guyham

It is interesting that the process of 90 day reporting coupled with annual one year extension of temporary stay seems to differ at different locations, different days and probably different immigration officers.

I recently renewed my extension to stay (Non-OA visa, money in bank, 5th year of renewal) at beginning of March in Nong Khai. My 90 day report was due the same day as the renewal. Went to the office armed with the TM 7 (Extension of Stay form) and TM 47 (90 day report). The TM 7 was processed in about 5 minutes, the TM 47 was thrown on the trash heap of excess duplicates, unneeded documents etc. without even a glance by the immigration officer. Usually one gets the signed receipt portion of the TM 47 clipped into the passport. Instead, I got a small slip of paper with the basic rules of the 90 day reporting (including fines) with the future 90 day date, current date and initialed and then clipped into my passport. Looks like I needn’t have filled out the TM 47 and the immigration police renewed the 90 days report based on the one year extension of stay. However, next year I will be taking along a completed TM 47 just in case.

About a year ago I ran into some big time medical expenses and arranged for a $25,000 transfer to my account at Krung Thai Bank in Thailand. The wire transfer was received by the bank's head office in Bangkok but they refused to release the funds to my local bank until I had written a letter guaranteeing that I would not "re-export" the money out of Thailand. This I did and the money was released. The bank official in Bangkok who had telephoned my wife about this told her that if the transfer had been $20,000 or lower there would have been no problem.

I hate to say you are wrong about Google Earth not using satellite images for hi-res – but you are. Trawling through the internet I have discovered that GE gets most of their images from Landsat, DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird and MDA Federal Inc’s EarthSat. This information comes as much from these companies as from GE itself and a variety of technology journalists.

I have a theory concerning the issue of improved resolution images used by GE being several years old. I don’t believe GE went back in time to acquire a better resolution image but instead used highly intensive computer image processing to remove the “noise” (fuzziness) from their existing images. When looked at, these images now show sufficient detail to allow viewers to better determine the age of the image. This is just a theory – I have no proof of it.

Tankless, or instantaneous, electric hot water heaters are not ideal for a number of reasons. The first, and most important reason, is that the amount of power required to heat water over a reasonable temperature range is quite large. Taking a shower as an example, the normal acceptable flow rate for most of us is around 2 gallons per minute (that requires a water-flow restricting shower head, by the way). Heating the input water by 50ºF (sorry about being non-metric) requires around 8,000 watts of electrical power. Since Thailand’s voltage is 220V, this requires over 36 amps supply (8,000÷220). Now, in my area most houses have only 10 amp supply although at a premium cost one can get a 30 amp supply but that’s the limit (although it is possible to go to 3-phase but that really complicates the issue). Therefore the theoretical best I can get in my house is a water temperature rise in my shower of around 40°F. During the winter the ground water is below 50°F, so I do not get water temperatures up to 100°F, whereas a “hot” shower is somewhere around the 120°F mark. Furthermore, instantaneous water heaters sold in Thailand usually peak out at 6,000 watts (as opposed to 200V x 30 amp = 6,600 watts) so the water temperature will be a bit lower.

The second reason for not using an instantaneous water heater is – do you really want a system which depends upon safely separating these high electric currents from the water that sprays over you? Ultra fast fuses are not an adequate option. I know of at least one local farang who was electrocuted in his shower.

By the way, if you have a main fuse box with separate circuits for the house, the shower heater must be on a single circuit and have a 30 amp fuse. If you use a 20 amp fuse, as an example, the fuse will keep popping or you will need to set the water temperature control (if available on the water heater) to an unacceptable low temperature.

Sorry about all the engineering info but hope it helps. In my opinion, a gas water heater with a small storage tank (say 20 – 40 gallons) is better and safer.

I have seen this statement before about ATM receipts being proof of money transferred from overseas. Yet I have looked at many of my ATM receipts that I get from Thai ATM machines based on extracting money from my bank account in the US. There appears to be no information that indicates the money came from overseas. Am I missing something?

Any Google Earth aficionados out there? I very occasionally dabble in it, spending an hour or two wandering over the Himalayas or New York City etc. Anyway, 6 months ago I first used it to get a view of my local area in Isaan about 25km from Udon Thani. Absolute rubbish! Everything was so fuzzy I could not even identify the roads. I recently returned to the same area and it hasn’t changed. However, I did notice that a few areas of Thailand had improved definition. Examples:- Sakhon Nakhong has much better definition where individual houses can easily be identified. Also Phuket (where I lived for a year) has Phuket Town as pretty good resolution whereas the west coast area (Patong Beach etc.) images are hideously poor. It looks like the “new” improvements might be due to aerial photography rather than satellite imagery, as there appears to be a degree of curvature in the better images. I have only looked at Thailand via Google Earth a couple of times in the past 6 months so I don’t know if the images are slowly getting updated. Does anyone know more about this? By the way, not to knock Google Earth, because I do think it is a fantastic resource, particularly as it is free.

I haven't seen this in any of the Thai news. This came from my son in USA. Also similar article in British Guardian newspaper website. Hope it works - maybe should catch on to rest of the world.

THE LIGHTER SIDE: Bad Thai cops to endure Hello Kitty shame

Thai police officers who break rules will be forced to wear hot pink

armbands featuring Hello Kitty, the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of

shame, a senior officer said today.

Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or

arriving late ? among other misdemeanors ? will be forced to stay in the

division office and wear the armband all day, Police Col. Pongpat

Chayaphan said. The officers won't wear the armband in public.

The armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.

"Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them

feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no

matter how minor," said Pongpat, acting chief of the Crime Suppression

Division in Bangkok.

"(Hello) Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It's not something macho

police officers want covering their biceps," Pongpat said.

Police caught breaking the law will be subject to the same fines and

penalties as any other members of the public, he said.

"We want to make sure that we do not condone small offenses," Pongpat

said. He added that the CSD believed that getting tough on petty

misdemeanors would lead to fewer cases of more serious offenses including

abuse of power and mistreatment of the public by police officers.

Hello Kitty, invented by Sanrio Co. in 1974, has been popular for years

with children and young women. The celebrity cat adorns everything from

diamond-studded jewelry, Fender guitars and digital cameras, to lunch

boxes, t-shirts and stationery.

? The Associated Press

I live in the environs of Udon Thani; have for the past five years,, and have recently come across a piece of Thai folklore which I find very strange. Now this may sound like something cooked up by a bunch of drunken farangs late at night at the bar, but I swear this comes from a number of Thai wives married to farangs. OK, the folklore is this – if you point your finger at a rainbow it is very bad luck and the only way to alleviate the bad luck is to stick your finger up your backside. I told you it sounds like a drunken farang makeup. Moreover, my Thai wife says it is rubbish. Anyone heard of this before? No one seems to know the origin of this piece of folklore. Maybe it is something unique to our village or are the locals trying to wind me up?

Mailed it from Thai Royal Mail???? Well only thing you can do is wait, but high level of theft from these lot. Both sending/receiving - best to use fedex, dhl, or ups.

Up here in the boondocks of Isaan, there is no fedex or ups delivery service so the mail transitions to the Thai mail service, so back to square one. DHL however still does door to door service so that is the safest deivery service.

Just finished A.J. Cronin’s “Hatter’s Castle”. A fascinating Dickensian style novel about the decline and fall of a self-important tyrant in a Glasgow suburb during the late 19th century. Brodie, the tyrant, is a character one really wants to hate but Cronin leaves room for a little bit of pity. The best book I have read in the past year.

If StarSports disappears on Saturday, what happens to the coverage of Wimbledon? This is real bad news.

I went back to check my medical bill and found the name of the stents they inserted at Bumrungrad. They are Cypher Select made by Johnson & Johnson. I checked on the internet about them. They are a drug-eluding stent (work that one, out but supposedly the only one on the market). Each stent cost 145,000 baht.

Plavix is for six months - just as a blood thinner and to stop coagulation around the stents. Did not get any wrist band etc. I have no idea what kind of stents I got - just that they were bloody expensive. No pain at all after the operation (none before either). I am not aware that I have the stents in my body - I had one inserted in Calgary 8 years ago and am not aware of that either.

I had angioplasty at Bumrungrad 4 months ago. Two stents inserted for a cost of 400,000 baht. Plus have to take a medication named Plavix at 3000 baht per month. Still, living beats the alternative. Incidentally, the modern form of angioplasty prefers the insertion of the fibre, ballon etc. via a vein in the wrist rather than the groin. I guess the surgeons don't like to have to stick their noses up the patients a*se while performing the operation.

OK, my math is rotten. 90 days minus 2 weeks is not 83 but 76 days. But I still returned to the immigration office before the time expired and still had to pay the money. Also, I am still mad (probably in more ways than one).

Not totally true lopburi. I have been on a retirement extension to stay (see - no "v" word) for 5 years. I submitted my 90 day report two weeks before my extension to stay expired at Udon Thani immigration office. OK, I thought, that is good for 90 days. Unknown to me, the 90 day report was only valid until my extension expired ( so that made the 90 day report valid for only 14 days). I gained my next one year extension to stay a week later. Ha, I thought, still 83 days before I need to report again. Oh no, the 90 day report expired one week after the extension to stay submission and I have to pay 20,000 baht for late reporting. Is this bureaucracy gone mad - well, at least I am.

I recently had a tracheotomy because of a swollen windpipe. Now it should be time to remove it, (or downsize it) but the doctors at my hospital in Udon Thani are concerned about some potential complications and suggest that I have a bronchoscopy (fiber optic pipe down the windpipe) to have a good look prior to any tracheotomy removal. I had always thought that a bronchoscopy was a common or garden procedure that was available at many hospitals and medical facilities. The doctors informed me that they knew of only two facilities in Thailand that perform this – Bumrungrad and Bangkok hospitals. This seems to me to be a bit unusual. Does anyone know of other facilities that perform this procedure.

I would suggest buying a PC/laptop in Thailand if it is to be used by Thais. That gets you a dual English/Thai keyboard and bundled software that has both English/Thai capabilities. You won't find that in the US. The downside is that it will be more expensive in Thailand - maybe 25 - 50% more. The upside is that you can usually get some kind of support for a Thai bought product in Thailand - forget about that if you buy one in the US.

I’ve lived full time in Thailand for 5 years with a Thai wife 25 years my junior, and this is the conundrum I have been struggling with since I first visited Thailand 8 years ago. What is the magical attraction between young Thai women and older farang men? Every day I look in the mirror and see a 60 year old saggy, baggy heap of sh*t. Any US or European young woman would see the same and probably try to keep at least 50 feet away from me if not walk on the other side of the street. My wife says I am a sexy man for her. Oh yeah. Yet how come so many Thai young women (and I am talking about middle class professionals, not bar girls) go out of their way to flirt, sometimes heavily and even to the point of really hitting on me. It cannot be just because of the assumed money bags hanging out of my pockets or the potential security of being with a farang. It happens too often to be that simple. There must be something else. On the other side of the coin, why do so many farangs lose their brains when they come to Thailand and meet their first Thai ladies (usually bar girls in these cases)? Nowhere else am I aware of where men act so consistently stupidly. I can only put it down to some special affiliation (or is it affliction) between Thai women and farangs (particularly older ones) that I cannot understand.

My favorite word is ผลไม้ (fruit) as it reminds me that sometimes the rule of pronouncing a letter only once in a word can be broken. This one, as most of you know, is pronounced phon la mai instead of what normally should have been pronounced phon mai, i.e. law ling (ล) is used twice thus creating the extra syllable. I am thankful that there are only very few occurrences of this (this example being the most common), else reading Thai would become impossible for me.

A good friend of mine has lived in Thailand for the past 7 years using a multi entry visa from Singapore each year. Having determined that this method would now be difficult or impossible, he decided to apply for a marriage visa (he’s been married to a Thai wife for 15 years). He borrowed the necessary 400,000 baht from a farang, putting it in his bank account the day before he applied for the visa. He got the visa but was advised by the immigration police to keep the money in his account for 10 days. This he did and then returned the money to the lender. Maybe this does not meet the spirit of the immigration laws, but I believe it does meet the letter of the law.

An interesting thread. What causes one person to trust another? I’m sure there have been books written about this but I haven’t read them, so I really don’t know. It all seems to be about how you feel about the other person, which is possibly a dangerous non-scientific assessment that can lead to disaster.

I know I can (and do) trust my Thai wife with my money (which she now realizes is also hers), my property and my life. I know she will not be unfaithful, lie to me or put others, including her family, before me. This has taken seven years with a couple of minor and one major upset. Do I have my head up my a**e?

I know a lot of farangs with Thai wives/GFs who say the same thing – they trust them 100%. Yet how come so many of these Thai women are cheating on their farangs, particularly those who are not living with their women full time? As soon as the farangs return back to their country of origin for work, out come the Thai boyfriends/husbands (or even another farang), and much partying and gambling – and then the request for money for spurious medical and/or family problems. I have seen it happen time and again so it is not just hearsay.

I like to think that my wife trusts me 100%. Most of the time I think she does, but she is always cautious, even jealous, about me and the potential for other Thai women. She may have reason for this since a long time in the past I blew it, although that was due to excess tequila (unfortunately it happened on the night that I proposed marriage to her!)

Meanwhile I will continue to believe 100% in my wife. I am happier that way. If the bomb should drop, so be it. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

Plenty of Dutch speakers in Udon Thani. Go to Harry's Bar on the ring road. He is Dutch and has many Dutch speakers as customers.

Since it was my comment in another thread that started this one I guess it behooves me to get my 10 cents in.

The major problem appears to be disillusionment. Thaksin has been tub-thumping for years about how he is helping the rural poor, yet they have noticed no improvement whatsoever here. No more jobs, no better standard of living, no more money – no nothing.

I’m not suggesting that it is simple for any politician to vitalize these poor rural areas that seem to cover the majority of Isaan. There is a chronic lack of infrastructure, massive illiteracy (none of my wife’s family – which is large – who are over 25 can read or write, except my wife and she quit school when she was 7) and ill-education and a powerful mentality for sanook. Not a tempting environment for investment by government or private industry. Face it, frontline countries like the US, UK and Germany have not succeeded well in revitalizing their own rundown industrial areas so wouldn’t expect miracles from Thailand.

But the problem with Thaksin is that he has promised so much – or at least the Thai people believe he has and were therefore behind him all the way thru the past years. My wife’s family are beginning to realize that it has all been a con job. They don’t care too much about him stuffing billions of baht into his back pocket or the corruption of his cronies. They are concerned about “where’s the beef?” Time for the chickens to come home to roost.