Richb2004v2

I thought that you didn't leave your house. How do you know? Have you just looked out of the window?

you thought?

did you find any interesting decaying housing estates lately? how's the dog shit nowadays in your soi? and what about the other zillion shortcomings of Thailand you hate?

I thought it because you said it. In one of your attempts to convince us that you live in a different Thailand to everyone else you said you spend all your time inside your hi-so castle without need to venture outside.

Thanks for asking about the many shortcomings of Thailand. They are all still there. Well, everywhere other than outside your window, in your special part of Pattaya.

Thanks for that advice. She does have a Uk provisional license, and drove on it for 5 years when we live there last time. This time she will work towards passing her driving test asap.

I live in a small "community" it was the first built and the company is up to #6 in the area, mine is well maintained always someone taking care of the communal pool and general "soi" maintenance, I see 2 ladies every morning sweeping the soi from dog shit and such, garbage is collected every 2 days.

Had a mate over a few weeks ago, he borrowed my pickup, the security would not let him out he gate until I gave the thumbs up.

try traditional thai villages where many houses are built of wood A lot of houses are poorly maintained but they look a lot better because they are surrounded by semi jungle. Our house is probably one of best maintained in the village but we spend around 100,000 baht a year keeping it in good condition. Nearby small houses with no maintenance or almost none still look ok because they are set amongst nature and have evolved and blended into the surroundings. I decided never to touch a new moo barn home 15 years ago and although we have to fight the termites and encroaching nature never regreted it. And weve never had any problems about security. Our neighbours are normal Thais and tolerate me and are kind to our children. Shame being in deep red country they are all total 100% Taksin fanatics.

If you read my earlier posts you'll see that I have visited a huge number of Moo Baans in the Bangkok area and not a single one has been flawless. It usually looks nice from the outside (and many times it IS nice, clean and well maintained), but without exception we have viewed houses in each and every place that were in serious need of maintenance.

Obviously (and not surprisingly) it is only in Naams place where ever single house is well maintained (but of course...), everybody who' read more than 10 posts from Naam understands that..

exactly you have visited the gated ghettos not traditional old thai villages In the village I live in their is no maintenance charge The government gives 1 million baht for upkeep a year all houses use well water i have 5 air con a pool. You are visiting wrong places. Look at places normal Thais live rich and poor. Only forangs their wives and hisos buy houses in places you visit and thais who buy have so much money they just buy for show. We have many rich thais here and many poor. Houses range in price with land from 200,000 baht to over 20 million and most look ok being mostly wood houses

That seems strange. You are saying that the Thais that have possibly modernized and moved into modern gated communities are less considerate of their surroundings and dirtier than those who in many cases are poorer and maybe less educated but chose to stay in the village. I'm not saying it's not true but it doesn't make sense to me. It's like those who make out that Pattaya is a mess because of ferang, even though it's still 95% Thai.

When ever I see 'normal' Thai places they are sadly often utter sh_t tips.

We are soon to leave Thailand for the Uk. Before we go my wife would like to get an international driving license. The last time she got one from Bangkok. This time we would rather not bother with a trip there if unnecessary. Is it possible to get one in Pattaya, and if so how?

Thanks.

This could be better in the General section.

I don't think Pattaya is a good place to raise children. Bloody dangerous if you ask me. No pavements for one. Try walking along Arunothai with a pram in rush hour. Pedestrian crossings which never show green men. Try crossing Pattaya Klang with a pram. I am forced to rent a car every leave to ensure safe transportation for our baby within Pattaya. Doing it the thai way on a moped with no helmets is not an option. Playing fields and parks are few and far between so nowhere for them to play safely. Plus who would let their kids go out and play alone in Pattaya? Enough said. Millions being made on Tourism but no effort to spend money on improving streets etc. Don't get me wrong I like living in Thailand but I constantly worry for our daughter's safety. Will feel alot better once we're living in the UK. At least there she can receive a decent education without paying extortionate fees also.

Isn't most of Thailand like that? The parts I've been to are. I don't think I would let my kids go out alone and play anywhere in Thailand. All the streets are dangerous, not just in Pattaya.

I moved to Pattaya two months ago and think that if you stay away from the bars in the center it compares well to other parts of Thailand. In many ways I think it is much better. The facilities are very good. Also I get several English radio stations, which is a small thing but a big bonus to me. Cable Tv is cheap and quite good too. On the whole I wish I'd moved here 5 years ago. The idea of living in a rural area is my idea of hell.

No need for acidic comments, I have allready written it in clear text: the size or the prizelevel of the estate is irrelevant - Thai properties tend to suffer from lack of maintenance. As I said, there's plenty of realy nice property in LOS, but to claim that shabby houses doesn't exist in every moo baan is incorrect. I once viewed a 40-million Baht property where the wifey refused to walk through the door due to all filth... Looked great from the outside, though.

nobody claimed that run down houses do not exist. but i claim that in my "moo ban" there is not a single run down house inspite of the fact that the first homes were build approximately a decade ago. period!

I thought that you didn't leave your house. How do you know? Have you just looked out of the window?

I don't think this is a one off. There is an area in Kanchanaburi famous for the monks and their tigers. If you look into it I think you will find it is something of a controversial spot.

Very nice pictures and no doubt the family is better off due to Ians benevolence, but it does seem all a little strange to me.

They are totally different aren't they? I don't see how you can compare them at all.

I've just got back from completing the half marathon. It was labeled as a half marathon of proper half marathon distance ie 21.2km. However I crossed the finish line on a 20km marker, but my Garmin said 19.5km. That's normal for runs here though. Anyway, I didn't see any dog turds at all. In fact the Navy grounds are very very clear. It's like a different country in there. Very good. The run was extremely hills, as was the 10km mini marathon. It wasn't round a lake either.

I come home to Nonthaburi in July. If you would like I can buy one in the US and bring it with me. Let me know and I will order it now as I am offshore. It will go to my companies office and i can grab it on my way to the airport.

Thank you for the offer, and sorry for my delay in replying. I found a battery today, but priced at 1700 baht. That's about 6 times the price in the Uk. I will be leaving Thailand in a month or so, so will wait until then. I will just make do with my point and shoot for the time being. Thanks again.

My father had extensive dental work on the NHS last year. He was seen and treated within a couple of months. I couldn't believe how quickly he was treated. He also has knee surgery in a similar time scale. He was unaffected by waiting lists. My mother had cancer a couple of years ago and suffered no delays at all, and received the latest treatment available. I thought I was getting something good with relatively cheap medical care here until I realized it was all free in the Uk.

If Thailand has a fire department then it's the first I heard of it. I'd love to take part, but hopefully won't be around . Good luck with it though, what ever it may be. I'm sure there will be people here to help.

I used to live in St Leonards on Sea in East Sussex, England, I lived on Marina the seafront road, when I went for a run along the prom it was like a slalem avoiding the dogs shit, it was unbelievable.

I have lived in Thailand for 20 years and have never seen any amount of dogs shit on the beach road in Pattaya that could compare to the dog shit between St Leonards and Hastings.

Oh yeah, St Leonards is terrible. If it's not the dog crap it's the electrical cables hanging at head height, and the terrible pavements. And I remember the stench from the drains too. God it was awful there! Plus the bloody home made motor bikes and side car driving the wrong way without lights on nearly hitting me. Then there was the holes in the road and pavement, and ridiculous obstructions like steel wire stretched across paths. I don't know how I ever managed! Oh, hold on, I'm getting mixed up. That was all in Thailand not St Leonards.

When exactly are you talking about? 1982? I've not noticed dog crap since then in the Uk. I remember there being the odd stray dog back then too, but never on anything approaching the scale of Thailand. Now I never ever see stray dogs in the Uk when there. As the other post said there are heavy deterrents in the uk now that actually work.

Try taking a walk on the roads just outside Pattaya and come back to me. I've spent little time on beach road so can't comment, but would hope that since it is the center of Pattaya's tourist district they would at least clear the dog turds, if nothing else.

I can go about half a day at best. When I was heavily into weight lifting/body building I would feel faint after 2 hours of not eating. Thankfully I'm not that into it anymore.

Whilst I am sure it is not permitted to ship general food stuff I wonder about dried items. My wife wants to ship a box full of herbs, sauces and general cooking ingredients. The kind of things that are in sealed packets and have best before dates of a couple of years or more. I just wondered what the rules are about this. I don't want to ask the courier in case it is not permitted. If I just send it with the other dozen boxes I wonder if it will be a big deal?

Any experience anyone?

Another gem of a thread Rich??

It might be an oldie but rehashing this one makes me think you might be feeling a bit sentimental about saying Adios to LOS after all this time

Or are you spoiling us with threads about all things canine-y before your departure?

Not hard to noticed a bit of a pattern forming here...with all this talk of dogs sh^tting, chasing, biting barking everywhere its no wonder you are legging it back to ol Blighty.

I reckon even the soi dogs will miss you..maybe you could throw a going away party with them

Well, you know, one does ones best . I would have liked to have opened a thread recounting the time I was in a beach front restaurant with Thai friends and behind us, inside the restaurant, were two dogs back to back stuck together yelping. The Thais never batted an eye at it, even when I suggested we do something. Ah, happy times.

As far as I could tell neither dog was telapathic.

Laughing at animal suffering ... this is getting better and better ... What's next ? Torture as joke ?

,

aneliane they where actually not really suffering...

Richb2004v2, next time you look at shagging dogs be aware that doing so, can give you a nervous eyelid (old Thai tale).

I say Sir! How dare you. Contrary to what you may have heard about me, I have never shagged a dog. It was simply a matter of slipping whilst exiting the shower. The dog was in the wrong place at the wrong time is all.

Getting stuck by your genitals and pulling it to separate does not hurt ?

This is not Thailand, this is Lalaland , you guys come another planet or what ?

On planet earth pulling genitals of men or dogs when they just retracted DOES hurt

Seriously where are you from? Which educational system ?

I don't think that you are in any position to accuse anyone of being from lala land.

I must say I really loved the pic of that beautiful lady..really good stuff.

Yes. Very impressive. Those carvings are quite unique. You could make money selling them. You should really do a 'Pattaya man' edition though.

Another gem of a thread Rich??

It might be an oldie but rehashing this one makes me think you might be feeling a bit sentimental about saying Adios to LOS after all this time

Or are you spoiling us with threads about all things canine-y before your departure?

Not hard to noticed a bit of a pattern forming here...with all this talk of dogs sh^tting, chasing, biting barking everywhere its no wonder you are legging it back to ol Blighty.

I reckon even the soi dogs will miss you..maybe you could throw a going away party with them

Well, you know, one does ones best . I would have liked to have opened a thread recounting the time I was in a beach front restaurant with Thai friends and behind us, inside the restaurant, were two dogs back to back stuck together yelping. The Thais never batted an eye at it, even when I suggested we do something. Ah, happy times.

As far as I could tell neither dog was telapathic.

Laughing at animal suffering ... this is getting better and better ... What's next ? Torture as joke ?

This is Thailand. Sometimes you have to laugh at worse than this.

Another gem of a thread Rich??

It might be an oldie but rehashing this one makes me think you might be feeling a bit sentimental about saying Adios to LOS after all this time

Or are you spoiling us with threads about all things canine-y before your departure?

Not hard to noticed a bit of a pattern forming here...with all this talk of dogs sh^tting, chasing, biting barking everywhere its no wonder you are legging it back to ol Blighty.

I reckon even the soi dogs will miss you..maybe you could throw a going away party with them

Well, you know, one does ones best . I would have liked to have opened a thread recounting the time I was in a beach front restaurant with Thai friends and behind us, inside the restaurant, were two dogs back to back stuck together yelping. The Thais never batted an eye at it, even when I suggested we do something. Ah, happy times.

As far as I could tell neither dog was telapathic.

Gym, squash, running, reading and studying, and looking after my kids. In between these activities I manage to find time to moan quite a lot .

Back to the subject of being attacked by dogs. Over the last couple of months I've been running more each week and of course encountering many dogs. I've learnt that if I ignore them and continue running at exactly the same pace without any change in my posture or expression they simple ignore me or stop when they are still well away from me. I do of course concentrate and send out the message 'come any closer and you get a kick in the balls' too.

When I was 12 I may have believed in things like animals using telepathy, and I could probably write that much too. When I grew up and learned a little about reality I stopped believing such childish things. I think most people follow the same path. I don't know any adults that voice such nonsense, hence my comment.

No offense if English is not your first language, but your post is a little difficult to decipher, init.

It is exactly why we lose the ability of telepathy. Adults tells us it's nonsense. You should not have listen to them, it's quite difficult to re-learn.

I think you might be impervious to rational critical thinking , because you are emotionally invested in believing this kind of thing. For some reason you think it makes the world more exciting and wonderful.

But reality is wonderful enough already.

You don't need to suggest telepathy as an explanation for your pets' behaviour, there are already completely satisfying and amazing explanations that are much more fascinating than supernatural wishful thinking...

It's been known since the early 1900's that animals have an extraordinary, almost unbelievable, sensitivity to visual and other non-verbal cues that their owners provide, completely unconsciously. It's called the "Clever Hans" effect, and anyone doing studies of how animals behave has to go to huge lengths to try to eliminate this source of error in their experiments.

Clever Hans was a horse that became famous in the early 1900's because he could apparently add, subtract, and divide numbers when asked questions orally, or even in written form. He could answer by tapping his hoof the correct number of times. He could correctly answer questions like "if Tuesday is the 2nd, what date is the next Saturday?" Everyone was amazed! He was right 90% of the time.

But they didn't just think: "ah telepathy!", or "this is a supernatural horse!", and leave it at that. They studied the horse and his owner by (direct quote here from wiki):

"Isolating horse and questioner from spectators, so no cues could come from them

Using questioners other than the horse's master

By means of blinders, varying whether the horse could see the questioner

Varying whether the questioner knew the answer to the question in advance.

Using a substantial number of trials, (they) found that the horse could get the correct answer even if (the owner) himself did not ask the questions, ruling out the possibility of fraud. However, the horse got the right answer only when the questioner knew what the answer was, and the horse could see the questioner. He observed that when (the owner) knew the answers to the questions, Hans got 89 percent of the answers correct, but when (the owner) did not know the answers to the questions, Hans only answered six percent of the questions correctly.

(They) then proceeded to examine the behaviour of the questioner in detail, and showed that as the horse's taps approached the right answer, the questioner's posture and facial expression changed in ways that were consistent with an increase in tension, which was released when the horse made the final, correct tap. This provided a cue that the horse could use to tell it to stop tapping.

The social communication systems of horses probably depend on the detection of small postural changes, and this may be why Hans so easily picked up on the cues given by (the owner) (who seemed to have been entirely unaware that he was providing such cues)."

Extraordinarily, once the psychologist doing the studies recognised what the cues were, even though he tried to stop making these involuntary signals, he couldn't! The horse could tell anyway, despite his best efforts.

This effect has since been observed in many many different animal species. As Wiki says, if you want to study learning or behaviour in animals:

" it is necessary to find some way of testing the animals' achievements which eliminates the risk of Clever Hans effects. However, simply removing the trainer from the scene may not be an appropriate strategy, because where the social relationship between trainer and subject is strong, the removal of the trainer may produce emotional responses preventing the subject from performing. It is therefore necessary to devise procedures where none of those present knows what the animal's likely response may be....."

So we know that signals so tiny we don't know we're making them, and can't prevent making even if we try, have a huge effect on animals' knowledge of our intentions and can alter their behaviour.

We also know that animals can hear sounds that are completely inaudible to human ears: you can buy whistles in shops to train dogs that to us make no noise at all.

We know that animals sense of smell is hundreds or thousands of times more sensitive than our own, to the extent that they have a whole sensory system that is basically missing from us.

Given that all these things are known as an absolute certainty, and do not need to invoke any mystical powers to explain, why would you not think these are more likely explanations for your animals sensing things in ways you don't understand rather than jumping to telepathy, for which evidence is non existent??? Because you want it to be true?

I know you might say "oh it doesn't matter, let people believe any nonsense they want if it makes their lives more colourful", but I don't agree.

If you don't use your brain and your intelligence to critically sift and analyse your experiences, you become foolish. A nation that is not taught to value critical thinking becomes backward and uncompetitive, (not that I'm thinking of any particular country here )

A person who doesn't think logically and critically can't do science, can't make the world work properly. I would not trust them to do surgery or fly a plane. Critical thinking is important! You can't just believe anything you want. Some things are true and some are just not.

So: homework: if my hypothesis is that your cat knows when it's going to the vet because you tense up (knowing your cat doesn't like it) and your cat smells or sees these signs of tension (Clever Hans effect) and not because it's telepathic, as an exercise in critical thinking, what tests could you do to show me I was wrong?

That's how you prove yourself right - by trying to prove yourself wrong....

That's a great post. I've a feeling that critical thinking may be a foreign concept to our telepathic friend.

geez rich, you seem pretty anti dog. two topics on the front page !?

I wasn't until I came here. Actually the other thread is from quite a while ago that got resurrected.