LaosLover

#1 Bore-ama on that list, Agra, is a bit of a ringer. It's like saying that the area surrounding The Grand Canyon is boring. No one is going to either place for the night life. They're there to see The Big Thing. And I rate the Agra Big Thing as the #2 Big Thing I've seen in my life behind The Grand Canyon. I expated first in Mex City, the nice parts of which reminded me of Paris with tropical plants. Tremendous intellectuality, real bookstores. Raw bar restaurants at about half US prices. Some of the best fusion-ish Jap food I've ever had, at 3* prices. Don't love their Freida obsession and Aztec art puts me to sleep. But that's down to taste. Mexico punches well above its weight, art-wise. Lots of innovative modern buildings. 'Can't fault Charlotte NC being on the the boring-list. It's a suburb in search of a downtown. Downtown Charlotte would take maybe 10 minutes to traverse. Upside: It's between more alive places called Atlanta and Nashville. So you can catch big acts like Bob Dylan on a Wednesday night when they tour in between them. Asheville is another NC city that bands will play in at a loss just to revel in the rich hippie vibe.

But if you're looking for old teak buildings (near the beach, no less), Hua Hin is very, very well-preserved. And chill at the valium in the water level. 'Killed a month there waiting out the Chiang Mai smoke. I had modest expectations and they were more than met. If you'd go to Phrae, you should give HH a look. Not that great a strip of sand, but I'm not a beach person (at all), so I was happy to be on the "wrong" side of the road, next a mall, and go to the gym. For a monthly rate, I had a small studio unit with a kitchen that averaged out to 1,200 baht a night. A decent place for medical tourism. Reasonable (not great) restaurant selection, prob the least expensive tourist beach you could go to.

Google Dr Panu.

Yeah, but I wake and bake every morning. And I usually spend some time here. So this "meaning"-thing you speak of is unlikely to touch me at all at this late life stage. I've been living a post AI life for at least a decade.

Yessss. And HUMMUS, near Tapie Gate, Chiang Mai.

True. I was a headhunter on Wall Street. Quants (hard math analysts) were where I made real money. Good looking, good talkers? Hard to squeeze a commission out of them.

-Really, a falafel up there with Jerusalem and Greenwich Village. But she's not out there every day, so if I had just had a grilled cheese sandwich and I saw her, I'd prob have one and skip the next meal. Authentic Northern Cuisine at the Nong Nootch Beer Bar would be a can I'd just kick down the road.

Who's going to be paying for this? As a shareholder, I will say what shareholders always say: the government.

The wat on Pai's walking street is a Shan masterpiece -as grand as anything in Mae Hong Son. And right outside, a killer falafel stand. Talk about a win/win.

Can you somehow resist peeking into Phrae on Youtube? I couldn't. Then I was bummed there weren't even MORE Phrae videos. That will shape your preconceptions and ultimately your visit. Loved Phrae for 2 days btw. A beautiful collection of the old teak houses, partic in the Tai Leu style (known for elaborate railings and stairways). As to fake yoga retreats, you must be a real swami to be able to glean true yoga from fake yoga. Been to Phrae once, been to Pai 5 times. A holiday is for fun (and grilled cheese), not an endurance test to save money and bask and in authenticity. And if I'm a guy who knows Tai Leu railing when he sees it, my authenticity cred is as fat as it needs to be.

-Like for the same money, right? I call that universal income by stealth. Not thrilled with UI either. 'Can't think of another option.

Yeah, but the world changed. Before I went to Pai last week, I could blow up the Google map and identify every bar and restaurant. I could then usually go to Youtube and see the restaurant in action. By the time I actually set foot in Cheese Madness for a grilled cheese sandwich, I felt like I already had had it.

She still there, by the fountain. Otherwise, it's all still at least 50% shut down here. The post-covid comeback will take a long time.

Uh, been there, done that. My #3 wife: permanently estranged from her family. I thank god every day for her pain from this (which she painfully picked). I still live in fear of a reconciliation. But you're never out of the woods. I'm dining with someone tonight who's 40 year old daughter is in a Lao prison for a heroin smuggling mess for 5 years. I thought, damn, if you can't even relax when they're 40, I'm glad I got a vasectomy and am shooting blanks.

Unknowable to the likes of us. He has a hard choice, he asked for input, he got a good range of opinions, including from many who have walked his walk. No one here has the wisdom to offer much more than to share their own story and toss him some empathy. I def agree with his painfully honest assessment of his options.

Yeah, but like my friend being frozen out in Tokyo, life is a game of pick your pain. From the tenor of his post, he'll be more miserable if he goes. Like Mr Tokyo, any threats of leaving or cutting off money will likely not be believable. You can't put those cards out if you're not ready to play them. If you ARE ready to play them and you win, you will have a groundswell of passive aggressive resentment that will never go away. I had similar problems in 2 marriages where the kids already in place were not always being raised as I would like. I never prevailed much. I called it taxation without representation. Like I said, when you marry the woman, you marry the culture. Even tho he's the bio-father, there's still a level of cultural distance that puts him somewhat in the step-parent role; in that the decision making will never be 50/50. Hence my very reluctant suck it up suggestion.

I agree with the consensus that when you marry the woman, you also marry the culture. My friend in Japan has two kids who grew up there and prefer to speak Japanese at home. As they get older, this has become more of an issue. So too his in-laws, who give him 5 minutes of stilted English at family events and then treat him like a 5th wheel. If it's suck it up or go, you're prob going to end up in some version of suck it up (like my friend did). Much empathy.

Well, sure worked for me. But I was just situationally bummed out when I got here, not for-real depressed. A psychiatrist should be your first stop. They'll give you all the valium you need, if that's their call. I agree, you sound depressed and therefore may need antidepressants, not valium. I was on them, they def tends to shutdown the sex drive. I recall saying to the shrink, "can't you just take my eyes instead?". Anyway, that def motivated me to change my life.

As you continue to knock out various strata, there will a lot of social dislocation (policy-speak for chaos). That gas station jerky seller was climbing the greasy pole to become an x-ray technician. If both those ladder rungs go away, what are they to do, partic with no universal income? Typically, they will vote for a crazy person who promises them improbable solutions (and more probably) convenient scapegoats. I lean centrist-democrat, but neither party is up to the job ahead. Def. can relate to your obsolescence. My job was to write government reports that no one read. There's no reason why a computer couldn't generate those reports and then not read them too. Whoever has my old desk is prob contemplating chef school.

Yeah, and also the truck driver infra-structure of everything from jiffy-lube to gas stations that make more money from selling little bags of beef jerky then they do from gasoline will be shaky too. Without selling food and drink, those gas stations cannot cover their costs. Self-drive vehicles are very light on jerky consumption.

Self-checkout at the supermarket is a useful parallel. You can still wait (and wait) for a cashier. You can go to a nicer store, pay more and get waited on. But the high water mark for cashier-hiring has come and gone. If the robot X-ray is cheaper and faster, then that's all she wrote.

Agreed. Communism was a political response to new technology. Will the next response be any wiser? For most poor people, AI-doomed jobs like being an X-ray technician are the route to the lower middle class. What will the political response be when that route severely narrows? Currently the political response from those people is Trump. So I only see more friction ahead.

There's also the tourist service worker shortage that's only going to worsen. So if Phuket can't staff the front desk, what hope does Nan have? And that further impedes the tourist development of out of the way places. In Pai, every place has a sign up looking for people. If I'm a tourist worker, I'm seeing Pai as a no-tip zone and heading to Phuket.

Agreed, I can see on nurse per floor that you ring up in an emergency and a lot of robots dropping off meds and warm jello at dinner time. You can't talk about AI without talking about universal basic income -which is currently politically impossible. Current politics aren't even playing catchup with the new tech reality. It's the industrial revolution part deux (Mighty Ducks reference).

Like the Thai-Chinese run Thailand, The Vietnamese-Lao rule this place. So that's two diff French-influenced Asian cultures influencing each other -which means that Luang Prubang is a rare preservation semi-success and that you never had croissant so good outside of Paris, which you can have with a plate of first-class lab on the side. They're very big on duck larb, which again come from the Vietnam/French/Laos mashup. It's hard to go back to regular larb. And here, the rice powder is roasted daily, not out of a jar. I like cultural shmush places, like CM (Chinese/Thai/Hilltribe). No place is as shmushy as Laos.