaya is dry, only a few bars along beach road from central rd to Soi 9 would try to get it on but the momentum couldnt't be carried

But then the Bangkok People and the Foreign Tourist came down on the Sonkran Actual from 13th and proceed to have some fun and now it has turn into full-blown week

Could someone confirm that the big night in Pattaya in on the 18th (eve of the 19th) and not on the night of the 19th? please!

Nope, the 18th is the big day for Naklua, north of Pattaya, there will be some spill overs from that area but the full force will be down in Pattaya Actual on the 19th

I've seen tourist that's arrived on the 19th booked a hotel somewhere on beach road and got a taxi down and managed to get in as far as Foodland or Big C car park on central road., their taxi gave up after 3-4 hours, left them to fend for themselves and probably walk the rest of the way to their hotel.

The fact that it's mad down here in Pattaya is not well known in Bangkok

I prefer to use google to search thaivisa than the forum's own tool myself

for example to search for supermarkets in Pattaya would turns up too many results from classifieds selling condos and such saying they are close to Supermarkets

To search within thaivisa from google

type:

supermarket pattaya site:thaivisa.com into google

This turns up too many condo and classified results to exclude something from the results just add - (minus sign) then the word that you don't want, So if I want to search for topics about Supermarkets without stuff about Condos or classifieds type in:

supermarket pattaya site:thaivisa.com -classified -condo

you could do this for just results from the classifieds too, for example to search for guitar in the classified

type in:

guitar site:www.thaivisa.com/forum/forum/8-free-classifieds-for-salefor-rentwanted/

I see there are some ads for guitar lessons that I don't want so to further refine the results I use

guitar site:www.thaivisa.com/forum/forum/8-free-classifieds-for-salefor-rentwanted/ -lessons

In many Anglophile countries there are 'Special Constables' that does pretty much the same thing right?

The FPV are taking the flak because they are most visible, there are also Thai Police Volunteer that are equally despicable, using radios without licence, setting up illegal stop and search roadblocks (usually on the dark side) it is quite possible they could be collecting tea money for the real MiB too

A few months back I seem to see tables setting up along Walking Street manned with Chinese Language Students, seems much more useful and friendlier than a bunch of police wannabes, granted they don't have to deals with drunkenness like the FPV do

Anyway, whenever I take a guest for a stroll along walking street, they always comment on how reassuring it is to have such international face in uniforms greeting visitors at the entrance, however, when we pass them on the way back and they just sit around watching football...

Pattaya Police Station 038-420802-5

HuayYai 038-938399

Najomtien 038-255700

Most Police in Pattaya area seems to be able to communicate in English somewhat, knowing the streets arrangement, I probably couldn't even give directions to the Police in Thai even,

In Bangkok if your calls to the local station goes unanswered there are Traffic/ Police FM talkback Radio Stations(in Thai) run by the Police's PR department that would always manage to light some fire under the local stations butt and get them out quick.

Getting to know your local rescue teams isn't a bad idea, technically they can't help much, but sure they're willing to help put some boots down, especially if the per's still around and they have radios that can contact the police's despatch and some are police volunteer in some capacity anyway

Pattaya's callcentre 1337 number seems to be pretty good in English and I always manage to get them pretty promtly without being put on hold forever unlike the police's number they can probably take down your details and forward it in Thai to the right place

ฺBanglamung Police Station

As for the cost, 15,000 is very top end starting salary for freshly university graduated kids, and if they were to only just show up when called, I'd fire their asses in a hearbeat

But the police do comes with some special privileges, like being able to carry a gun

but even for someone that even just walks around with a gun, in a retail store like mine is probably an overkill, but for Jewellery stores and armoured cars, they could be worth their weight in gold

Remember that unlike europe, even regular police, even the traffic guys carry guns here, and guns here costs 60-70,000 Baht for you and I, Okay Government official like police can get subsidies for guns so the prices for them is more like 40,000, paid out of their own pocket of course, they have paid it back somehow

Considering that in order for civilians to be able to get a 'carry' permit as in being able to holster a loaded gun around as opposed to just transporting them unloaded from place to place, the permit needs to be signed by the minister for interior, as how much that would cost, I wouldn't dare to hazard a guess, probably if you need to ask, you can't afford it

(but to guard your home or business (like a farm of jewellery store), no carry permit is needed, so just a permit to have/buy firearms is enough, usually the gun dealer can arrange this for you)

I don't necessarily condone the practice of paying for police of course, just letting you know the practice

I can tell that for 9-hours shift, you can expect to pay no more than 20,000 per month,

That's quite a price for a policeman who isn't present, and earns less than half of that in a job where he has to be present. Don't you think so?

We actually pays closer to 15grand, but we hire lots of them so if a Jewellery store jut hire one guy from 9-5 it might costs more, so I say expect to pay no more than 20large

In some places of ours in Bangkok, they do stick around, sometimes when we call the guy that's supposed to be on duty and he can't come out, he'll call his mates at the station and they'll come faster than we were to call the station ourselves

We get a mix of guys, one guy could be a traffic guy, the next could be in crime suppression or even riot control, some of these guys even manage to snag a few gigs like these, in effect earning double shift in addition to their regular police income that's like 7-8000 a month?

This is all above board off course, but who knows how much these little guys have to pay back to their 'big brother' that managed to land them these jobs, and amongst other income that's available to the uniform.

This is why every year at the police examinations, there are ten of thousands of people applying for a few hundreds job openings, even though the police starting salary is (i think) 6000 Baht a month

As to get back to topic, the local number of the police stations is a better choice than calling 191, but I don't know if the guy manning the phone in the middle of the night would be able to converse in English, Soi 9 must have some FPV around but dark sides stations like Bang Lamung, Huay Yai or Na Jomtien?

Sorry, I didn't see your earlier post about the red police mailbox before I post my post

I don't know much about the price, but for only a few thousands bath a month is pretty good value but in my experience only people with connections managed to get them on their house, I often see them on houses belonging to retired police or army generals, (maybe they get them for free?) I know it's possible to get it on regular peoples' houses but maybe the hassle of negotiating red tapes is not worth it

If you live in a Village then get together and make the village pay for one,

A shotgun with beanbags sounds nice, but I don't think you can get those things here, certainly not legally.

We have the patrol service in our gated community too, I think it's 1,000-1,500 baht per month, and it may be part of why they come when we (rarely) need them. They put up this small red mailbox on the outside, usually with some sort of police sticker. Try driving around your neighborhood and see if you spot any.

Hello, New Member here, I hope I could be of service

There's actually a service by the local boys in brown where for a monthly fee, they put a police letterbox on your front door, making your house part of the patrol route, the officer on patrol then has to sign in on the logbook in the letterbox, someone in my village in Bangkok has it and the boys do come round about three of four times a night and during the daytime too.

As for how much this cost, there's the official price and also some lubrication required to get things going which depends on which stations your house falls under the jurisdiction of,

Also for the holidays like Songkran and New Year where many Thais will leave their house for extended periods,

there's a similar scheme where you let the local bobby knows that you'll be out from when to when and they will come round and keep checking on the house, this is actually free but only during the holidays of course, as to having the knowledge out in the open (in the police station at least) that there's an empty house actually is a wise thing to do or not is another issue.

Where I work, (retail) we just hire a policeman, and he's supposed to come around and hang around our store for things like shoplifting, etc.

We do this in every of our stores even in Bangkok too, most jewellery shops seems to do it as well. in practice it varies, some police guys would do this outside his official shift, when he's off duty and would be present with us the whole time, in Pattaya some of the police guys we managed to hire do it while they are on duty, so they are not present but they are supposed to turn up when we call during the time that they clock in with us, so at least we have a point of contact that can smooth things over with the station as for the cost, I can tell that for 9-hours shift, you can expect to pay no more than 20,000 per month, the policeman is happy to have extra income and the cost is not more than hiring a private security company or expensive security systems, put you probably cant just walk up to your local station and demand to hire some off-duty guys to keep a watch on your house, as with everything in Thailand, contacts is key,

it's not unusual when moving into new house to turn up at the local station and gets acquainted with the local chief with a gift baskets or a black label in tow(I think wines has become popular now too, the Australian wine "Penfolds Bin 2" is the currency of bureaucracy these days, but I digress)