Ombra

You are right. My mother was born in 1920 and died in 2004. When she went to a supermarket, she calculated the cost of items faster than the cashier and she had the exact amount of money in her hand when the cashier told her the total. It was normal with people of her generation. And she complained about younger people's failure to do the same.

How can a person be coerced into spending 40 million baht?

Yes, indeed. It doesn't look like a photo of the main Rangsit road.

True. But dinner plates have almost doubled in size since the 1970s. Most people are eating far more than they need.

I don't think that I have ever seen a Toyota Land Cruiser in Thailand. I used to work in the UAE and I saw them every day.

There is an article in The Daily Beast today in which RFK Junior describes Donald Trump's diet as 'poison.' He says he lives on junk food and Diet Coke and that he has never seen him drink a glass of water. How does an overweight 78-year-oild man eat like that and yet work a ten- or twelve-hour day seven days a week? Is every meal accompanied by a handful of pills? It reminds me of Morgan Spurlock's film 'Super Size Me,' in which he lived for a month on hamburgers and fries - and died at the age of 53. That someone can eat like that amazes me.

So the same damaging policy - more and more tourists.

A couple of years ago, I read that Prachuap Prison had opened a car wash and that the work was being done by inmates, but I didn't try it until this week. The result was great. It was the most thorough cleaning that my car has ever had. For example, the plastic suction pad that holds my camera in place had left a series of rings on the inside of the windscreen, and I could never remember to clean them. The other car washes that I have been to over the past couple of years did nothing to remove them, but the prisoners did. This thorough cleaning cost 180 baht, which is half the price charged by the car wash at Lotus's. However, given that there are not many car washes in the town, other businesses may not be complaining about the very cheap labour at the prison. They might also be happy to see that young men are able to escape from their cells for a number of hours each day. Next to the car wash is an attractive cafe, a laundry, and a shop selling handicrafts made by prisoners.

It has taken them a long time to realise that bored travellers might appreciate having something interesting to eat.

My wife and I stayed in the hotel a couple of times twenty years ago or so. It was a good place to stay, and it had live music in the evening. I remember there was a very amusing Elvis impersonator. It was very convenient to walk through to the mall for coffee and shopping. I have happy memories of our visits.

Thanks to all the information in this thread, I renewed my visa last week without any problem. In the past, I have usually gone in the morning and last year I waited two and a half hours to complete the process. Last week, I left Thap Sakae at 7.30 a.m. but because of heavy traffic I didn't get out of the bank until 11.15, so I had lunch and got to the Office at 12.40. There were only two people ahead of me, but more arrived as opening time approached. There was no system of queuing, but as many of the later arrivals seemed to be German speaking, I thought that it would be quite orderly. I was wrong. When the Officer removed the chain at 1 p.m., they all made a dash for it, and I went from second place to about tenth or twelfth in five seconds. Despite that, I was in and out in half an hour so, if I am still here next year, I will go in the afternoon and keep an eye out for the Germans.

Can they even identify the remains of their children? How awful!

Expect rather than hope.

The distinguished Irish commentator, Fintan O'Toole, who is no apologist for Trump, pointed out that Trump can only succeed in debates when he has a very weak opponent like Joe Biden. He says that that is because of Trump's very limited experience of debating. For 11 years, he had his reality TV programme and then, since 2015, his political rallies. Hence, Trump's favourite speech style is the lengthy undisciplined monologue. O'Toole predicted immediately after the first debate that there would not be another.

At the Kasikorn Thai bank in Hua Hin, I tried to activate my account by depositing 100 baht, but they said that they couldn't accept such a small amount, so I deposited 1,000 baht.