JamesPhuket10

Great, is it a fact the products from iHerb are made in the USA or at least to USA standards?

The problem here is you do not know iHerb exists online and you can buy as many as you want in Thailand.

Thanks for the info, I just looked at iHerb and downloaded the app to my iPhone, it looks genuine and is giving 20% off for the first order so I will order a large batch of supplements plus I can pay in Baht. I tried twice to order a large batch from Amazon UK but the package was turned back at Heathrow Airport so I suppose they can not be shipped by the regular route.

I have been to one a few times, it is in Centra Shopping Phuket, it is out of the tourist areas so 90% of the customers were Thai. They eat mostly meat with a side dish from the self-service salad bar as that is included in most if not all of the meals. I took four people on holiday from England there a couple of months ago, the quality of the meat has gone down, I had to force myself to finish mine. The salad bar is good though as it included salad of course but also three different types of soup and desserts. Regarding your comment on Issan, I think the majority of farangs living in Thailand as far as I have seen over the last 30 years have a Thai partner/wife/girlfriend from Issan and so they think nearly all Thais are poor, I know many well-off Thais as my circle of friends are not from Issan. In Phuket my gated community complex which contains about 300 houses the majority of houses are owned by Thais, and there are one or two Mercedes cars around as well. The comment about Issan is not derogatory but one to balance things up regarding Thai society.

Is your spirit level many miles long, if not then what you are saying has no meaning.

In England, we have always used trousers or pants interchangeably for men unless they are to be worn by women where they are always called pants. In Scotland, they are pronouced "Troosers" 🙂

I went back to the UK in November last year for a month to buy some property. I stayed in a hotel for a month near the area I was going to buy. Electric heater, I was cold so I turned it up, after the room was at a comfortable temperature I happened to look at the setting, it was set at 29 degrees. 😄 I have been in Phuket for two years so I am comfortable at a setting of 28C, the main thing is the humidity is greatly reduced so it feels cooler, I would feel ill at 18C 🙂 I have friends living in CM but they leave when the smoke season starts and go and live in their other houses in the South for five months, there have never been any smoke problems in Phuket, my PM2.5 monitor is showing a reading of 6 at the moment.

I have a feeling they are the same person with two accounts on this chat. But Bob does make me laugh, what makes me laugh more is that people take him seriously, he is just taking the piss.

So the simple solution is to stay away and go somewhere else. I do not want to live in Russia or Iran etc but I do not bother to write about it.

From a man's point of view. (In Phuket). Apart from earning lots of money being a software engineer meant you could wear whatever you chose to wear, no one cared, and you could wear shorts to work if you liked, I can think of nothing more counterproductive to output than wearing a suit, etc. Suits are for salesmen. Here in Thailand during the day, most people wear shorts and loose-fitting soft shoes except those who have to work for a living and as I have seen in banks etc men wear a shirt tie and long trousers. In the evenings I wear a decent pair of long trousers, soft shoes, and a shirt when going out to counter the mosquitos. It is never a good idea to be too well dressed, for one it is uncomfortable, two, I like to blend in with the crowd, and it is not a good idea to stand out here. I do like to wear a suit, bowtie, etc when going to a gaudy at my Oxford University college now and then, but that is in the evening when cool, plus all the men are dressed similarly so there is no competition etc. I am currently sitting in one of my air-conditioned rooms in my house in Phuket, the air conditioners are Mitsubishi and work as well here as they do in any country in the world, cars, large department stores, restaurants, etc are also airconditioned, so it makes no difference if it is the hot season or any other season in Thailand.

The very few times I go to Patong in any year I see the same police operation, at the small roundabout at the start of the road that goes up the mountain to Kata and Karon beaches there are two police officers, they only stop farangs motorbikes, it is a nice little earner for them. In the Kathu district of Phuket where I live, there are very few farangs, 99% of the motorbike traffic I see is Thai, most of them do not wear helmets and many drive very badly, eg when I am turning left into the road I live in from the two-lane highway many undertake me in my car on my left even though I am part way through the turn, thus causing me to have to stop to avoid an accident, many times when driving I am overtaken by Thai bike drivers on both sides at the same time, I would just have a dent in my car if hit, they would have a 'dent' in their body. I turn right at a major crossroad near where I live, bikes from the opposite side of the traffic lights are showing red but the bikes just turn left into your path even if there is a sign saying no left turn on a red light for them. Many just zoom onto the highway from the left without even bothering to look for other traffic, many times as you follow them you can not see the rider's face in the bike's mirrors which means they can not see you, they think mirrors are there to check on makeup etc. The police could just park up outside my gated estate and catch a bad driver or a rider without a helmet every ten seconds, the reason they do not is Thais can vote for the local government so they are allowed to do as they please. Isn't having a man, wife, and two kids on one motorbike considered dangerous driving, none with a helmet? Isn't young boys zooming off down the street from school racing his schoolmates considered dangerous, I have seen it many times over the last two years. I have seen about six accidents with motorbikes and as I drove past (ambulance etc. in attendance) I saw they were all Thai. The vast majority of dangerous bike riders on the roads in Phuket are Thai so why just target foreigners, they are barking up the wrong tree as usual. But as usual, of the millions of visitors each year a few of them drive badly, and they are then in the news, the millions of Thai bad driving incidents are never even mentioned as it is normal, it would be the same as reporting it is hot in Phuket every day of the year. 😀

"Thai government employees get a pension. Around 20K per month", you said. So they end up with a pretty miserable life then unless they have savings or a private pension pot of their own. I know a Thai woman who worked at Thai Airways all her life and then retired at 60, she gets more than 20k baht a month in her company pension, plus the 600 baht a month government pension, plus her house and car were paid off a long time ago in a nice area 60kms north of Bangkok.

And wondering if it was a bloke or a bird giving you the BJ I can imagine. 😄

That is the main point, it was more fun and seemed great because we were young, it was new to us and we were full of adventure. We could get Thai girlfriends who were real girlfriends as we were the right age, no bar girls needed, now if we want a younger woman then of course it would all be about money, and what fun is there in that? Thailand has not become worse, it has become better, we just got older and many oldies as far as I can see have just become miserable old gits.

Yes, that is the best policy and that is why they leave us alone as almost all of us are paying our way and not scrounging from Thai society.

I saw lots of Thais yesterday as I was stopped at a red traffic light outside a school. I saw quite a few schoolgirls getting onto motorcycles, four on each bike, I asked my partner how old they were and she said about 15 years old, hence no driving licence, they must do it every day. Oh yes and none of them were wearing crash helmets.

The 700 baht 'service charge' was so I could get the visa extension and the multi-entry permit at the 'same time' as they are in different buildings and it would have meant me going back another day to get the multi-permit. If I don't need the multi-permit next year then the total cost will be 1900 for the visa extension. Seeing as I was writing Thai with English phonetic letters the 'clap' part of it does not mean 'the clap'. 😀

Nope, I did not expect a receipt for the 700 baht "service charge", I would have paid more if needed, it is not much fun wasting time in immigration offices, and I have a much more interesting and profitable way of using my time.

True. I know hundreds of immigrants who came to the UK from East Africa in and around 1972, they were mostly Asian Indians who were being forced out of the country. Many of them set up their own businesses and worked hard and the next generation became doctors, accountants, and all sorts of professionals, now their children are being well educated and will go onto good jobs. I think 50% of the national health service in the UK is staffed by immigrants or children of immigrants. I do not support the current illegal immigrants who come in on boats from France, I thought we had to help people who came to the country while escaping a dangerous country, but I don't think France is particularly dangerous. 😃

A few guys have told me all Thai women are the same, they are all just after our money, so as someone told me, it must therefore be true using your logic, they said you not only have to pay for the woman but you have to support their family as well. Well, that has not happened in my case, but it must be true though because someone said it. I never take anyone's opinion on anything, I always cross-check it.

True, I got one for about $193 dollars today both the one year visa extension and the multi-reentry visa, done at the same time, that incuded the extra 700 baht 'service charge'. 😀

I have never met an unpleasant Russian in Phuket, I was in Makro a week ago looking at Australian beef, and a massive Russian speaking perfect English laughed and joked with me about why there were so many Australian joints of beef on sale, "Have all the Australians" gone on holiday he laughed. I asked him if he knew which were the best joints and so he took me to them, he and his wife were friendly. I think one Russian family is living in my gated complex of 350 houses in Phuket, there are a few other farangs but the rest are Thai. When shopping in Makro or Tesco etc 95% of the customers are Thai, the rest farangs, I do not see the millions of Russians the people living upcountry go on about, it is all false. But there is one place I have seen them in a crowd, in Central Shopping there is one floor which contains many exclusive expensive shops, Louis Vuitton, etc where handbags and other items cost 2000 dollars each, the doormen for each shop only lets in two or three customers at a time, most of the people in the queue were speaking Russian. The Russians I have seen in Phuket are well dressed, smart looking, and have Russian wives and kids, I have not seen a single one with a bar girl, they are here to escape the war, and I don't blame them. The few of them who are here choose Phuket for the international scene, they woud not want to live in a village in the middle of nowhere. So when I go upcountry sometimes and the farangs tell me Phuket is overrun with them and that is why they do not live there I laugh to myself and think the reason you are not there is because you can not afford to be there more like. 😃 Plus Phuket is "Reassuringly Expensive", (as the old British advertiment said) which is great.

A lot of this has nothing at all to do with changes to Thailand, it has to do with people getting old and not being able to do what they used to do when they were young, I hear it all the time. I remember my dad saying it fifty years ago and he probably could remember his dad saying it. Doing visa runs was boring. Now an hour at the immigration office once a year applying for a one-year visa extension and at the same time a multi-entry permit is the way to do it so I can go in and out of the country anytime I like. 90-day reports are done online within five minutes with an email receipt received, same with the TM30, it can be done online. Cheap sim cards with unlimited data for 300 baht a month, which means unlimited local or international calls via LINE or WhatsApp etc, and mobile email. Local and international banking is via smartphone apps, and money is sent from the UK to Thailand in seconds via the Wise app. I can sit in any place in Thaialnd and do my 'work' from my computer while being connected online. I too miss the old days, not because things have changed but because I have changed by being older just like the rest of us. No more being able to bonk seven times a day like the old days. 🤣

True and even better you can make a note for each transaction in the app stating what the payment was for which is there anytime to look back on.

I found out today that when I picked up my passport there were two receipts, one for the extension, one for the multiple re-entry permit, and no receipt for the "special service charge" of 700 baht. I wondered why when I went into the office one of the guys walked towards me smiling and said very loudly "sawadee clap". After I checked the receipts later on I realised why. 😃