Brewster67

Couldn't move in town today with all the traffic coming in to sell their votes to Thaksin, ooops, I mean sell their votes to the US State Department.

That's the thing, I have known him for 30 years, back in the UK he is never like that, he only went out once or twice a week and would just sit in the bar have a few beers and chat. he has even been here before, he was here 10 years ago for my wedding and he wasn't anything like that but he was with a few others who maybe kept him grounded... He seems to have changed// I won't be inviting him back. That is for sure.

Well that was a 10 days from hell I won't be wanting to repeat. I invited my friend over from the UK to visit Thailand and within days of his arrival I began to regret it. There is something about the British that whenever they go away, alcohol forms the central plank of their experience. Admittedly I was the same in my younger days but I am now in my late 50s and I am not here on holiday. This was a big miscalculation on my behalf. I had anticipated that I would be going out more and drinking more for the next week or so, but my friend just wanted to go out and drink every afternoon and evening... It was a very tough experience for me I can tell you. But if this wasn't bad enough, once my friend got a measure of beer into himself his behaviour changed for the worse. There is a catalog of things I can write but I won't bore you, I will pick out just 2 of many examples that made me literally wince. One evening when we were sat in a restaurant and he had a few beers down him, a car pulled up outside pumping loud Thai music from the stereo and the 2 occupants got out to greet a crowd of people they obviously knew. My friend looked in their direction and waved his fist in a faux masterbatory gesture and shouted Wa*k*ers, I was mortified, they definitely knew what he meant... I almost lost my mind, I had to grab his arm and pull it to the table, you just don't do that here, we could have easily ended up in the local emergency room. On another occasion I took him to a regular restaurant that i use a lot, and am rather friendly with the family who run it. The matriach of the family served us and my friend obviously took a liking to her and as she walked away from the table he grabbed her butt right in front of her twenty-something son who was in the army... The look on his face, if they hadn't known me so well I think it would have been all out war. You just can't do this stuff here, as you know Thai society is very conservative and polite. They will restrain themselves up to a limit but that limit is finite. The British have a bad reputation abroad especially across Europe, when they step on a plane, many of them leave their brains at home. I am almost ashamed of my countrymen... Don't get me wrong, not all Brits are like this in fact the majority are not. But there are enough of them that give us this reputation that brings the whole country to shame. Anyway, after I dropped him at the airport it was like a huge weight had come off my shoulders. I had to apologise to my Thai family multiple times. I won't be inviting anyone in the future unless i have had a long talk with them how to behave here. I think I now need a holiday to recover from my Friend's holiday.

Check my bio, been here 13 years, think I have a grasp of the place by now. If you are referring to time on this forum.... 8 years. You are clearly running out of steam with that last comment..... Bwahahahaha

You are taking too much sun with your Leo. Calm down, you will give yourself a stroke. Don't forget to check under bed, you never know what evils are waiting for you. Hell, A life in constant fear is no life.

Another crazy expat that seems to think there is a Thai behind every lamp post with a machete or a gun.... Where do all these farangs live that shows Thailand is such a violent place?.... It sounds like Pol Pot's Cambodia from the late 70s where you live. So you are saying that my wife accidentaly rolls over a stupid animal and all of a sudden someone is going to shoot her husband in the head who wasn't even in the car but sat innocently at home and THAT is a good way to get murdered by all those gun toting Thais in this Mad Max style hellscape I have moved to????? You need to write for Hollywood.

Civilized behaviour is not letting your dogs <deleted> all over the place so you get your neighbours to do the cleaning up for you, Civilized behaviour is not standing on your porch watching your dogs snapping at the heels of your neighbour and don't even attempt to call them away. Civilized behaviour is keeping your pets safe and not allowing them to lounge in a place where 1 tonne hunks of metal are regularly going. Civility is reciprocal, it aint no one way street.

Or MAN UP and teach the dumb idiots a lesson. To say if my wife can't go because of a dumb animal into her own steet trying to get to her house and you say 'Don't go'.... So what?.... You want my wife asnd kids to go stay at a hotel because of a stupid animal that is a historic nuissence to the community can't be arsed to get up and walk away??? A special kind of stupid

Way over the top and over-dramatic post... The wife didn't DELIBERATELY run it over and there is no proof, the dog isn't visibly injured and you live in a very different Thailand to me, because I have been here 13 years and I see more violence in the UK in a year than I have seen here in all my time here.... YOU must live in a part of Thailand where lunatics are running all around the place with machetes and guns... I would leave that place right now if you have two braincells to rub together. There will be NO compensation, the Thai family is way too well connected to the police for that to be enforced. Soi dogs have ZERO value to us, but you are right about one thing.... I AM happy.

Funny you should say that, I said the same thing to the wife, and she said if their dog bit somebody they would say 'not my dog'.

Its like being back in the 16th century sometimes ????

Well, I could see this one coming. The house three doors down has two dogs, from 6am to about 10pm they open their gate and leave it open all day. They let their dogs just come and go as freely as they please. These doge use anywhere they wish to use as their toilet and this is probably the reason they keep their gate open, so their neighbours have to clean up after their dogs. Another thing they do is lie bang in the center of the road and you literally have to creep right up to them before they can be bothered to get up and move away. They also are quite viscious, I literally can not walk round the corner to the shop without them barking and snapping at my heels.... Needless to say I am anything but fond of these creatures and I have nothing to do with that ignorant heighbour who will just stand on their porch watching their mutts harrass people and do nothing to stop it. My kids are literal prisoners of the garden. Well a few days ago my wife was returning home at about 8pm and as usual one of the mutts was lying in the road, she slowed right down to let it move out of the way, then after she thought it had moved she started too drive forward again when she heard this noise coming from under the car that sounded like a humpety bumpety sound... she stopped the car and then saw the dog coming out and dissappeared into the neighbours garden. It didn't look like it was limping and it didn't yelp or anything, so the wife parked the car outside our house and came inside and told me. I have to say, I smiled quite a bit and congratulated her, especially when she said there was nobody around to witness it. I told her to just forget it. Last night the wife got a message from our next door neighbour saying that somebody had seen her drive over the dog and that the neighbour was pi88ed off that she hadn't bothered to come to see if the dog was alright. The wife replied saying she didn't even know she had run over the dog, the wife then told me.... I just said DENY DENY DENY, if it aint on video it didn't happen and this witness must be mistaken, and with no actual evidence then nothing can be proven. The father in law says they will probably come to ask for compensation, I said they get nowt. Apparently the dog isn't even injured yet has not eaten any food for days. In summary... If you let your dogs out in the street all day terrorising your neighbours and letting them cr@p up and down the steet and just let them lay in the road, then when something bad happens to them..... THEIR FAULT. Compensation?..... yeah right, I wouldn't give 50 baht for those flea bitten Heinz 57 Variety soi dogs. I have no animus to dogs, in fact I am quite fond of the house pet variety owned by responsibe people, but those two.... Different matter.

Yeah, I probably will do that. Usually I would bring back a large quantity of Yorkshire Tea every time I visited the UK, but have not been there for years and am now exposed to the Thai market. But yes, I won't be buying Liptons again, I will be certainly taking your advice, until then I will be double bagging the cup till they are gone.

Just an observation, maybe someone else has examples. I just bought a box of Liptons Yellow Label tea bags and I noticed the tea was very weak, in fact I had to let the teabag brew for like 3 times longer than normal and had only about half the milk I usually add just to make it look like tea. I went online and looked up the product specs and it is supposed to be 2 grams of tea per bag, yet when I weighed a bag on my very accurate digital scales it came up as 965 mg, that is less than half the amount of tea than their usual product. I am pretty sure the Thai importer has got Liptons to make it to this spec to get the product in cheaper... I am quite bemused a major brand from the west is happy to lower their product quality to such extremes just to get sales. One would think brand reputation would be their number 1 motivation. I know this goes on here because I buy a regular brand of tinned sardines here and when you buy it from a shop there are three pieces of fish in the can. but when I bought a pack of 10 tins from Lazada as the price was around 25% lower, when I got them, every can had just 2 pieces of fish, so saving 25% and get 33% less.... Lol. Obvioulsy someone contacted the factory and asked them to reduce the fish in the can to reduce the costs and the factory willingly complied. This Lazada seller literally had over 5000 ratings for this product, so they are pulling quite a canny manouver. You got to give them credit for that ????

I have just been informed by immigration that I need to leave the country to either get a non imm O visa or a border stamp. Can I get a 60 day stamp with a simple land border run?... Or is it limited to 30 days. Can I extend the stamp at immigration for a further 60 days?

Thank you for all your help.

I can't... It's a long story but just before covid hit I had done a border run for a 30 day visa exepmt stamp, after that it was amnesties followed by covid extensions... I am pretty sure i can't extend a border stamp that expired almost 3 years ago.

I already have my new passport, it came last week. I want to get a 60 day non-imm 'O' visa based on marriage, which is available at my local immigration, but I am of the belief that you need to have at least 30 days on my current stay, I have just 1 week left, so am I going to have to go to Laos or Cambodia?

Hi. Is Thai immigration still issuing the 60 day covid extension?? Waiting 14 weeks for my new British passport has really screwed me up.

The whole world depends on China actually..... Including the USA

Well done Thailand. If the UN granted this as a secret vote so people could comfortably cast an honest vote knowing there could be no viscious backlash from the USA and her sycophants of the collective west... But no, once again more evidence the USA runs the UN. The west are losing friends fast, most of the world has an axe to grind against western countries after the last few centuries of slaughter and repression.... The world is changing, the west is a dead parrot.

I have a son who is almost 4 years old. I have only ever communicated with him in English, his mother uses mostly English with her thick Thai accent and occasionally in Thai. While everyone else uses pure Thai. It amazes me how with absolutely no attempt at tuition, and when he learned to speak at about age 1, he only ever spoke to me in English, he mostly speaks to his mother in English and occasionally Thai and everyone else in Thai. Nobody actually explained what language and to whom, mostly because how do you explain the concept of multiple languages to a child so young?... He simply just realised we speak different and learned them in parallel. He has never attempted to use Thai with me, and never attempts to use English with the Thais. But what really gets me is that even though Thais speak English with a thick Thai accent, my son speaks English in a pure English accent. Is this the same with other farang with kids brought up here?

Talk about in your face police corruption. Myself and my wife build bespoke websites for the Thai market, mostly based on the cryptospace and NFTs. We were in phase 1 of building a very complex NFT site that has a budget of 8 million baht. The customer is Thai but was raised and mostly educated for 12 years in the UK. So he has been incredibly easy to work for. Anyway, here is what has happened with this guy over the past days. All our work comes from 2 agents who find the work and pass in onto us... One of the agents responsible for this particular job called us last night to tell us the customer is in prison and to hold the project for now... We then get another call with the details of what has happened. Apparently our customer who is pretty well off and owns a string of high end BKK restaurants, had a 50/50 partner for this project who was supposed to be stumping up half the cost of the website. For the sake of ease I will call him 'client'; and his partner 'partner'. Now we started this site a few weeks ago, and the client paid us the 20% deposit (1.6 mil). But now the partner has decided to pull out, which clearerly pi55ed off the client who then went round to his partner's house with a gun to obviously change his mind. Now I don't know all the exact details, but it seems the client had him at gunpoint and demanded the entire 4 million. I don't know if any money was handed over or what arrangements were made. But it seems the partner called the police whom arrested the client and locked him up. Now as far as I am aware, the client is still in prison but still in contact with the agent and the situation is that the police have decided that the partner must pay 2 million baht to the client or they will make sure he goes to court and the judge will force him to pay the whole 4 million, the police will make sure that happens.... Then for the client to get out of prison and make all this go away, he has to give the 2 million to the police boss. Now I have been here for 12 years already and so I am not surprised in the slightest at how this has all unfolded, in fact most of you reading this would have had a good idea how all this was going to play out.... what I am surprised with however is the openness of all of this. Absolutely no attempt to have this all hush hush, under the table theatrics you would expect anywhere else. Well.... I don't know what is happening with the project now, all I care about is my expenses are well covered, the agent has his cut of the 1.6 mil and we have a contract that says if he cancels in mid-project, all money paid is forfeit. ???? Anyone else experienced such naked corruption?

Much obliged to you for the help... Thanks mate, off to BKK I go.

Thanks for that, I have just saw that... But it says in the info that once the application is made, you can no longer use your old passport but can retain it for ID purposes. So I am assuming they are going to clip the corner, so I am not any better off regarding the 11 weeks versus 8 week stamps. Or am I reading this wrong?? Most grateful for your response. Editid to add... Actually it does say cannot use it to travel... Here is the sentence. You can’t travel with it after you’ve applied for a new one - but you will be able to keep your existing passport for ID purposes.