LaosLover

2nd best rum after Havana Club Blue Label. I say go mad and have one on your birthday too.

I only remember an upstairs Indian restaurant with over the top wallpaper. Midway on Beach Road. Otherwise, no one is going to Pattaya for the decor. You'd have to be the most demented post-modernist to find Pattaya beautiful. Therefore, I await the coffee table art book.

I hear they don't favor Nimman, so I'm good. As I recall from touring many a 100% pure latex pillow store, they really, really like Tapie Gate. 'Had a nice schezuan meal over there.

Yeah, my wife calls Nimman Miami Historic district (old buildings, tropical plants) for a fifth the money. We're enrolling in Thai language school and are here for good. Don't know if I'm allowed to recco a specific real estate agent, who's name may or may not be googleable with the number 66 in it, but I had a great experience renting here. Much hand-holding and explaining. Landlord pays their fee. When I lost my key card, the agent drove me to the police statement to fill out a theft report to get a new one from the condo office (a new rule). That excellent, fluent English-speaking agent may have been named Diana.

You have a fair few different-feeling districts to visit within CM for a $4-6 cab ride. 'Can't think of anywhere else in Asia that offers such variety in such a small space. Old City feels very distinct from the Ping River in a way that Pattaya/Jomtien does not. The next best such variety deal I can think of would be Nonthburi, Bangkok and that would be a long trek to say, lower Suk road; not the 15 minute, $6 option I have to go anywhere I might reasonably want to go to. I agree that driving here is masochism. But if I'm in a cab even every other day, that costs me about a $100 a month. What would maintaining a car and having a car payment cost me back in The States? Love Chiang Rai to death, but I rate it as about 20% too small of a town for me. It falls off into teak house-land not too far from the much beloved Clock Tower. Def agree that the hinterlands of CR are much more spectacular than those of CM. Everyone should kill a Saturday night in a town like Fang.

There's a place called Medical Dispensary (Ha!) across from the Nimman 1 mall that has it too. Same price.

I moved to the Nimman area 90 days ago. I love it to death; probably the densest and best collection of mid-priced restaurants in the world. Tons of amenities like yoga, massage, etc. . My rent in a very lux condo is $600, which is a deal to be in so central a location. So much so that I'll just write off the smokey 3 months and head back to the states. A lot of people agree with me; any condo rental gets booked in a single day on the market in my building. Very hard to get a lease less than a year. Tourist-wise, it packs out on the weekends with Bangkok partiers here for the ganga scene and a smattering of snowbirds and backpackers. There are urgent signs in my lobby urging me to turn Air B+B-ers in. They're about 80% of the the people I see in the elevator. They're the only people who use the pool. I like being in a place with lots of diff kinds of people, and that's usually a party kind of place (see also: French Quarter, Soho, Greenwich Village). The snowbirds I see on my morning cappuccino run are respectful Thai-maniacs like myself. 4 minutes away from my cappuccino, there's a tin roof place selling 40 baht Khao Soi noodles among big banana trees. Even down by the night market, you can easily find side soi's with a sole proprietor papaya pounding station that feels like you're far away from modernity -even within any given 100 meters in the well-visited Old City. Compare CM to a place like Florence and it feels much more alive. As to crossing Nimman Road on foot, I hate it but can offer the following advice: wait for a break in the traffic on your side and cross to the middle. Now you're the problem of the other oncoming traffic lane. Remember the cold, Darwinian Thai pedestrian logic: the bigger and more lethal the vehicle coming towards you, the less likely they are to stop for you. Play chicken with a Honda, but not with a songthew. Particularly not with a songthew.

GreenHead on Nimman Road has good cbd oil. Not cheap: 2400 baht for a small eye dropper bottle.

Back in the states, my wife does sourdough bread that takes 4 days to rise on its own. In warm and humid Thailand, this should be sourdough Veuve Cliquot region of bread-dom.

I'm old enough to remember practicing ducking under a little school desk to protect myself from a nuclear blast. My condo has an even larger kitchenette table to duck under, so I guess I'm good to go.

Blew some large money on sushi and waygu. Done and dusted by 4:30 PM.

In that case, I recco looking at non-financial preferred shares. In a well diversified ETF, you'd take away about 5% with much less risk (and growth, unfortunately) than stocks. Bond-like REIT's are good too. But Saint Warren said if you don't understand it, don't buy it. And I agree. What do you do to take income from your pile of cash?

No place in Pattaya is as nice an area to eat in as Phuket Old Town. It's like a cleaner Penang. But all in, for food choice, quality, and price, Pattaya wins. You can find a great Indian, Italian, and Norwegian restaurant next to each other with a chicken and rice vendor out front.

I am a value dividend investor. It takes a fair while to build up a portfolio. You can't control if the price or the dividend goes up or down. You can only control what price you buy in at. This a reasonable time to look at dividend etf's if you don't want to pick individual stocks. If you do, Morningstar lets you look at their div investment newsletter for free for 2 weeks.

Been keeping my powder dry and just started re-investing again. My genius take: further slow decline in prices till the summer/fall. Reversion to the mean means that a bottom is in sight.

Divorce is expensive because it's worth it. Britman, I left behind a house in England too. I left home and slept in a shed behind a pub. The previous divorced guy had hung up an AC/DC poster that he had brought with him from his man cave. It was like a stop on The Underground Rail Road.

I can only claim good friends and marital bliss. Structure to my day? Let the four winds blow. If I hit the gym 4 times in a week (and I do, and it kills me), that's going to be it for me structure-wise. A job? It's been 20+ years. No ones hoping I show up at that formica desk again. Passion for anything? It comes and goes. At 70, I've had a little look at a lot of things. I don't think there are any completely undiscovered golden bits to warrant passion. I wish they found new music on Mars or something. Last year, I had Peruvian food for the first time (a lot ceviches, great use of hominy corn). I've been to 3 Peruvian restaurants now. Sushi Samba is the famous upscale chain. I might do it again. But prob not 3 times in the same year. Wouldn't I be a bit of a drama queen to claim that I was "passionate about Peruvian Cuisine"? Because most people's passions are just as made up. Would be good bait for a Tinder profile, tho.

Maybe claim virginity-taking and collect a round of back pats from the staff?

When you get older, people flat-out want to hear from you less. A lot less. Even other old people feel this way about other old people, who are not them. That's either a crushing disappointment and cause for anger, or a gift from God and permission to finally just eff the eff off and quietly do your own thing.

Seems like it should just be a cost of doing biz, like if you're a bar, you're going to lose a few ash trays a year. Or alternately, if you're lucky enough to be checking into hotels with women still young enough to menstruate, you might just apply the same cost of doing biz-logic to yourself. I personally wouldn't go more than 500 baht, but that's based on nothing and if they bothered to threaten me, I'd cave immediately.

Pattaya (really, Jomtien) was on my short list to retire to. I knew that at least in my first Thai years, I'd want to be in a bit of an expat bubble. By def, that means some population density and some crassness. You can't diss a bubble for being bubble-istic. I ended up in Nimman, Chiang Mai, which a blogger described as an an "unapologetic bubble". Fair enough. I feel some empathy for people with undoable sex urges. Like, a fat guy who wants to be dominated by an instagram model while wearing a rubber outfit with a tight-fitting, latex hood is like Brad Pitt compared to that guy. These people are miserable and compulsive. They will never know a moment's peace.

Hardly a list of my super-faves, but proof that positivity endures and negativity fades. I will miss the grumpy and cynical voices of my youth like Dylan and Lou Reed, but history will broadly disagree with me. Billy Joel and Abba have cleaned their clocks. The top 3 new R+B/Rap names are mostly unknown to me. I have to believe Kanye will be slipping a few notches, income-wise, on the next go-round.

The most obnoxious aspect of affluent people like me is their Marie Antoinette-like protestations of thrift; about how they retain the common touch by stopping in to a chicken and rice stand every other week. I myself could not resist pointing to my local-savvy and virtuous street omelette consumption (not that often, really). The income disparity between me and the locals is like Haitian-level here in the pricey Nimman area. I can but tip them well, and be a cheery and low key customer. We thank god every day to be in such luxury with such nice people for so little money. If I were back in Manhattan, 1500 baht a day wouldn't buy us lunch, let alone oysters.

It really is down to the luck of the draw as to what kind of response you get here. I did a "can I retire on $6K a month?" post here this year and got thoroughly pasted and trounced for 6+ pages. For English people, talking about money at that level of frankness is like forcing them to look over a steep ledge. With that level of money in cheapskate paradise, you can pick a luxury or two. Golf, girls, sushi, travel. To pick 3 from that list or add another option, you're going to need another $2K. Or you could just go in deeper with more $$$: golf membership, instagram model, waygu beef, Dusit Hotel.

Call it about 1500 a day for the two of us. I know that's crazy money to someone here (who I would def envy and feel a bit inferior to) drinking hootch in Kalisan and plucking a mango off of tree. But for people like us in a nice condo in NImman CM, that's about right. Breakfast is 250 baht. 2 cappa's and hot croissants. We're not on an Issan-mango frame of reference, we're from the states where that would cost triple. Lunch? Who cares? Tend to skip it. Or just grab a vendor omelette or a rice and-plate. Toss another 150 baht a day in the 7/11 fund for iced tea's. Yes, we could make that ourselves. but it's like having the laundry done. Fuji Natural Green Tea, I should buy stock. Its refrig. cooler row in 7/11 is always 34/s empty. Dinner seems to alternate between an 800 baht Thai meal in cafe-type place with 3 dishes and no booze and THEN an 1800 baht blow out of say, a daily special menu at Why Not? Italian with a half a carafe and some oysters. Or today, we'll be lobster-rolling it at the Central Festival Mall. Tomorrow, maybe an Indian takeaway for 600 baht. Nimman is only about 8 streets but it will be impossible to even sample all of the food choices here. We retired to Mexico first. We're spending 20% less here and eating lobster rolls instead shrimp taco's. So while our food budget is someone else's entire budget, we're grateful for Nimman prices.