keestha

Since 5 months I am the proud father of a beautiful daughter. It brings a lot of joy but also one problem I would like you to shine your lights on.

My girlfriend refuses to be left alone with the baby, even for a few moments. When she has to take a shower or even go to the toilet , she calls me into the bedroom to keep an eye on our daughter. Frequently I have to go away on business for part of the day, and then she always insists on going with me, taking the baby along of course.

It might be relevant to mention that she grew up in a village setting, where there are always people around to help out with taking care of the children. Also, it is her first child, so I can imagine she is still lacking confidence.

I pointed out to her that for farang women it is quite normal to be alone with the baby whilst daddy is out working, but this didn't seem to impress her very much. The owner of the bar I used to go to about once a week is missing me, is there any chance for me to regain a little bit of freedom?

Imay be wrong, but it sounds like having the baby has knocked all the self confidence out of her,hence not wanting you out of her sight,. as for a cure, difficult, keep reassuring her that you feel the same about her etc, good luck,.

Thanks Mike, but that is not it. The first 3 months her parents were here to help out, and then she didn't have any problem letting me go out alone on business or socializing.

Since 5 months I am the proud father of a beautiful daughter. It brings a lot of joy but also one problem I would like you to shine your lights on.

My girlfriend refuses to be left alone with the baby, even for a few moments. When she has to take a shower or even go to the toilet , she calls me into the bedroom to keep an eye on our daughter. Frequently I have to go away on business for part of the day, and then she always insists on going with me, taking the baby along of course.

It might be relevant to mention that she grew up in a village setting, where there are always people around to help out with taking care of the children. Also, it is her first child, so I can imagine she is still lacking confidence.

I pointed out to her that for farang women it is quite normal to be alone with the baby whilst daddy is out working, but this didn't seem to impress her very much. The owner of the bar I used to go to about once a week is missing me, is there any chance for me to regain a little bit of freedom?

Wasabi,

Sure it is a very good idea to learn Thai. But I don't think it makes it a lot easier to find a job, Thai employers are far more interested in diplomas than in your actual capabilities.

Two examples:

1) Back in the nineties, I went through two stints of applying for jobs in the hotel and travel business. I speak Thai, English, German, French and Dutch. No interest whatsoever though from potential employers, what they want is someone who graduated from hotel school somewhere in Europe.

2) The hotels in the area where I am living now, are suffering from a lack of staff. A young women that I know who speaks English semi fluently because she has been living with a farang for a long time, couldn't find a job here though. Why? They only hire waitresses and so on who have finished Mattayon (high school), and the women in question has only done 3 years of mattayon. Just try to strike up a conversation in English with a randomly chosen kid who has just finished mattayon.

The last 7 years I always had computers I was working with protected against intruders with the free version of ZoneAlarm. Sometimes the program prompted me to download&install a free upgrade, which I usually did after a few days, after I had been prompted to do this over and over again.

Lately, again the familiar small gray pop up appeared on the screen, suggesting to download a free upgrade. After clicking yes, I was led to a webpage that invited me to purchase goods from one of ZoneAlarms "partners". After having done so, I would be able to download the free ZoneAlarm upgrade. Of course I closed the browser right away.

But since then, the small gray pop up keeps reappearing continuously. It gives you a drop down menu option to be reminded in a certain number of days. But using this option, or simply trying to close the pop up, invariably leads the browser to the webpage inviting you to purchase something fom one of ZoneAlarms "partners".

Simply using the "back" button brings you back to the page you were viewing, but it is rather annoying nevertheless.

Did anybody stumble across the same problem, and, more important, does anybody know what to do against this?>

A quick and dirty way is to use a total dissolved solids (TDS) meter which you can buy for a couple of thousand baht

I used to have a colleague who had a small meter that you had to dip into the water you wanted to test, and then it displayed a number. The higher the number, the more molecules were in the brew that were not H2O. That could be traces of metal, insecticides or whatever, but also relatively harmless things like minerals. The cheapest drinking water, in the almost one liter bottles that cost around 6 Baht, gave a reading of 30+. A half liter bottle of the more expensive kind of water, retails for around 10 Baht, came up with 300+. The big surprise was that the water I draw myself from a depth of 19 meters under my land, also came up with just 30+.

Don't know if what he used was a TDS meter or something else.

Whatever questionable kind of water you are drinking: Cheers.

There is no universal "thruth" on living in Thailand. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. During the years I spent backpacking around the world, I learned at a young age not to pay too much attention to other people's opinions about places. What is paradise to one guy, is h-ell to another. It all depends on which people you happen to meet, and what situations you chance to stumble into. But most depends on your own attitude.

I know what it is though, to move around in a place where people are really hostile to (my type of) foreigner. Mexico was an example, the first thing I learned to say in Spanish was " I am not an American, I am a European", which made them a lot friendlier indeed. Another example was South Africa during the apartheid period, as far as the black people were concerned. Yes of course they had very good reasons.

No way there is anything like that in Thailand if you are a westerner. You can become very much liked and accepted here, with the small "but" that you can never really integrate. Also if you learn to speak Thai fluently, get married with a Thai and raise 12 children, and set up a business where in the end 800 people are working, a "farang" you always remain. But I can live with that.

Central is the largest and oldest department store chain in Thailand. Not sure if they have them upcountry

Won't be of much use to the OP I'm afraid, but there is a Central Department Store in Phuket.

Wednesday september 12 a major earthquake occurred in Indonesia, off the Sumatra coast. Due to the place where the earthquake took place, it could never have generated a tsunami in Thailand. Quite rightfully, Thai authorities did not issue a warning.

Foreign media though gave a tsunami warning for the whole Indian Ocean, and this made many people in low laying areas at the Andaman coast head for higher ground temporarily. There was no panic whatsoever though, and the next day it was only good for a very brief article in the Bangkok Post.

When somebody says he is leaving because of the visa requirements getting tougher, it might not be the only real reason he decided to call it a day.

In the course of the years I have seen people leaving for reasons varying from "I can't stand the climate anymore" to "it is better for the future of my half Thai child that we move to Farangistan".

Often I wondered if the stated reason for departure was the only one. In Thailand there are a lot of ill adjusted westerners who didn't even take the trouble to learn Thai. They are constantly moaning about the way things are here. Well no wonder that more than a few eventually realize they are not happy here, and that it is better to head for the airport.

Thai people swear by a cleaning liquid which is called PET. Pet means duck, and there is indeed a picture of a duck on the bottle. The toilets in my resort are always getting brown stains because there is metal in my well water, and the only way to remove the stains is to pour Pet on them, and leave it there for a while. You can get Pet in any well stocked supermarket.

Oh, if only all threads could be as interesting as this one.

Sure there are some bars that make good money, often they are the ones that have a loyal customer base of local expats and also tourists who come every year. But mostly bars keep changing ownership and not without reason. Just spend one night in a Phuket or Pattaya bar that seems busy, and keep track of how many drinks they sell. It will be a joke compared to a busy neighborhood bar in Denmark, where the barkeeper sometimes has to stop taking orders because he needs time to rinse glasses. And......did you ever go on a bar crawl during the low season?

I drove from southern Thailand to Buriram many times, getting around Bangkok using the outer ring road (Kanchanapisek), and once you are on the number 1 motorway going to Saraburi it is very easy.

There is a very good road atlas called Thailand highway map, published by the roads association of Thailand, Tel. 029840836. It also contains a map of the major roads for through traffic in greater Bangkok, city maps of many provincial capitals, and many small detailed maps of complicated junctions.

A woman staying at my resort in Khao Lak had a serious motorcycle accident (Oh, tourists and rented motorbikes.....driving a car I learned to watch out for them even more than for the underaged Thai kids riding motorbikes).

After a brief stay in the government hospital in the district capital Takua Pa, off she went by ambulance to the Bangkok Phuket hospital. They diagnosed her pelvis was broken in 4 places. She was told that she had to go to Bangkok for the operation, in the Bangkok hospital.

I was highly surprised she was transported not by plane, but by ambulance from Phuket to Bangkok. Not exactly comfortable. But maybe it is just technically impossible to transport somebody who has to lie down on a normal flight.

Paul,

Please take into account cultural differences. In Thailand a woman is expected to get married the sooner the better after she has started cohabiting with a man. And especially if she is young and does not have children from a previous marriage, it will also be expected that there will be a child, or at least a child on its way, in less than a year. There is an enormous social pressure to this effect coming from her family.

You may feel tricked, but she only did what she was programmed to do by her upbringing. She just did what she thought was the only proper thing to do.

Unless you are 100% sure not up to it and choose the adoption route, why don't you just take it one step at a time? The child should at least be given a chance to have a father. See how it works out living with her when the baby is there. Your relationship with her will change then, because you will really have something in common.

In case it really doesn't work out, you can always split up with her, and after that pay her a monthly stipend to enable her to take care of your child.

I became a father 3 months ago, and my life didn't change so much after that in Thailand the father is not expected to do so much in the sense of changing diapers, getting up in the middle of the night to bottle feed, and so on.

I was always wondering if many freeloaders were attracted by Trink mentioning that a bar would be offering a free roast to celebrate the owner's birthday or something.

Just a thought.

Cases that I have seen of foreigners getting bank credit to build a resort or a hotel, they always had a Thai company limited that owned the land, and it was a prerequisite that not only the foreigner, but also at least one of the Thai partners had the right to sign on behalf of the company. A bank will be much more willing to consider a loan if construction has already started. Also, the bank will want to see that you can put up part of the investment yourself.

Speaking the fully correct Thai, saying krap and not kap, and farang instead of falang, would make you less well understood. An unwritten set of rules has developed when to pronounce the ร raw reua as an L and when as an R in informal everyday conversation. In the word karakadakom (july) it is an R, in falang it is an L. Sure it depends on where in Thailand you are, also. But I have seen Thais frowning their eyebrows, really having to concentrate understanding a foreigner who learned his oh so correct Thai in a language school.

Oh well, speaking a foreign language has its own psychology I guess. When I am speaking German, which is not my native language, I am sticking more closely to the correct grammar than the native speakers do. Speaking a foreign language you really want to speak it perfectly, whilst you are quite slack handling your own language.

Finding real village life in Issan is getting harder and harder - farangs are everywhere!

Better to state it this way: real village life 2007 is different from real village life 1977. Same applies for most American villages I guess: a Vietnamese family moved in and opened a grocery store, and wealthy city people built posh houses overlooking the lake. Sure there is at least a little bit of a farang presence almost all over the isaan, but outsiders moving is and always has been a fact of life everywhere.

Going to internetcafe's in the Isaan, I noticed that often Thailovelinks was in the browsers memorycache.

Two girls that I know registered at Thailovelinks, and they both received an expression of interest from the same American guy, 50+, living in Chiang Mai.

Forgot to mention that a lease contract for more than 3 years has to be registered with the land office in order to be valid, it also has to be written at the landpaper.

Just to make sure......did you tell the owner you want to stop? If he agrees, the contract can be terminated any moment. If he refuses to cut you loose, yes, than you should seek the advice of a lawyer.

many dont even have work permits. Everything they have to do is done through their wife and all permits/licences are in their wifes name.

Sure, but they have to be very cautious. People have been busted for things like recommanding a bottle of wine in the restaurant which they were effectively running without having a work permit.

Working without a work permit can have very serious legal consequences, such as being extradited and being declared persona non grata.

Anyways I think we are straying from the original topic a little bit.

Some of these people undeniably spend a lot of time here, but usually they don't keep on doing that for so long. Members who post very much, they come and they go. For one reason or another sooner or later they shift their attention to their life offline.

Its definately a lot harder to go it alone in los. Having a thai wife would would make it a lot easier.

Yes and no, Obsession.

For somebody who cannot speak and read Thai sufficiently, indeed a wife or another trusted person is in many cases needed to overcome the language barrier, and the cultural barrier.

But on the other hand, especially in a small business, the farang owners wife's presence can have a negative impact if she is bossing around the staff too much. She will automatically regard herself as being the co-owner, and act as such.

The OP asked a very good question!

What happens to expats who are still in Thailand when they are so old that they cannot take care properly of visas and other paperwork anymore? Normally in Thailand old people are taken care of by the family, and one can only hope for the aging expat that he also has a family/family in law that he has instructed in time, when his mind was still clear, when and how to assist him with his visa extensions.

I remember that when I was travelling in India in the seventies, people told me there were old people's homes for British people who stayed on in India after it became independant in 1947. A number of years ago I heard mentioning that there was an old people's home for westerners in Pranburi, south of Hua Hin, but I have no idea if this is true or not.

Maybe time to start contemplating a Thaivisa members old people's home!