Badger18

Good spot but approach gives you sdlxf for the first 5 letters. I liked the substitution idea but there are well over 26 different characters so that seems a bit of a stretch as well. Some people post things on here for a laugh. Just saying.

I think you've got to expect different rules for people of working age and retirees. What surprises me more is the fact that they have the cut-off as young as 50.

It was part and parcel of the original proposal (this has been in the works for about a year). It isn't mentioned in the announcement at the top of this thread but if they had dropped such an important part of the scheme you would think that would have been newsworthy. The gist is that they approved the original proposal so I am hoping the land ownership bit is still in there. As I said in a previous post it looks as though the details have been settled but they don't seem to have been released yet. Lots of questions around that, e.g. if you're in the category that has to spend at least USD 500k on property, how long do you have - is it like the investment visa where you have to stump up and then wait 3 years before applying, or do you have a year's grace to find somewhere you like, or what.

No doubt Tomster can speak for himself but he said he had a Thai company so is presumably paying tax in Thailand. The point you're making here is exactly the reason why they have made the eligibility requirements fairly high - people in the remote worker category won't pay tax but they have to be relatively high earners who can be expected to spend a decent amount in Thailand. The attraction for me is not the work permit but the ability to buy land. That puts this visa in a different category from any of the others, especially for those of us with no intention of getting married.

If it's been approved the small print must have been worked out. Is it available anywhere?

You're right, I'm overcomplicating things.

If anyone's truly "mastered" reading in 45-60 hours, I'm impressed. "Got to the point where you can work out most things with a bit of effort" is more like it.

I'm guessing there isn't but wanted to double check.

As no-one seems to have any direct recommendations I thought I'd mention that a friend of mine in Chiang Mai has been studying with TSL and reckons they're pretty good. They do online classes. A few years ago I did a class at AUA and that was just OK (don't think they do online classes anyway). I think the individual teacher you get makes a massive difference. I also think that if you learn to read in a group like that you'll get exposed to a lot of dodgy pronunciation. After the first couple of weeks there will probably be a lot of reading out loud, which is as much pronunciation practice as anything else. You don't really want to be picking up your pronunciation from other learners, but the setup makes this hard to avoid. Probably more fun than a 1-1 though.

I fancy an old Vespa. You can buy them locally but I'm having some trust issues... definitely not confident that I'd pick up on any problems with a restoration, and there are bound to be some. Another option is to get a fixer-upper, strip it right down and start from scratch. Some replacement parts would be available locally but I would think most of them would have to be shipped from Europe.

I wonder if that's right. To me หลายร้อย means hundreds (as in "hundreds of times") and หลายสิบ is the same thing but for tens. Around 12 times is not really "tens of times". In other words I think หลายสิบ is OK for "dozens" but not for "a dozen". This raises another question - how come we say "hundreds of times" but not "tens of times"? Maybe because we count hundreds ("two hundred, three hundred...") but not tens ("twenty, thirty..."). I mean the -ty obviously does signify ten, but it's not as though we say "three ten" the way we say "three hundred". Thai does count tens, more or less, so that fits. Maybe because we can't really say "tens of...", so we adopted "dozens of" to fill the gap, especially as it suggests an estimated number. Can you say "tens of" in Dutch, and does your number system count tens, e.g. is 40 four ten?

There used to be a Vespa place called Nit Vespa / นิตย์เวสป้า over the iron bridge behind Rimping. I'm told it's moved... does anyone know where?

Great info, thanks. No way to amend the frame number in the book then?

I am looking at a scooter restoration but I would basically be replacing everything with imported parts. I know you can't import cars and assume it's the same for scooters... but does anyone know if there's a limit on replacing parts? You could see what I'm thinking of doing as buying the Thai plate and putting it on an imported vehicle.

Can confirm Chiang Mai are starting the 60 days from the day of the application. I told them this was stupid but it didn't help...

Assuming they're willing to give you an extension, do they run the 60 days from the date you apply or the end date of your current permission to stay (or does it depend on the immigration office)?

I'm sure that's right, but then they ought to have anticipated that and realized that it wouldn't be a problem if they numbered the tones as is done in Mandarin learning... or maybe they did. That's a very different situation though... Thai kids are learning to put a name on something they already know very well. They don't need a descriptive label to help them remember how the tones go. For most adult learners, when they are given the names of the tones they are still trying to make sense of the whole concept and can't yet recognize or produce the tones. That could be the reason why descriptive terms were chosen, even though people probably realized that the tones were likely change and leave the descriptions behind. Vietnamese kids do "learn" the tones by descriptive names, by the way, and the descriptions aren't accurate for all dialects. I don't think this matters, because as native speakers they're not relying on the descriptions to recognize or produce the tones anyway. Come to think of it, Thai native speakers do use descriptive terms like เสียงต่ำ as well. You're right of course that the fact that foreign learners and Thai kids use different terms for some of the tones is bound to lead to confusion, and I think it's up to us to switch to their system.

The whole "which language are we speaking" thing can be a bit trippy IME. People working in hospitality seem to have it deeply ingrained that you're supposed to speak English to anyone who doesn't look Thai (or maybe that should be "who doesn't look Thai or Chinese"). As a white guy I find that people in other lines of work might default to English, but once they realize there's no need they'll happily switch to Thai, and then you get the full treatment with all the details... but the hospitality people seem to get stuck half way between English mode and Thai mode. If you've had a longish or detailed conversation in Thai they seem to sense that it would be weird to go back to English, but on the other hand they're not comfortable initiating / volunteering anything in Thai, because deep down they feel they're supposed to be speaking English. I think that's why you tend to get very terse answers. Congrats on arriving just in the nick of time...

Are they still doing under consideration stamps for covid extensions in CM? I heard some immigration offices are just giving you the extension there and then. Also, do they run the 60 days from the date of the application or the expiry date of your current permission to stay?

Yes it does - that's great info, thanks. So actually it looks as though the number is not so much wrong as wrongly described, and the certificate obtainable via mor prom may be usable. Excellent news!

FWIW the "fee free foreign currency transactions" cards are less prone to being blocked IME. Worst I've had is an SMS asking me to verify the first transaction in a new place.

Good luck. I suspect you would be OK without a passport number if the details actually shown are correct, but then you (we) shouldn't be in a position of having to hope their mistakes don't matter in the first place.

Not in Thailand, according to khunper's link above. At least not if you have chosen to separate the two. What exactly happens when the lease has expired but the house is still yours, I have no idea. Presumably if you own the house, that at least means that no-one can knock it down or live in it without your permission, in which case the land isn't going to be very saleable and the freeholder's best option is likely to be to lease it to you for another 30 years... but you're still basically gambling. I feel like it's always that way with Thailand. There are lots of different bets you can make but nothing you can really rely on into the long term.

Yeah, I should have done that as well but at the time I just wanted to get out of there. It may well be more than a headache as my original cert will be too old to use for entry to the EU by the time I leave Thailand so I am likely to have to isolate / quarantine on arrival, depending on the situation. I'll then be unable to return to Thailand without doing full quarantine. The easy solution would be to get another shot but I had quite bad side effects and getting another one so soon just can't be a good idea.

I had a Moderna shot recently but the certificate is not correct - it has someone else's ID card number on it, no passport number, and an address I have never stayed at. There's a note at the bottom that says "in case of data correction please contact the vaccination site". I contacted the vaccination site and they told me to download the mor prom app. They checked that my name and DOB were correctly stated (which they are). I'm a bit concerned that if I download mor prom and register before anyone has corrected the hospital records, the wrong info will just get transferred to mor prom where it may be outside the hospital's control and impossible to correct. Does anyone who's used mor prom have any advice? Is there for example any way to ask for information to be corrected from within the app? Has anyone else been given a Thai certificate with mistakes on it and then found that the info in mor prom is correct (I mean the info on the registration was correct, so it's in the system somewhere...).