TheSiemReaper

Nobody finds it all weird that an adult man wants to buy his girlfriend a giant teddy bear?

You had me at crumpets and then lost me when you don't deliver them to Chiang Mai... if you froze them, they'd travel as well as meat and cheese...

I get my maids from Loi Kroh for about 1,500 Baht a shift - they're terrible at housework but excellent at polishing my... ;-)

There are a ton of Facebook groups dealing with second hand stuff in Chiang Mai. Don't know about physical bricks and mortar stores though.

I have looked at those Facebook buy and sell groups and talk about greed or hating to give anything away. They are selling their secondhand junk for just below the buy as new prices.

Not worth it, new goods are cheap enough.

Not all of them. I bought a cheap espresso machine there (and very cheap exactly half the new price with 10 boxes of coffee pods - which were worth more than the machine) and a cheap USB standing microphone (which is an expensive microphone new). But yes, there are a ton of delusional wombats who want to sell their iPhones and iMacs for about $4 less than they paid for them 3 years ago too.

There are a ton of Facebook groups dealing with second hand stuff in Chiang Mai. Don't know about physical bricks and mortar stores though.

Does anyone know if you can buy the Thai made, Royal D, rehydration salt/sugar sachets here in Chiang Mai? I've found ORS and WHO made ones but they're absolute rubbish comparatively and Gatorade, etc. isn't working either.

Would be happy to buy them by the sachet or by the case from a wholesaler... just as long as I can find them at all.

The lesson here is - do your research before you invest in something and not at the point you intend to sell. This is a pure buyer's market and property will only sell if it meets the buyer's valuation. The fact that both Thai and farang have been hoist by their own greed is pretty much irrelevant to that.

This has been a 'pure buyers' market' ever since the European economy went pear shaped some ten years ago and has never recovered. Before that every Sunday would see some aging farang being scootered around my neck of the woods by his ti rak looking for something to buy her. I agree that a lot of greedy farang have contributed to the devastation of Phuket being enabled by the local bent OBJ's to throw up their Godawful multi storey condos in predominantly residential neighbourhoods, thus further devaluing their immediate neighbour's home's value at a stroke. I fortunately do not fall into this category but feel for the poor buggers who do.

I now also understand that to Thais, a structure is of very little importance/value, it's the land it sits on they prize, their coming from a culture where bamboo shacks were routinely replaced every year or so. They simply don't share Westerner's different value system.

I notice your nik. Toying with a relocation. How goes it in SR? Lovely town. Completely different vibe to here.

Already relocated. :-) I like Chiang Mai, it's not SR for sure but variety is the spice of life, right? :-)

Breaking News: These plans, as people already suspected, are on hold for the moment. Nimman will remain two-way.

The lesson here is - do your research before you invest in something and not at the point you intend to sell. This is a pure buyer's market and property will only sell if it meets the buyer's valuation. The fact that both Thai and farang have been hoist by their own greed is pretty much irrelevant to that.

I thought PhotoBug were absolutely brilliant. Good advice (and in fact tried to down sell me on two products that I wanted for cheaper alternatives that they felt were as good as the ones I was looking for), excellent overall service but absolutely not the place to go and buy a point and shoot camera - it's really geared for DSLR owners and people picking up bridge cameras.

There was a Jesus-shouter down by the night bazaar the other night. He's an annoyance but a pretty petty annoyance. Not worth confronting or arguing with - pretty much everyone just ignored him and went about their business.

Luxury studio for 3.5K Baht a month? Umm... no. Unless you define luxury as "somewhere that cockroaches live"- in which case, go right ahead.

If your budget is 2K Baht... you're doing very well to have found anything at all. If it's $2K USD... then you can pretty much rent a small palace for that kind of cash in Chiang Mai.

I liked the lanterns. I don't care if they're a long-term tradition or not - they're jolly nice. The people of Chiang Mai are entitled to start a tradition whenever they darn well feel like it. If you got to the UK at Christmas, you'll find travel is a lot more inconvenient, try Saudi on the second day of Eid when everyone is on holiday... you'll struggle there too.

I didn't move to Thailand for it to become an Asian version of the US or the UK - I moved here because it's different. We should be celebrating those differences not whining about them. The OP needs to get over themself - globalization is leading to a rapidly homogenized world; that should be resisted wherever possible not embraced so that you can skip through a queue faster at an airport.

At my first LK, 25 ÿears ago, there was nary a sky lantern to be seen. True, there is an old tradition of constructing and flying lanterns, but these were few, let off by temples as part of ceremonies, and not necessarily during Yee Peng. The mass production, mass marketing, and mass release are very recent phenomena, driven by a few clever capitalists who have learned how to privatize the gain and socialize the pain. One of those pretty little things sucked into a jet turbine on approach or takeoff (the lanterns, not the capitalists) would make for quite the fireworks display, and quite the headline.

Umm... no. One of those things sucked into a jet engine would do nothing. Birds (which are substantially more solid than paper lanterns) are regularly dragged through jet engines and shredded.

Well, it just goes to show that the terrorists are winning when some paranoid gets sympathetic murmurs on a Thai forum. I feel 100% safe mainly because I have a sense of proportion.

Further information. He has to obtain a thai passport and a tourist visa, On arrival in Taiwan, the agent will find him a job in a factory assembling mobile phones.

????

Seems highly unlikely - almost all the world's mobile phones are assembled in Shenzhen, China at the Foxconn campus (of literally millions of Chinese workers) there.

Pure scam unless your nephew has mad skills that are in high-demand and is already paid very well - there's nothing in Taiwan that's going to pay better. Given how little a Thai passport costs... that he's asking for the money says that this isn't the case. So it's a scam.

Leave Thailand on Thai passport. Enter UK on British passport. Leave UK on British passport. Enter Thailand on Thai passport. That's about it.

100% No for a rental car. If ASEAN ever results in freedom of movement, maybe but until then not a chance I'm afraid.

So many bitter people in Thailand. A visa agent provides a service. Only you can decide if it's worth the money to you. I'd happily pay 5,500 Baht to recover a day's worth of my time. When I die, it won't be days stood in queues at immigration that I will be thankful for.

Whoever took that photo needs to learn to use lightroom... it's dreadful.

Cats in your apartment? Use bungee cord!

Down Under bar is near the river past the night bazaar on Loy Kroh road...

It's the human condition to complain. Most people don't get the difference between "a holiday/vacation" and "normal life". Turn up with a year's hard-earned saved and go on a mega trawl of the tourists sites, stay in 5 star hotels and get accompanied by every lady in every bar in the country - then decide this is "heaven on earth". Come to live here... find you can only get a job as an ESL teacher... earn three-fifths of nothing... find that once the money's gone, life's pretty much the way it was back home. Get depressed and start whining.

Both sides in this come out badly though. You have the "I've been here 20 years, speak the language, earn next to nothing but I am superior to you because I know some Thai people" and the "I've been here a year, only hang out with other expats, and find life frustrating." both boring the living **** out of me. I'm a serial expat. Your 20 years in country is worthless unless you have some success to show for it - sure you can speak the language but you only use it to discuss farming or what you're going to eat tonight; I'm not impressed. Your one year in the country is also pretty worthless if you haven't found a bit of community and a place by then...