grain

Thailand was the flavour of the month for a long long time, but it was inevitable that another SEA country would rise up become the new flavour of the month.

Laem Chabang's Romeo & Juliet

the 300Bt arrival tax for foreigners has officially been announced as coming in before end of this year, it's stage 2 of the TDAC. Stage 1 is getting the online form and QR code set up and running, then a few months later stage 2 bringing in the 300Bt fee which we'll need to pay online before getting the QR code. It's no trolling rumour. It's coming.

Probably a good idea to change that now to your name, or your account could get automatically locked. Not worth risking the inconvenience.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least, I've kinda been expecting a hike up in the financial requirements for a few years now, but if it went to 2million THB it'll be the straw that breaks the camel's back for me.

Same with me, I actually have dual DTAC sims, only one of them I use for banking and official matters (the other is data) and the official sim was in tirak's name. 5 minutes at the DTAC counter and it was changed to my name, then I went to my banks, I have 2 accounts (SCB and the yellow bank) and we went through and updated all my info (one account still had an old address for 5 years ago) So everything is all correct and up to date now.

Well that batwoman from the Wuhan lab was going out to the remote mountains and catching bats, bringing them back to the lab, and they were tweaking the viruses, gain of function study, obviously there was a lab leak. As soon a covid 19 broke out in Wuhan the officials knew exactly what they were dealing with, they locked down Wuhan, and cleared all the computer data, did a wonderful clean up at the Wuhan seafood market, where the lab staff went for after work dinners. The biggest villian is the story is that clown Tedros from the WHO.

The social media in Australia has been running hot, it's quite a nasty divisive election actually, possibly the most divisive I've seen since the Whitlam era. In this election we have two very uninteresting and uninspiring leaders. Albo is a boring fart who has spent too much time flying around the world with his girlfriend; and Dutton is a meathead ex QLD copper with zero charisma. It's interesting with Dutton because up until very recently the image projected by him was tough and stern, no nonesense, there were tough things ahead and he was the tough man to deal with them. But they may have overdone it and put people off because the past couple of weeks they're now presenting a softer, warm smiling Dutton, holding hands with his handsome son, and walking around smiling with the Indian community pretending he's not a racist. There's nothing but bad news ahead for Australia regardless of who wins. If ALP then more of the same from them, some of which has been pretty good, and a lot not so good. Dutton will be a disaster in my opinion, he doesn't give a rat's ass about afforable health care, education or arts, if he gets in he'll put as much funding as he can into police, border force, defence, they are the areas he cares about. Control the people, lock up the borders, bring in bigger fines, heavier penalties, more mandatory sentencing, the full force of the law. Once a fascist QLD pig, always a fascist QLD pig. However as we stand today it seems most likely that not only will the unpopular Dutton lose this election, he'll probably lose his seat as well, as there is a swing against him in his electorate, and he only hold his seat by 3000.

sure, I'm not passing any judgement on it, just saying it's pretty common here and I've seen quite a few Thais do it.

It's a common thing here, over the years I've seen quite a few Thais do this, I've seen Thai teens do this to their GFs when they tried to get away from them, I've seen Thai cops do this when someone tries to flee from police checks.

OK, thanks for the tip.

It's certainly on my list, as I said earlier we have a car, I checked some resort prices and much cheaper than elsewhere on Phuket, I guess due to the isolation. I had a walk around the place with Goggle maps and there are a few little Thai seafood restaurants, so this beach could be what we're after.

OK thanks, I wasn't familiar with this beach so just checked it out online, it certainly looks promising.

Yep. we're in Korat, we've had a few hot days but nothing like past years, and most days have been pleasant and mild. We're now halfway through April, so lets hope it continues.

Exactly, my fighting days are over but back in my younger days I learned to read body language and to size someone up, never saw any sense in getting into a scrap if I was going to get minced. If the odds looked stacked against me I backed away.