Choscura

anybody expecting accurate news out of burma, especially from official sources, shouldn't hold their breath. but if theres riots, it seems like there would be a reason for the riots, such as some democratically elected leader- like Sun Kyii- being found dead, or having been executed. anybody remember the riots in... 92, was it? 93? when they had the first democratic elections, and the government promptly ignored them and declared martial law?

Are farangs who marriages failed in the West luckier than those who marriages were successful? You go out in Bangkok and you see a 55 year old guy dressed in beach attire riding the skytrain with his twenty-two year old wife, and then you see another set of farang 55 year old husband and wife and she looks like she weighs 80 kg. So doesnt this mean that the farang who drank too much and wrecked his marriage back home and escaped to Thailand is luckier than the farang who didnt drink too much and is still married?

what I think is funny is that the young thai women get a taste of farang men/culture (whatever, i have no idea which is actually more appealing) and then they go and cheat on the old farang guy with a younger farang guy. I've been in this equation, so have a good number of my friends. it's kind of degrading for both guys involved, on the one hand the old guy finds out exactly how much he's worth- whatever his income statement says, and nothing more- and on the other hand the young guy generally finds out that sex is less important to the girl than money, which is also damaging to the ego.

not that much, though. all you old dutch retirees, look out! I'm comin after your girlfriends!

just a quick edit: I think it should be mentioned that never has the girl said up front (in this wierd kind of relationship) "oh, I'm seeing someone else". it usually happens a month or two months after you've been going out with the girl. I got lucky, the girl flat out told me "this is what's going on". one of my friends got really messed up by a girl who he found out was cheating on him, and then found out was using him to cheat on someone else. went through a few years of 'all women are whores!' because of that, so count your blessings.

no, I meant tour guides for short time visitors. and thanks for all the info, this is nice to know.

I'm just curious if foreigners can be tour guides. I'm not really looking for a job in this, but I'm curious because I've never seen one and I've never gotten expat-useful advice from a thai travel guide, and it seems like the expats from whatever country would be more likely to be able to help their countrymen/women know where to go to get the best <insert noun here> in a given area. I could have used this kind of advice when i first got here, where to get a hamburger and a cup of coffee and so on.

anyway, does this exist? magazines/publications don't count.

thanks in advance.

they should have a pay-per-view channel with thaksin's arrest on it. they should get every piece of tape they can of his arrest and transport into custody. I want to watch this stuff.

especially if it happens in the Man-U directors box.

well do you have any proof that only the elite have benefited from Thailand's economic growth? yes, many of the rural areas are way behind, but they are farther ahead then they were x years ago. construction in these provinces has grown, has it not? thailand's middle class has definitely grown, this undeniable.

i don't mean to be confrontational. perhaps some people don't realize that there might be a reason why prices are higher, instead they think they are being cheated or something silly.

the newspapers are the proof. for example, when Thaksin's assets were seized, it was reported as 70 bn baht when they counted it. given that they use machines to do that or are counting money that's on record, there's not a lot of margin for error there.

the next day, the papers said that no, sorry, only 50bn baht had been seized! gee, I wonder where the other 20 went. it's not like it'll ever be seen again

also, the price increase is kind of a double edged sword, in theory too. imported goods should be getting much cheaper, as well as goods that are made from imported parts. that should all be going DOWN in price as the value of the baht goes up. it takes fewer baht to buy the same thing, after all.

I was drinking with a few friends one night and one of the takaap crawled out of a gutter and right up my friends trouser leg! man did he let out a shout, we thought he was drunk and thought of something he forgot to do, and then we saw it, it was 25 cm (10 inches) long! I wish I'd gotten a good picture of it, but it's dead now. two knife-carrying americans took care of that.

other than that, i've seen some pretty big black scorpions, the biggest I think about 17-18 centimeters (7 inches?) when i was driving by- perfectly highlighted by the street lights and the road was kind of shiny from the rain, didn't drive over it though.

just saw quite a large spider earlier today. the big kind that has the very large webs (1.5-2 meters across), the body was about 7-8 centimeters long and about 1.5 wide (3.5 inches long, 3/4 inch wide). the body, not the legs. supposedly these get eaten too, I've heard they taste like grasshopper. maybe I should have captured it on the way back, I'm curious now.

I have the same response, usually, and unless I get to know the farang and thai girl in question I usually keep thinking that way.

but even bar girls can be gems sometimes. one of my good friends here is currently engaged to a former bar girl who was just in it becaus she had a rough period of her life... yeah. it took some serious doing on his part, he's a college student here and not super rich or anything, but they're happier together now than most farang-thai couples in thailand, I'd bet.

one of the things we farangs seem to have going for us is the fact that our standards of beauty are different than the thai standards. I've seen what in the west would be supermodel material be passed up by every thai guy they go after, simply because they don't look like the <moderately attractive but not super-hot> thai TV stars and singers and so on.

hey, here's a somewhat difficult situation.

I've got an old hotmail account that I used back in the states, and now am using here in thailand as well.

my problem is.... I can't recieve messages in thai! when I recieve a message written in thai, it's wingdings or some such font with not coherence at all.

how do I fix this?!

really, you don't want to kill the geckos, because when you do, you've got other problems. the geckos eat an insane ammount of bugs every night, and if they're getting into your house, that means they're finding enough food to stay there, so you'll have a whole new set of problems to deal with if you kill them. basically, the geckos are extra little vacuum cleaners that get the annoying bits of dust that try to run away.

all in all, it's a matter of environmental hygiene. if you want a house full of bugs, go for it, by all means, because no matter how many geckos there are, no matter how annoying they are (not very), no matter how gross they are (they aren't, compared with the alternative), you're probably going to have some other problem in the bug department if you get rid of them.

wow, I sound like a hippy.

this is ridiculous.

laws in thailand only come from one side of the law. the police are protected, not the suspects. and granted, even though police know their jobs well enough (not usually here, unfortunately. investigate does not mean 'ask for bribe again') and know what needs to be done to catch a criminal, they have no idea why people wouldn't want to help them (the most common reasons being they don't like being treated like a brain-dead prisoner ). police don't like people who aren't interested in helping them, but a lack of interest doesn't mean guilt. police would probably like it best if we all stayed indoors and sat quietly at our tables with our hands where the police could easily see them. do we do this? no. should we? of course not. it's ridiculous.

did you know that if you put a password on the bios when your computer first boots up, nobody can do anything to that computer until the password is entered? switching hard drives doesn't work. booting from a cd doesn't work. granted, you can still take the hard drive out and put it in another computer to get the data off, but theres got to be some kind of encryption trick that will protect from that.

all in favor of these wonderful new laws? hands?

yeah, I thought not.

:edit:

7-11 widgets! oh boy. now we've got the cheap knockoff version with legs that asks for money coming into our homes.

this is kind of interesting to think about.

this being thailand, I think no authority will do anything until the people are leaving in boats for higher ground.

I'd say be very careful, theres a lot of good thai women out there- I know, I've met a few- but the only ones who regularly come in contact with farangs (foreigners) are hookers, or bar girls, or trannies, or any combination of the three. go to the right place, you can meet the wrong girl. go to the wrong place, and it's not even a girl, it just has tits.

wow. that deputy prime minister is a real hardass.

once again, there should be some international law that allows copying of technology in limited quantities with no royalties on a 'need to have this' basis. thailand should be 100% allowed to copy any and all drugs pertaining to the treatment of HIV/AIDS within a regulated ammount in order to treat it's citizens. it would certainly prevent fiascos like this

well put, cclub75

this kind of crime makes me think castration should be a legal punishment. if the guy had no balls, he wouldn't have wanted the girl to come to his table anyway- problem solved for next time. also, threatening the little boys downstairs will keep a lot of these sick ***ks in line just because its the one thing they value above all else.

edit: it's great that people want to help this girl. where is she? if she's in northern thailand, I could help get her a decent place to stay with a few thai friends that will look after her. I don't think she's going to have much work anymore either, so why not try to find a job for her?

carrot stew. get some carrots, a good thick beer, the meat of your choice (chicken, pork, beef, whatever), a large onion, some peppers, a spoonful of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, and some chilli pepper (if you want).

put everything in a crock pot (in the morning). since there's so many veggies available here, I'd say add quite a few of those that you've tried and are sure that you like, but be aware that this takes all day to cook (it's a set it and forget it meal) and so any veggies will be quite broken down.

for spices I usually use a bit of worcestershire sauce, some white vinegar, garlic, basil, oregano, paprika, and just a dash of cloves and ginger. alternately you can use curry, but if you do, don't add the western spices (oregano, paprika, worcestershire sauce, cloves), because the flavors do not mix well in this. just make sure that you cover it with enough beer that all the ingredients are submerged.

then just set the pot (again, in the morning) on low, put the lid on, and go to work/class/whatever it is you do during the day. it takes about 8 hours to cook this type of meal (on average), and when it's done the meat should be falling apart and the whole thing should have a consistancy like a very good gravy.

simple things, sure, but a 7-11 hot dog? no, thank you. street vendor food over 7-11 food any day.

and in any case, why is anybody here even drinking tiger? granted, you can use it for all sorts of things- cooking, etc- but it's worse than budweiser in terms of quality, taste, and value. may as well call it tigweiser. me mates and me call it refugee (backpacker) piss.

the easy thing to do would be to 'smoke' it out. get a pack of cigarettes, light them all, and put them in an ash tray as close to under the nest as possible. hornets and kids don't mix.

pat pric sot is a good standard if you're trying to lose weight. can be as spicy as you want, 's got veggies in.

also you could simply try eating less white/sticky rice (just don't finish what they put on the plate).

just buy the meat that is kept on ice with some device to keep the flies away. it's not uncommon, not expensive, slightly more hygenic, and you can buy in bulk and store it in your fridge/freezer (or cook it all at once and then just add it to various dishes, whichever), which solves the 'oh no is my meat hygenic!' phobia, because you're in control of it.

that's pretty good.

marriage

I wonder how much of the local ingredients could be adapted to serve dishes that require similar tastes.

the thai take on too many western dishes (from any country) is that it needs to be light and sweet- look at bread that is most common in thailand. they put sweetened condensed milk on it and make it so it melts in the mouth. that isn't real bread, thats sugar foam and flour baked together. generally, real bread is similar to eating beer- thick, slighly bitter, good flavor, only difference is you don't get drunk.

I've done a bit of speculation about mexican food here since I've got a few spanish friends, and I think that if some of the ingredients were adaptable- such as using different types of beans, cherry tomatoes for sauces and dishes that require diced tomatoes, such as salsa, you could get by. local thai chillies would work just as well for the spices. the thing is that both countries have wonderful food that is abundant and cheap but is well known in at least north america (haven't been to europe, can't tell about it there).

the trouble is getting the ingredients that you can't fub, and getting them priced cheap enough to be able to make money off the dishes, and beyond that- business practice- using the rare ingredients in as few dishes as possible, but at the same time putting in some cheap rate to put them in any dish. what you need is to talk to some people who really know mexican/spanish food and know what they need that is hard to get here. some of the things are basic, like avacados, and a special type of dried corn for the tortillas. others might not be. I've only covered this briefly with the people I know, so I can't give much info.

I'd love to see this done successfully. I really miss good mexican food. I've got family in mexico and have had the real thing (I even ate cactus), so it'd be a big deal to see this kind of thing go up with realistic prices for thais to eat at regularly- I'd say something cheaper than the regular western restaurants- mayber 40 baht per taco, so you can get a good size meal for 80 baht if you're really hungry. depending on the type of the taco, I think that would be a realistic price to turn a profit at.

there's my brain fart. have fun.