Polar Bear

I was dubious, but I needed it in a hurry, and most of the negative reviews suggest the battery was bad from day one (swollen, wouldn't charge, etc.) or were about poor packaging, so I figured I'd know quickly if there was a problem, but it's been fine. YMMV of course.

If you bothered to look at the picture, you can see that it comes with jump leads, I just haven't had cause to use them.

I've got this version of it. https://www.lazada.co.th/products/i3800083363-s14464322842.html I've not used it for jump-starting, but the air pump does the job. I've also charged a phone from it. I don't know how long it takes to charge up, but I charged it overnight using the wall charger about 6 months ago, and it's still showing 3/4 of bars charged.

Yes, and I confirmed they would bring her right through and stay until she was handed over at the meeting point. She's nearly 80 and was flying business, so she had fast track access anyway. It was the buggy and porter I was paying for. She does get disoriented in big airports these days after a long flight.

I recently booked it for exactly this reason for my mother, but the service was terrible. They picked her up in the buggy, dropped her at immigration and that was it. She had to go through on her own, ask other passengers to help her with her bag, then she couldn't find the person collecting her and ended up lost in the airport. The person waiting for her was trying to contact the company (Bangkok Limousine VIP Service) and they took forever to reply and then eventually said they would send someone to look for her, but we never heard from them again. A random airport worker found her and helped her get back to the meeting point.

There used to be an arrivals lounge (Salon Arrivée) in CDG. It was only open in the mornings, up until about lunchtime. But I haven't used it in a long time, so it may not be there anymore.

True Money or QR codes. Neither gives any access to your bank account or debit card.

It's not too late, but make sure the vets at the temple know. Regardless of whether she has mated, if she is in season, there will be more blood flow to the uterus, so they need to be prepared. With street dogs, vets usually assume they could be in season anyway, so it probably doesn't matter, but it's still better to tell them.

I've had vaccines at Medconsult, Samitivej and MedPark. Medconsult is my preferred option because they are better organised and don't waste time. It always takes well over an hour at the hospitals, and you have to go over everything multiple times with different people, and then one room for blood pressure, another to see the doctor to get the prescription, another to get the jab, back to reception to do your 15-minute wait, and then find the payment counter and wait again. Then it's another wait to get your car back. It's tedious. At MC, it's all done in one room, and I can be in and out in 20 minutes. However, my husband has been to MedConsult for medical issues and wasn't particularly impressed. So if I needed to see a GP, I'd probably go elsewhere, but for routine stuff like vaccinations and health certificates, we've never had a problem.

Are you sure it's Air Asia and not Thai Vietjet? TVJ will only let you pay per kg on top of an existing baggage booking. For example, if you have prepaid for 10kg and have 12kg, you can pay per kg for the extra 2. But if you haven't paid for any, you will have to pay for a 20kg bag, you can't just pay for 2kg. They only offer 10kg & 20kg at the airport, but there's a bigger range for prebooking. The cost difference is substantial, for a different domestic flight, a 20kg bag was something like 350 THB in advance or 1,000 THB at the airport. Excess was 250 or 300 THB per kg, around that price. Being 1kg over, worked out as slightly less than pre-booking a 20kg bag.

Euro English is a separate dialect (or set of dialects, depending on how you want to break it down) to standard English. As it's primarily used as a lingua franca, it is typically spoken more slowly, the vocabulary and grammar are slightly simplified, and it's more concrete because idioms rarely translate well. Naturally, the parts that have been dropped in Euro English are the parts that learners find most difficult. If that's what you have primarily been exposed to, of course you will find British/American/Whatever English more difficult to understand, especially if the speaker has an accent or uses a local dialect. The solution is to practice listening to a wider variety of dialects. Americans often struggle more with British accents compared to Brits who generally have fewer problems with American accents. That's partly down to there being a wider range of strong accents in the UK, but it's mostly because we are exposed to a lot more American English through TV and movies. When British accents do make it in American media they are usually received pronunciation and bear little resemblance to how most people actually talk. Brits flounder just as much when faced with a strong unfamiliar American accent. (And I once had a very confusing conversation with a Glaswegian Rasta. My Scottish friend had to translate because despite us both supposedly speaking English we didn't appear to have any language in common at all.) Find movies where actors have local accents or watch/listen to local news from around the world. If you are serious about it, there are plenty of materials online for English learners who need to understand a broader range of dialects.

I used to fly with KLM relatively frequently. Their long-haul economy tickets don't include a checked bag anymore, and the ticket prices have increased. They weren't usually the cheapest option, but they were reasonably good value. Now, adding a bag makes them one of the most expensive options, and they've got ultra-cramped aircraft by cramming extra seats in. I guess most people don't find out how bad they are until they take the flight, but they would be one of my last choices now.

I teach here, including first-year undergrad Thais who have a much better understanding of this topic than you do.

Lynn and Vanhanen, but their 'research' is garbage. It had pretty much every methodological flaw you can have with IQ tests. Un-normed tests, no random samples, taking massively skewed data and claiming it was representative of an entire country. (For example, the estimate for Sierra-Leon was based on how well a group of schoolchildren could draw stick men. Lynn and Vanhanen used that as an estimate for adult IQ across the whole country. Even the original authors objected to Lynn and Vanhanen's interpretation.) When they couldn't even find data that bad, they just 'estimated', i.e., made it up, based on countries nearby or which they felt were somehow similar, with no documentation of criteria of course. The data was manipulated so egregiously that it is meaningless. But then Richard Lynn built his entire career around trying (unsuccessfully) to prove his white supremacist theories. If he'd been right, he wouldn't have had to keep faking data to get publications.

That's not how IQ tests work. IQ tests are culturally dependent. An American taking an IQ test normed for the UK will score lower than they would on a test normed for the USA, and vice versa. Of course a Thai will score lower on a USA-normed test, and an American or Brit would score lower on a Thai-normed test. They are designed to have an average of 100 wherever they were intended to be used. There is no valid universal IQ test. You can't just translate it into another language and call it equivalent. The bigger the cultural and language differences, the more useless an IQ test is unless it has been normed locally. Even the most basic things like digit span and working memory are confounded by language.

We use Fatboy's On Nut when we need an agent for driving licence stuff, but for a standard renewal, they can't do much because you still have to physically go to the center for the tests and so on. If you want the number, DM me. It's a bit hard to track down the right phone numbers since they split the company up.

There's a vaccine for Dengue now as well (Qdenga). You can get Dengue 4 times, and each subsequent infection has an increased risk for the most severe outcomes.

They don't know yet because it hasn't been around long enough. It only got a general release in 2017. The data from the people who had it in the drug trials comes in every few years. At the moment, they say up to 7 years, but the initial data from the 10-year cohort suggests you are still covered at 10 years. They will have to wait another year or two to get the results from the bigger trial to be able to say 10 years with certainty. It will continue to creep up like that until they either identify when immunity starts to drop or that it never drops enough for a booster to be required. I got it at Medconsult in Bangkok in October (5,590 THB per shot). Thai Travel Clinic has it for 5,199 THB per shot, but they add doctor and hospital fees on top, so it comes out about the same as Medconsult in the end. I had a really sore arm for a few days, like I'd been punched hard in the arm, but that was all. I've been waiting anxiously for Shingrix to come out here. My dad had recurrent shingles, and he wasn't the kind of man to complain about pain or illness, but shingles floored him every time. The only time I ever saw him cry was when he had a bout on his face. I would pay whatever they asked to never go through that. I'm glad it's finally made it to Chiang Mai!

An average IQ is 85-115. The scale is adjusted to ensure that's the range. Anything within it is average. In terms of being able to do a regular job, there will be no discernable difference between someone with an IQ of 89 or 107. The tests are not that precise. You are reading far too much into them.

I had exactly the same thing with Vietjet for a flight to Vietnam. I think it ended up being 200 THB for the insurance, and as far as I recall, it didn't even cover me because it was only for Thai citizens. I did go back through the booking process to see where it happened, and they added the insurance charge back on the final page, where you put your card details, even though you already removed it 2 pages previously. I also got stung recently with Thai Lion Air. I booked a promo fare that included a 15 kg free checked bag and an extra legroom seat. Once the paperwork came through, it just said promo fare and not what was included. At check-in, the extra legroom seat was there, but not the bag. TLA claimed they had no record of any such promo, and the extra fee only included the seat fee. I would never have booked that because I'm a short arse, so I don't need extra legroom. I ended up paying for an additional 10 kg of luggage. When they sent the receipt through it said 15 kg (promo) + 10 kg (paid). I tried to argue about it, but they insisted baggage fees were non-refundable.

They were never lost. His connecting flight was cancelled and he wanted to visit his dogs while they were in transit. No airline or airport allows that. So he threw a temper tantrum until the police got involved and made the airline take the dogs out of transit for him. Airlines do lose, injure and even kill dogs sometimes. But this guy was just an entitled brat.

2012, and one of the big drives to change it was because of US states that have chemical castration for rape. Convicted (male) rapists still sometimes re-offend but use bottles or other objects instead, which at the time, wasn't technically rape. I doubt there were many 'woke' activists involved in that campaign.

I don't know what the wording is in Thailand, but this certainly isn't the definition everywhere. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape

I didn't have to do a colourblind book, but I was the only person being tested at the time, and the guy who was taking me round seemed entirely bored by the whole thing, so maybe he just couldn't be bothered.

Do you get your pensions paid directly into Wise? The money I send through Wise comes from UK investments with a solid paper trail, but all Wise sees is me transferring money from my UK account. They can't see how the money got into that account.