digbeth

The raids seem to be focused on hotels for now, it's low hanging fruits, there's always managers to arrest, hotels to close down. Raiding AirBnB condos will be difficult, actual co-owners not present, they're not gonna kick out the hapless tourist caught up in this.

The Hotel Act does allow for unlicenced 'homestay' short term rentals for house with no more than 4 rooms, taking less than 20 guests, so the villas might get by under this exception.

I've seen some townhouses that converted to backpacker hostels that might also be able to operate under the 4 rooms too.

Condo co-owners that rent out short term could argue that if they only had the one unit, that counts as less than 4 room, but recent rulings might seem that they count the whole building

Last time I looked a couple of years back they had a program with opening for limited time/slots per year that you can join, and the deal breaker was that only 'approved' equipment must be used and maintainance/replacement must be approved and you're 'locked in' for the 3-5 year contract effectively means you can't repair/upgrade/improve your system down to the battery.

Nam Prik Pao - like the stuff used in Tom Yam Soup spread over taost, lightly in amount like you would spread Vege/Marmite is a thing

23 hours ago, johng said:

I looked on Google this afternoon and the Satellite image doesn't show the spur road that connects to sukhumvit at the yacht club is not up to date...later I drove past and the road is almost joined to sukhumvit now on the southern carriageway...I'm not sure what they have planed for the northern carriageway to link up but they have widened sukhumvit road on that area both ways by 1 lane each.

Google Earth the program is more up to date than Google Map on the web

1 hour ago, spidermike007 said:

...No doubt the wine duty was about a small lobby, that paid a senator to pass anti fareng wine legislation, to promote a handful of very inferior domestic wineries. A myopic policy, that staggers the imagination. T

Have you looked at the price of 'real' Thai wines, they are even more expensive than the fruit juice diluted imported stuff

There are high tariff/ excise duties on 'luxury goods' such as wines and are arbitrarily applied yes, but they are not done at the bequest of Thai wineries.

The real culprit would be the Lao Khao and Rum/'Thai Whisky' distilleries that would lose out if these alcohol 'sin tax' is applied rationally, like per % of the alcohol content.

2 hours ago, bluesofa said:

I know this isn't exactly regular, but does the annual steam excursion that used to go to Kanchanaburi around December time still run?

 

Steam Trains usually run on the big holidays, the December one is on Father's Day 5th December

There might be one on 23 October for King Rama V day going to Bang Pa In Palace in Ayutthaya

Some steam train rides goes east to Chachoengsao 

Back in Australia when they covered up Spencer St. Station in Melbourne and turned it into brand new Southern Cross Station, there're lots of issue with diesel fumes being trapped under the roof, and that was design with western health and safety standard.

Electrified rail will only still be a small part of this new station where most are still diesel trains, the exhaust of fumes is a solvable problem and probably has been designed it be capable architect and engineer. But looking at how much of a bungled mess Suvarnabhumi Airport has been, and how State Railway of Thailand has managed to run the Airport Link into the ground.... one could only be hopeful

The only way you can make it to Utapao from Pattaya and the distance come to around 60Km is if you head up north to 36 either using the Hwy7 or Via Sukhumvit and then down to Utapao on the 331

Otherwise, crossing from Sukhumvit to 331 either at Silverlake or Phoenix or even going down to Utapao using Sukhumvit alone via Ban Chang should be more than 40-45Km

If you follow the news, there's big hotel bust too, 100+rooms hotels that's been operating for decades even, so it's not just small guesthouses 

I don't think the bus shelter is that old, judging by the font used and construction (composite aluminium paneling) It's probably installed during the last mayor's Intthipol Khunpluem first term, so around 2008-2010

There are now newish cheap end brands that has fully imported no-fruit juice (non-orange tax lable) wines from Australia and France that works out at sub 300 baht per bottle, some even have big 2 litre size bottle too, works out cheaper than the likes of Mont Claire now

Looks like the wines with fruitjuice loopholes is closed for good

Still wondering if Thai authorities will consider wine with added 'grape juice' as one of the fruit wine category ?

not only subject but prepositions can also and often be omitted and makes formal Thai writing clear as mud

What can a shareholder be voted out of if he hasn't been bought out and the shares bought back by the remaining shareholders? From preferred to ordinary shares? or the rest of the shareholder just forced him to sell back the shares?

On 5/31/2018 at 2:31 PM, kingstonkid said:

The parents are also to blame for not making sure their daughters were dressed properly for school.  We all know what the dress code is.  Could it be that they have done this before??

 

If they have to wear three layers of clothing in Thailand's weather to protect their modesty perhaps the school uniform is too thin. Or maybe the concept of the 'bra' is too offensive in that seeing the outline of a bra through clothing is detrimental to learning so it's better to go without

the use of 'underwear' here is misleading, the teacher made the girl take off her bra as punishment for not wearing another layer of undervest to protect her modesty

yes, punishment for not being modest enough by taking off more clothes... if it's logical it wouldn't have been in the news

Khanom Jeen is not originally Thai but has etymology from Mon people which is well integrated into Thai culture

Central is now doing an 'outlet mall' near Suvarnabhumi airport now, possibly to bus the tour group over, so there's a lucrative market there. But I don't think T21 or even Central Festival is set up for big tour groups to be bussed over and herded around, it'll be popular with independent tourist definitely, but the typical mall lacks 'attraction' like a duty free or souvenir shop that is wiling to pay kickbacks to the tour operator like in Mike's or most out of town tourist trap. 

Also

Central Festival Beach road is slated to be renovated in the second half of 2019, so they definitely feels the pressure from T21, but renovating later, and after T21 will have been opened for almost a year, rather than sooner probably reflects their 'wait and see' approach to new competition in Pattaya.

6 hours ago, johng said:

What about the car park  is that open earlier ?

Car park is open 24 hours, I've been there too early and have to use the stairs in the carpark to get down to ground level,

23 hours ago, trigpoint said:

 turn off the 7 to rayon hwy 36, toll gates no holdup and free for that bit, 
 

It's ten baht from Pattaya to that exit now

I doubt that there's really a school that teaches สุนัข but not หมา

If there really is a school as such, I think it's the quality of the school that's the problem, not whether Thai has too much loanwords from Sanskrit.

It'd be equally preposterous for a learner of English as foreign language to complain that English contain too many words with French/German/Greek and Latin origin ruining the spelling with all the irregularities why cant dem skool teach english like how we speek it on da street innit?

5 hours ago, Pib said:

Thought I would do a test to see if making a Playbox Wifi connection to my smartphone DTAC network hotspot would allow AIS Play to stream since my AIS Fibre connection is down right now.  It didn't....although the Playbox made the Wifi connection to my smarpthone OK the Playbox was not getting an IP address from the AIS servers.  

 

Don't know if that means the Playbox will only play on an AIS Fibre line...or it means the problem they are having right now (at least in my area/for my account) has my account not working at their central servers regardless of how you connect.  

 

Once my AIS Fibre service is restored/working normally again to include the Playboxes I then run the smartphone DTAC hotspot test again.

I have more than 1 AIS Fibre location, I tried moving the Play box over to the other AIS Fibre that didn't have the AIS Play service and it won't play, so it seems like the box is tied to your 'number' 

AIS Play app however, will play over WIFI just fine, and it streams over WIFI to Chromecast with less problem than the AIS Play box

2 hours ago, rak sa_ngop said:

So what is the story behind Pattaya Posh (next to North Pattaya bus station)? Looks finished to me?

I checked and there's nothing on rental too, strange

if it swams there's แมงหวี่

There used to be a moratorium about Rueng Rueng Pattaya coach coming back from Ekamai not going into Chonburi City during rush hour like 4-6PM, any other time is fair game as they try to fill the empty bus with passengers that stops earlier along the route, but in the past years that I have used them I've never had a bus that went into Chonburi and Sri Racha at all. Maybe the passenger numbers throughout the day is good enough that they don't need to pad the seats with Chonburi passengers anymore, the couple of time that I had used the bus recently it's filled with independent Chinese tourist now.

The official 'request' stops seem to start at Rong Poh (north of Nong Prue) that's where the bus turn right back up north on Sukhumvit from Hwy.36 before coming back down to Pattaya