Guderian

Yes, I know where to go now, but I'm hardly overjoyed at the prospect of a 140 km round-trip, plus grappling with yet more Thai paperwork and bureaucracy, for the sake of a 2K Euro pension.

Thanks. My Thai handyman was around this afternoon so I asked him. Apparently, it's a provincial thing rather than a city one. So the Pattaya SSO is actually in Chonburi City, there's not one in Pattaya itself. That explains why there's one in Phuket, Rayong and so on.

I'm asking this because in less than a year I'll be getting a Dutch state pension, so will have to do the annual PoL thing for them. I've asked a number of people in Pattaya and nobody has been able to point me to a Thai SSO. When I use Google, I get directed to the SSO HQ in Nonthaburi, not to any local office that the public can use. Can you post a picture of what the SSO you use looks like in Hat Yai, that may help me identify one in Pattaya?

I wonder what this means for the condo developers in Thailand, since the Chinese were by far their biggest buyers, after the Thais. Will it mean the bottom dropping out of Chinese property purchases in Thailand, or will it redouble their interest as the Thai property market is much more stable than their home market?

Or maybe go to one of the shops that makes rubber stamps, get an official-looking one made, then get your better half to sign the form while you stamp it. Add her phone number, then if they call her to check that the form is kosher she can tell them it is indeed, and that she's a company director/juristic person/medical doctor/civil servant or whatever fantasy takes your fancy. This being Thailand, though, and with them looking for an honest person of good character, don't let her say she's a politician, lol.

Interesting, so where would I find a Thai Social Security Office in Pattaya to do this?

Well it's nice for once to hear someone mention that expats living here are important to the economy, the way the Thai government, Immigration and Pattaya City behave you'd swear we were completely valueless. I've lived in Pattaya for 20 years and I've never known the air quality to be so bad for as long as it was this year (though it's fine now). If that starts becoming a regular event, or gets worse, then I think I'll be looking for fresher pastures in which to spend my money.

The big Makro in Pattaya sometimes has fresh jalapenos, though they call them Mexican peppers. I saw them a few weeks ago, so I bought a kilo for 50 Baht and pickled them myself, very quick and easy to do. They're big peppers, too, and quite spicy. With a jar of the small plain olives, instead of having jalapeno-stuffed olives. I'm now enjoying olive-stuffed jalapenos, lol!

They may not be growing tall, but some of them are expanding in other ways, and it's probably not due to excessive milk drinking, lol.

I had a query recently and couldn't face the phone nonsense again, so I sent off an e-mail via the form and got a pleasant, helpful and precise reply 5 days later answering my question. Full marks for that part of the service, at least.

Maybe the customers discovered that it's cheaper to get blottoed on dope, and they're all at home smoking weed and listening to the music of the spheres, lol.

Here's a clue: it's posted in the Pattaya local forum, lol.

I just got mine this morning. Very busy at the 9:00 kick-off I was told, with around 100 people queuing, but not many people arrived after that. I arrived around 9:30 and was finished before 11:00. I don't think they'd allocated more than half the 300 doses today, so there should be plenty left tomorrow if you want one. The vaccination centre is on the 10th floor of the multi-storey car park, very easy to find.

The cost will just be the price of the licence or licences you need issued by the DLT, around 250 Baht each, I think (the agent paid for them in my case), there's no fee for applying for a licence. You'll have to sort out the medical certificate and residence certificate(s) yourself, but they aren't expensive. I try to avoid the Soi 5 Immigration office these days so I'm happy to let the agent do those things for me for 500 Baht. As to the agent's fee, you'll have to ask a few as I doubt if it's a standard price. And apparently they're getting quite hard-nosed in Soi 5 about you having a valid TM30 these days, something I've never done myself in 20 years. The agent claimed that they won't issue a residence certificate without a TM30, but again it's just more tedious Thai bureaucracy and paperwork that I'd sooner a local took care of for me.

I got a new 5-year licence yesterday. I'd been in the UK last year when the original 2-year licence expired, so after a lot of pondering I decided to let it go until after my birthday in late-May so that I'd then get a 6-year extension, in effect, as the 5 years is from the date of your NEXT birthday. I used an agent, Mot, and I'm very glad I did as so much has changed since I was last there in September 2020. You have to make an appointment in person, they're adamant about that, even the agent can't do it for you, so it involves 2 separate visits, though getting the appointment is quick and easy. The physical test involving aligning the two pegs has been dropped, the colour blindness test has changed, and there's no 1-hour video to watch any more. My appointment was at 1:30 and we were done with the stuff inside by 2:15, after that you have to get your photo taken and then pick up your licence, outside and downstairs respectively. I left around 3:00 with both new licences, valid until May 2029, and quite happy with things. DO NOT let your licence expire by more than a year or you will be treated much like a Thai learner. Here are a few photos I took of the new rules posted by the (foreign) appointments desk.

TOT has been doing the same thing since they hooked up with CAT and became NT a few years ago. Paper bills are very hit and miss and now never arrive in time for the payment deadline. They send me a text message from NT Debt, in Thai, of course, telling me I'm a low-life, farang scum who hasn't paid the bill they didn't send me. There's a link in the SMS to an e-payment system which, as the OP says, requires a Thai ID number, my passport number doesn't work even though TOT/NT has it on record (of course!). If you look more closely at the app, though, there's also something like a 'Quick Pay' option which lets you enter their reference number from one of your old paper bills. I can't recall now, they may send you an OTP, but eventually you get a QR code which you can scan with your banking app and pay the wretched bill. Why do they have to make simple things so difficult? The major downside of this is that for the last 12 years I've been using the paper TOT bill as proof of address for Immigration, and they've been perfectly happy with it. If they stop sending paper bills completely, what will I use as proof of address then, the house and utilities are in a company name, only the internet and landline are in mine?

Why don't you read what I wrote?

I've had a Black & Decker electric strimmer for over a decade and it still works fine. Admittedly, I have gardeners who do most of this stuff with their own tools, but sometimes they can't come when I want them to, and other times the grass grows faster than expected, so I always tidy it up myself as needed. The strimmer I use mainly for the heavy duty stuff like trimming back long grass, the plastic cord tends to snap easily if you use it against the path edge, so to keep the edges looking nice between gardener visits I bought a battery operated tool like this one from Lazada 2 years ago. It also has an extension handle with wheels so you can use it while standing up. Works great and the battery is more than enough to do both my lawns.

Maybe if they made the bivalent vaccine specifically developed for Omicron readily available then there might be more booster uptake? The additional protection given by yet another jab of the old vaccines developed for the original strain is probably very limited once you've had a couple. It's obviously in Thailand, but where to buy it? https://www.thaipbsworld.com/many-turn-up-to-receive-bivalent-vaccine-booster-doses-provided-by-the-bma/

So the plan is to encourage the Thai workforce to become lazy, work-shy, self-entitled benefit scroungers. Pita and his mates ought to check how that's working out in, say, the UK, before embarking on that particular course.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by nationality. How many of them are young Russians avoiding Putin's draft but running out of legal options to stay in Thailand? How many are Chinese crims operating dodgy schemes intended to defraud their fellow countrymen? I doubt that many of them are Westerners, but I'd like to see the data to prove or disprove that assumption.

It's a probiotic, so full of beneficial bacteria that help to keep your microbiome healthy and balanced.

What a shame! One of the highlights of the year is the sight of the preening katoeys who've been conscripted, together with the doubtful, worried faces of the non-katoey conscripts surveying their new comrades-in-arms, lol!

Nothing whatsoever from them this year. Surprising when it should be back to the full amount for the first time since 2019, I thought they'd be dead eager to get it in the mayor's city's bank account, lol.

I gave up finding Yakult years ago and tried the fermented yoghurt. The Betagen version does nothing for me, so I switched to the Meiji brand and that works fine, as good as Yakult any day.