xylophone

No but Fanny is his Aunt!!

I like your reply because in some ways it mirrors my retirement here, as a single guy, but with an unofficially adopted Thai daughter who does her own thing anyway, I have plenty of time on my hands but I'm never "bored". I am a completely different person now in my retirement that I was in my younger days and professional working life, where I always wanted to be successful and pushed myself to the limits. In my youth it was football which was my passion, then travelling and adventure to various inhospitable places, then switching to the corporate world and studying and training in various disciplines before retiring at the age of 58. Now I rent an apartment, have a motorbike and a car which I like driving around the place, although not in the centre of Patong, visiting shopping malls, planning meals and cooking them of course. I also like hunting around for new wine experiences and wine bargains, and like you, I'm quite happy doing absolutely nothing apart from spending far too much time on my computer and not just on AN!! I never drink during the daytime and I will never be one of those poor unfortunates sitting on a bar stool day in and day out, although I will go out in the evening about once a week to meet up with a friend or two and may well have a drink at a favourite bar. I never thought I could be this happy doing nothing as I was just the opposite when I was younger, and this life seems to suit me now I have reached the age of 76.

Have just watched, "Mr Bates vs The Post Office" and thought it was bloody brilliant, a bit of a tear jerker at times and with great British acting. Made my evening, so, many thanks to whoever recommended it!

As I have said in another post, his leaving is not specifically because of hospital costs, but mainly because he is disillusioned with life here as a whole. He also has a large mobile home (very large apparently) in Canada in which he can live and in which he can travel around in and stay with friends and relatives, a bit of a nomadic existence, if you like...........he gave Phuket (Patong) a try, but not for him now.

NO.............that is an added extra and not the main reason. He is simply tired of all that goes on in Patong from corruption to traffic, to bad roads, to unruly and ignorant tourists, to crowded sidewalks to............etc, etc. And to add to that a couple of bad experiences with women. He has had an eye operation here and paid for it and he has a pension as well as savings; he liked hunting and fishing and living a little free and now he misses it.

I think with quite a few people who decide to leave Phuket, what was once "living the dream" is no longer, so there are many aspects of life in Phuket which can grate, and it's quite possibly a combination of things which make people leave. One of the friends who left for the UK has a family there and wants to see his grandchildren grow up, as well as getting tired with life in Patong. Whereas the other friend is disillusioned and because he is facing some health problems (not severe I may add) then going back to Canada will ensure that he can get them fixed free of charge.

Well he obviously does have a competent team to support him because the economy in the USA is doing very well indeed under his and his team's guidance. As regards corruption, well nothing has been established about this, and although many Republicans have looked into this matter, no one has found any evidence of corruption. The Trump family corruption though, is an entirely different matter.

I note your comments, but I don't think that my friend is a candidate for that flying club, because despite all that has befallen him, he still has a positive attitude and knows that he can go back to Canada and get work there. I think he has put it all down to experience and he has enjoyed some of the time in Patong, but poor decisions have eventually bought him to his senses.

Traffic, traffic, crowds and noise – – about sums up my venture into Patong Central last night. However the traffic situation was horrendous with the traffic backed up from the roundabout at the end of Nanai, to Soi Nanai 8, and then further backup on all of the other approach roads, and the reason was......two members of the BIB were endeavouring to direct traffic around the roundabout with absolutely no success whatsoever with cars and motorbikes whizzing by on either side of the roundabout from any direction, despite the BIB guys waving their lighted battens at the perpetrators. It was an absolute disaster and one would have thought that it was a film set for a sketch in an episode of, "Monty Pythons Flying Circus", because it was so unbelievably bad, not funny. However my young motorbike taxi driver managed to weave in and out of a lot of this chaos and got me to Blue Beach Cafe and Restaurant after a 20 minute ride from Nanai! Good man. Blue Beach was a welcome haven from all of this turmoil and I caught up with an old friend there, and much to our surprise and delight, there was only background soft music playing from a DJ, which was brilliant, and allowed us to be able to have a conversation across the table, whilst enjoying the food and a glass or two of wine. It was an enjoyable "catch up", but at about 9:30 PM my friend decided to head off home, whilst I ventured up Bangla, weaving in and out of the endless moving stream of bodies to get to a quiet little bar in Soi Sea Dragon (yes, they do exist). Bangla was jampacked and it was hard to make my way against the endless stream, most of whom seemed to be heading towards the beach area, and in amongst that melee were Chinese, a fair amount of Indian folk and many others whom I couldn't distinguish by their looks. Whilst the music bar/venue at the bottom of Bangla (the beach end) had only about half a dozen customers in it, despite there being a live band, the live music bar, "New York" was not only packed inside, but had people standing eight deep outside of it listening to the music! Bar funk was not very busy and overall the smaller bars did have some customers, but not many. I headed home on the back of a motorbike taxi at about 11 PM and getting out onto the middle road from Soi Sansabai was a bit like taking your life in your hands, or should I say placing it in the hands of the motorbike taxi driver, because it was downright dangerous, but we managed it okay. During the daytime on Friday the traffic was at times, gridlocked, and as other posters have commented on here and other threads, it is becoming a nightmare which Patong cannot really handle. Just before I sign off, there is a large "depression" in the concrete in Soi Banzaan, which has been there now for about three years or more and is slowly getting deeper, and I do believe it was made when a very large truck was waiting to get into the vacant land beside the small hotel called, "The House". Despite it being there for some time and slowly getting worse, nothing has been done about it and it won't be long before someone is thrown off their motorbike after hitting that – – beware.

I spent a little time in Chiang Rai, along with my girlfriend at the time and our daughter, and I thought it was a lovely place, and even looked at houses to buy, but eventually came back to Patong to live and have been here ever since! Just occasionally I get the urge to go back to Chiang Rai to have a look at it, but my Thai daughter wants to live in Phuket, so I suppose I'm pretty well stuck here, unless I can persuade her that Chiang Rai also has other teaching opportunities for her. Time will tell.

Palestinians living side by side with Israelis would IMO be normal, even if they never managed it in the recent past!! You took my use of the word "normal" too literally.

Sadly, a good friend of mine who has lived here most of the time for years has now decided to call it quits and has moved back to the UK. I am in contact with him and he says although the weather is disgusting, he is glad to be free of the traffic, Russians, invading Chinese and poor roads here in Patong/Phuket – – he owned a Triumph Bonneville and loved riding it around, but not safe to do that now, so sold it and he has gone. Another friend is considering going back to Canada because he is fed up/bored with Patong and has been financially shafted by one Thai girlfriend, thereby losing his business, and his latest Thai girlfriend has decided to dump him! Not a happy chappy, so I expect him to leave very shortly. As I have posted previously, this is not the place I remember it to be, but I'm tied here by friends and a daughter, so I will have to put on a happy face and carry on!

I was Chief Manager Investments for a major New Zealand bank, and I and another guy had started the division, which I was now running, along with 25 Investment Advisers and a team of back office investment personnel. A far cry from my days working for oil companies in the Sahara desert (twice), Nigeria, offshore Norway and a couple of North Sea platforms. The stress of the bank job was starting to get to me, so I took a holiday in Phuket, and around two years later I was living here!

Surely a fairly simple solution would be for a ceasefire for a period of time to be agreed whilst Hamas released all of the hostages, and Israel to release the same number of prisoners which it has – – a release of hostages for the release of some prisoners. Nothing difficult about that. The problem, amongst many, seems to be that Hamas will agree to release a certain number of hostages whilst wanting the Israelis to release many hundreds of prisoners, many of whom are convicted of terrorist acts and that's not a fair trade in anyone's language. Also of course Hamas will not lay down their arms, simply because they are a terrorist organisation whose main aim is to destroy Israel and the Israelis, so you have a stalemate which is damn near impossible to navigate. When Hamas is wiped out, things could return to normal, apart from the fact that many Palestinians support Hamas and their activities, so that will go on, sadly.

As has been noted by another poster, the chief investigator was an out and out Republican and Trump supporter, so being able to portray Biden as he has done in this report, could be seen as a move to "balance the scales" if you like, with Biden being portrayed as senile and incompetent versus Trump being a liar and a crook?? Food for thought, but at least Biden has not tried to buy Greenland or suggest that ingesting/injecting bleach could cure Covid, and whilst Biden might be a little senile, Trump is pure dumbness, bigly so.

Listening to Biden speak on this, there is no way that one can ascertain that he is mentally deficient/incompetent, because he comes through this very well, despite an occasional gaffe and the cackling and shouts from the floor. Rest assured, he knows what he's doing.

How disgusting is that, but then again they support another terrorist group, Hamas, so this is not surprising and really shows their true colours.

I will try and help you out here, whilst people may not "love Joe Biden", the other option is an absolute disaster. What is there to like about Trump, who is a compulsive liar, a convicted thief, stealing from a charity, a "rapist", someone who has ripped off the average American working man with his bankruptcies, possibly endangering America safety and security by the stealing of classified documents and a man who pays for his hookers out of campaign funds – – and plenty more to add to this but I'm sure you get the picture. Oh, and one more thing, he is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

"Birds of a feather", perhaps!!

Thanks for recommending this, as I watched it and thought it was very good, and although slightly off topic, but still related, it added to my knowledge of the persecution and murder of the Jews. I say this because I have read many instances where people have suggested that it was only the German "Nazis" who were doing the killing, and I had no idea that Lithuanians and Latvians were also culpable in the murders. In addition, other people, mainly Germans, have stated in the past (and one German in my workplace said the same to me) that the everyday German knew nothing about the concentration camps and the persecution and slaughter going on, yet there are many archives of this period which show everyday German citizens dragging Jews from their homes and shops and attacking them. Hitler and Nazism were a akin to a cult......say no more!

For some reason, as I was out this afternoon picking up a few things for dinner, the words of a Joni Mitchell song came to mind, brought about by your comment above: – "Pave paradise and put up a parking lot"......not quite the same, but I'm sure you get my drift!

Read a few of his posts over the recent past and you will get your answer........now you can go back down the rabbit hole again.

So now you know how it drive it Mac.......😉