DiDiChok

Read the book that should have come with the bike. It tells you how to turn off the "oil service" light by pressing a combination of buttons on the hamdlebars. All newer Honda bikes are like that now. Google the service manual if you haven't got the book. Back street bike fiddlers change the oil but don't know which buttons to press, whereas Dealers do.

Atterberg??? Would that be David Attenborough?

I had tri-focal lens implants because of cataracts back in 2021 at St. Peter's. All my astigmatism and other focussing problems got corrected in one go. I can now thread a needle, read four inches from my eyes, use a computer, read a newspaper and see in the far distance without glasses and I'm 74 now. I'm well chuffed with the result and no longer have to deal with opticians. Cost? Well, to sort out my problems was ฿230,000 in total for everything (both eyes and all out-patient treatment) and I don't begrudge a satang of it. I had thick lenses, astigmatism and poor eyesight since I was seven and now can see everything clearly and only need nice sunglasses. If you look on their web site (Google St Peters Hospital Chiang Mai) and they quote per-eye starting prices of ฿48,850 for mono, ฿68,850 for mono foldable and ฿98,850 for multi focal. With something as important as your eyesight, I can't imagine anyone not wanting to get everything sorted out properly in one go. If I'd known in full beforehand how good it was going to be, I'd have sold my soul to the devil to get the result. How did I end up at that hospital? I asked the elderly (like me) in my little village where they went and what they'd had done. My advice is to bite the bullet, find the money for them to do the best job for you and really enjoy the rest of your shuffle along the twig. I know people who've now had this same implant surgery in their late forties, which the hospital does under the name "Prelex". Slightly off topic, I was astounded to find someone who had discovered a German contact lens that uses the same multi-focus technology. He hadn't got cataracts but now doesn't need reading glasses any more. Technology is moving on so quickly these days. You never know what's just around the corner.

I'd say that a total price including outpatient checkups of ฿315,000 to ฿335,000 is around ฿100,000 over the top but it does depend on the treatment being provided. I paid ฿233,020 for both eyes in Chiang Mai and I can now read again without reading glasses and see in the distance better than I have ever done before. All my astigmatism was corrected and that required more to be done that just inserting the new intra-ocular lenses. They called it "SuperSight surgery" and they weren't wrong. I have never been so pleased with anything medical before, and this was all done in the middle of the pandemic. I'd suggest that the OP goes with whoever is recommended by lots of people. I asked around in my local village and it was soon clear from what I call the "Grandma mafia" who run everything, that I should go to the same place as all the Grandmas and Grandpas had done. So I did. You could say that I have never looked back . . .

The really good thing about Thailand is that there are plenty of rules either to choose from or to ignore. Makes me smile every day.

I've found that the eVisa site is a bit "sticky" now and then after certain questions, but does proceed after a short delay. Most infuriatingly, the error messages are either obscure or non-existent, so you must look at what you've submitted again and again. When it doesn't move on you must check really carefully that you have answered all the questions so far in full and that no error messages have appeared. Then you stand a chance of submitting the application.

This logic is what I call the "Eat s**t, 100 trillion, billion, milllion flies can't all be wrong!" argument.

Oh dear, I do feel for those suffering, but I think the problem may have been misdiagnosed (see rhyme at end). I suspect that as most of you do not have anything to do with three phase systems, you are unaware of the problems that come with these supplies. You are quite happy that individual houses and street lights are on different phases and never have a problem. Everything is quite all right as long as everyone either takes current from a phase and it is returned down the neutral or uses phase to phase power. But computers and other electrical "switched mode" devices put a whistle on the wires. Low voltage power supplies are often of this type as it means a transformer is not required when supplying low voltages. I take it that you do like the new low wattage street lights? Anyway, this "whistle" gradually undoes any screws holding wires to connections. In an office environment with multiple computers in it, someone is usually deputed once a year to go round and tighten up all the little screws. To alleviate the problem nowadays since there are multiple low voltage lamps everywhere, clips are used to hold wires in connectors instead of screws. Now, what happens when someone is taking power from live to neutral on one phase, but then the neutral's connection to its transformer is lost? There are three phases but only one neutral, so when the connection to the transformer's neutral is lost you get phase to phase current flow at 415 volts between your phase and what you thought was your neutral and not the 230 volts you were expecting. The current may be quite large as well. So everything goes "boom" and everyone wonders why. This causes great consternation when this fault is intermittent as it may well be because something heats up and causes the fault, only to cool down and restore normality. People are already saying that there are voltages between earth and neutral that are sometimes quite large, so the problem seems obvious to me. Street lights (like houses) are often very sensibly wired to the phases in order going along a road, to even the load out on each of the phases. Someone should get all the neutral connections checked right away or at least tell someone in authority about the problem before someone gets killed. This is why you should use double pole switches on mains supplies and not just a single pole isolating what you thought was the live wire. I think the rhyme goes like this: "Little boy, big pliers, playing with electric wires. Big flash, loud crash, little boy reduced to ash".

Back in the days when Gold was ฿8,000 for a ฿1 chain, I bought a lovely ฿2 rope one. I had it for many years, but then a Katoey said to me "You are good Falang and generous but you is walking safe deposit and it dangerous". So the next day I sold it for ฿25,000 and have never bought any since. Good advice. I just hadn't realised what I had been doing flashing it around.

When I bought a new Honda City RS they said the first year's insurance was included free. So I went through it with a toothcomb looking for the flaws as I have always had my own first class (read that as UK comprehensive) insurance. Knowing Thailand, I soon found them. The first class insurance in Thailand is based on the car's declared value. If you are aware of this then you ask to adjust the value downwards every year and consequently pay less and less. If you don't bother to revise the value yearly, then the vehicle price remains static and so you waste money by paying the same premium every year. You may think that it is kind of the Company not to increase the premium, but that is not so. To make the "included insurance" seem a good deal and be inside the budget set by his Company, the individual salesman had reduced the declared purchase value of the car to the insurer. The additional "Extras" ordered for the car had also not been included. Once the total value was revised properly and a supplement was paid, I became much happier. Just don't take what any salesman says for granted and that includes insurance salesman.

It's *125*1# but you've got to do it when you're in Thailand.

This much:

What a gloomy lot of people in this thread! Yes, we're all going to die, but not today for most people. Immigration Officers are Police, in the Government scheme and will be all right when they retire. However, I do agree that this is not so for many other occupations. In my village we've got all kinds of Government ex-employees who are comfortable and others have various ways of getting income including skimming from their children as mentioned before. Is nobody thinking that the real reason for raising the pension age is caused by the lower numbers of contributing younger people these days? Pensions are something that you have to contribute to over many years, as I did over 40 years and I can tell you that it wasn't cheap either. But I was educated about it before I was 20 by my parents and I'm now over 70. Thailand has only just woken up to Pensions and most wouldn't pay into one even if they'd got the money to do that. The part of the Thai mind set that thinks about the future is not as well set up as it is in the west, but that is now changing at last. An insurance broker and financial adviser lives nearby and he tells me that now, retirement planning is one of his best business aspects. I remember bursting out laughing in my 20's when I met someone for the first time who he told me that he hadn't got a pension. I thought it was a kind of April fools' joke. When I started work you had to join the pension scheme or you couldn't have the job. I had just been assuming that everyone else was in the same situation and they aren't. You cannot base your retirement on a plan based on winning the lottery. I blame the "woke" generation to whom everything is now optional when to us "Boomers" it plainly isn't.

When someone can advise this "Brit" what a "y'all" is, what it eats and where it lives, perhaps I could start caring as well.

I've used my physical Kasikorn Visa card online to buy airline tickets with Air Asia, Bangkok Air and Emirates with no problems whatsoever. The Emirates fare was ฿110,000 and it just went through without a murmur. Mind you, I used the Kasikorn App to set the spending limits accordingly to allow the transaction. No problem was encountered because the card name says "Privileged Member" and I always use the name in my passport in full as the card name, as that is the name on the account in the "Book Bank". I can report that the card works in ATMs here in the UK and the six digit pin isn't a problem either. In fifty years of flying, no airline has ever asked to see the card used to buy my ticket.

I fell for it as the "better half" was out at the time the delivery arrived. I got some plastic cruets for my ฿900.

Your previous reply was correct in my opinion with a multi-entry visa that's got time on it, leave the country and come back in by land or air. I wish more people knew not to advise getting a 30 day extension from Immigration that is designed for extending 30 days on entry exemption and tourist visas only. For other types you can't, Thai immigration law prevents it. Bleating to immigation that the visa you came in on was marked "Used" on entry or that the stay has nearly expired, that you have only two days of legal stay left and that you just need a few more days doesn't make any difference! But, and here's the strange thing: If you insist on applying and spending (wasting) the ฿1,900 then you get an automatic refusal and seven days extension of stay after which you must leave the country or then be on overstay. An immigration supervisor had to be summoned to sort it out for me. I got caught in this complicated trap because of bad advice and nearly went on overstay but at least the dodge got me the "breather" that I needed to do a quick out and back in visa exempt on a visa run bus. After this, I found that once you've got the odd stamp all immigration officers ask questions about it because no reason for the rejection is specified. Visa companies warn that once you have got this automatic extension by rejection, that they can no longer help you during what's left of your current visit. For your enjoyment, below is the stamp that I got.

I paid a PEA electricity bill for someone in "the family" who had not paid for some months. I did what one of the locals told me to do. That was to pay using my Kasikorn account and the "CA/Ref. No. 1" from a previous bill. I think the latest bill came up first so I paid it. I then repeated the process, and a previous unpaid bill came up, so I paid that. As I remember, the third time I tried it said the balance still wasn't zero so I paid that as well. The fourth time it said there was nothing to pay. If someone hadn't told me about this, I doubt that I would have tried to pay multiple times until it said zero. We're used to bills coming up with the total amount to be paid and not in individual increments. But hey, this is Thailand!

I got my size 62 from a shop in Pattaya Tai not far up on the right going towards Sukhumvit Road. Most Thais are 68 and that's all you can get in the supermarkets and most shops. I also got a size 62 from a Honda dealer in Nonthaburi in Bangkok. Really, your best bet is to ask big bike dealers as they have customers looking for proper helmets.

For me, the word "unaffected" simply does not mean much. I think that most people know what a "Bank Run" is, so I'll leave you to look into that further if you need to. This "unaffected" could possibly mean that there are no lines of people queueing to get their money out of a Bank. However, there is something called a "silent run" that is equally devastating and applies to Thailand. A "silent run" is when depositors reduce their balance in an institution to the guaranteed or insured amount. You may remember the Thai Government slowly reduced the guarantee for Bank accounts down to ฿1,000,000 per depositor per institution from a much higher level over the last few years. This guarantee comes into force when a Bank collapses to provide certainty that depositors are refunded up to that amount. I think Thailand reduced the amount because most have less than ฿50,000 in the Bank as shown by a recent survey. You may note that SVB covered $US250,000 and the UK covers £85,000. What depositors do with excess money to keep it safe is answered by how much they have. If there are enough Banks so that depositors' money can be spread between them to guarantee repayment in full, it's fine for the depositor. Otherwise, assets must be held outside the banking system in other tradeable ways such as gold, property or art. If enough money is moved in this way it is the same as a bank run with the same deadly consequences. Remember that nobody will tell you when a "silent run" is taking place but the Banks' risk evaluators will know and will alert the management. Being prudent, I did "silent runs" in the UK back in 2006 before the big crisis hit there. When the crisis happened, the UK Government decided to guarantee all deposits and averted catastrophe so my plan wasn't actually needed, but it could well have been. So "Unaffected" only means keep calm really and you should make of that what you wish. That's fractional banking for you.

I don't drink Chang any more because of what I call a "Changover". It's a kind of muzzy in the head feeling the next day. I've always assumed that there is an additive that's making that happen. It would be nice if someone analysed some to find out.

For cataract surgery, the price will depend on your prescription. Are you astigmatic and do you want that fixed? Shall we install fixed focal length lenses? Do you want to be a teenager again and for us to install the variable distance lenses that have the new "reading" component as part of the lenses so that you don't need reading glasses any more? Should we do "Limbal relaxing" to correct minor astigmatic faults? and so on . . . I simply asked for a successful outcome and the best job that they could do. I had top of the range everything done in 2021 and paid ฿250,000 in total for everything for both eyes, and I was astigmatic, short sighted and 71. 20 minutes for each eye and everything has been brilliant since. The biggest surprise was the colour restoration to my vision as I used to be a heavy smoker. The surgeon said that the original lenses had gone really brown. I've been told since that I paid too much and could have got it done more cheaply, but I am so grateful and pleased with the end result that I don't care. I had thick spectacles from the age of seven.

It's not so much the statins that I don't like, as I experienced a lot of trouble when I took them. After a month or so, I had terrible muscle pains and was confined to an armchair all day. Even trying different statins made no difference. My brother always took them in the morning, but I had to tell him that they had to be taken in the evening as that was when the "Bad cholesterol" was at its peak. It's pointless to take them in the morning. What I don't like is the way that the bad cholesterol is "Measured" because that isn't what actually gets measured. Two other things get measured and then the "Bad" level is computed. It's a right old fiddle. What's more, it depends on the time of day that the levels were measured. As I understand it, the "Bad" level is low during the day but starts to rise in the evening with a peak overnight. From early morning on, the level drops again to near nothing. To reduce the high level overnight, Statins must be taken in the evening. So if in the past you always got tested in the morning, try to get a test done in the afternoon and you'll be surprised by the "level" reported. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but when the pharmaceutical companies earn so much money from statins and throw money at Doctors to promote Statins, it's no surprise to me that they shut all dissenting voices up. I agree with the dissenters because I found Statins to be a poison. I'm fully vaccinated and have had Covid but I won't take Statins ever again.

I was in a similar situation except that the passport number Kasikorn had got for me was from two passports ago. Nevertheless, they updated everything and the address using the current passport only. However, as I used to use online Banking on a PC, they had to be asked to change that address, the one used for the phone app plus any others. It seems that depending on how long you've had the account, things may be recorded elasewhere on previous systems. At the same time, I discovered that they were now able to record lots more information as there were new fields on their screen. I was able to add my UK address and so on. If you run into difficulties and they try to persuade you to go back to the original branch where you opened the account, simply ask them to call the call centre. There are also "Customer Service Captains" available if you've a thorny problem.

While noting that the OP didn't mention using an IDP in Vietnam, I'd observe that: If Jeremy Clarkson (see Top Gear - Vietnam episode) could get a Vietnamese Driving Licence (maybe only at the upmteenth try) then you should be able to as well?