Guderian

An old friend of mine, currently on holiday in Vietnam, is coming to visit me in Pattaya on Thursday. I was surprised that he was able to get a flight to U Tapao from there. Convenient for us both, anyway.

Don;t forget the Porsches!

Well at least you can get almost anything here, unlike more remote parts of the country with far smaller farang populations. In the 1980's I lived in the Niger Delta for 7 years and almost all imports were banned. We had large salaries and plenty of money but nothing much to spend it on. Sometimes one of the service companies might get a shipment of food brought up illicitly from Gabon, and we were more than happy to pay the equivalent of £10 for a can of asparagus, or £30 for a bottle of beaujolais. Pattaya is infinitely better, imported things may not be cheap here but they're not usually unaffordable and at least you can buy the stuff if you want it. And maybe the biggest plus here that people take for granted is the wide selection of high-quality breads, I've never seen anything like it in the tropics. A mate of mine lives up country in Amnat Charoen (I know, where?), and if he wants decent foreign-style bread he has to make a 150 km round-trip to Ubon Ratchathani, and even then the selection is very limited. Most of us living in Pattaya forget just how lucky we are here compared with most places.

Looking at the boxes the spuds in Makro come in, they seem to mostly come from the Netherlands, though I've seen some boxes from China, so I don't really see it makes much difference where the crisps are shipped from.

So Thailand still won't legally recognise civil partnerships but you can sue a partner for palimoney. That makes as much sense as allowing a foreigner to legally own a house, but not the land that it sits on!

I forgot to mention that the packaging is new, so that might explain why they disappeared from the shops for a while. The price has also gone up, but in these inflationary times that's hardly surprising.

Just a heads up for people travelling in business or first. You used to need an 'invitation card' to use the Fastrack Immigration facility, but there was a busy black market in people selling these things to other passengers who didn't want to put up with the big queues. Anyway, the cards have been done away with now and you just show your boarding pass to get in, it's for first, business, VIP's and flight crews. Or at least that was the situation 3 weeks ago when I arrived.

OK, the Crunchips crisis is over, I was in Friendship this morning and they have them back in stock, including the salt & vinegar variety I like. Presumably, if Friendship has them then all the other stores will soon be carrying them again.

There's a good tip for when you go on holiday. Freeze a glass of water then put a coin on top of the ice and leave them in the freezer. When you come back from holiday, if the coin is still on top of the ice then you know there was no extensive power cut and everything is fine with your freezer. If, however, the coin is now at the bottom of the glass then you know that there was a sufficiently long power outage to defrost everything in the freezer and none of the food will be safe to eat, throw it all out. In the OP's case here, the coin would have been at the bottom of the glass, so chuck out everything.

And they still have those disgustingly unhygienic fingerprint scanners, they were breeding grounds for germs before anyone had ever heard of Covid, but with the winter flu and Covid season kicking off once again my advice is to keep some hand sanitiser handy and use it liberally as soon as your fingerprints have been taken.

Interesting, and do you know who Mohamed Atta is? Just curious.

No doubt, it'll just end up as a festival of Lakorn...

Pedo Putin works for me, lol...

At least they recognised that he was dressed as Dahmer, if he'd gone as a REAL baddie like Mohamed Atta nobody would have had a clue who he was, lol.

I used them last Saturday to take the GF out to dinner in Cafe Blu. It took the driver forever to find my house, even though I'd sent him messages saying where exactly it was, and I ended up having a bit of a rant to the GF about Thai people not being able to read maps. When he eventually arrived and we headed off, I followed the route on the map on the Bolt app and it was complete rubbish, I can understand now why he had so much difficulty finding us. According to the Bolt map, half the time we were either driving through fields or were on a different road altogether, the company needs to have a look at what's going worn as I assume they're just embedding Google maps in the app, but it doesn't work very well.

They were probably high on something, if you've smoked enough weed then even with a samurai sword you're more likely to hurt yourself than others.

There's still plenty of Lays around, but again no salt & vinegar flavour. I found a recipe to make your own salt & vinegar seasoning so if all else fails I'll try adding some of that to a bag of Lays ready salted. If that doesn't work well then I'll go back to making my own crisps from scratch, I did that for many years when I worked the Niger Delta and it was impossible to find any crisps at all.

I've no idea if this is only a Pattaya problem or if it's nationwide, but apart from a few leftover bags it seems that Crunchips have disappeared from the shelves of the supermarkets here. I've tried Lotus, Big C, Friendship, Foodmart and Villa, as well as keeping an eye out in the convenience stores. but to no avail. What's happened, have they pulled out of Thailand? I think the product is actually made in the US and packaged here in Thailand, so is there a major spud shortage in the US? Their salt & vinegar crisps (chips to some) were my favourite, but I can't find them anywhere now other than online at outrageously silly prices. Are they available in one of the farang-oriented places I didn't visit yet, like Foodland or Best, or maybe even Tops? Does anyone know what's going on?

Chuwit might have got more response if he'd sent the brown envelope to President Chairman Xi in Beijing, lol.

At least they haven't got around to blaming it on the dirty farangs yet <rolleyes>. Mind you, we haven't heard from Anutin yet, so I expect we'll be treated to that version as soon as his head pops up above the stupa, lol.

Payback for his mates in ThaiBev and Boon Rawd for the billions they "voluntarily" donated to his Covid recovery fund back in June 2020 to allow the sale of alcohol to resume.

I had a look at a couple of the View Talay Residence buildings many years ago and the build quality is better than average, but because they're relatively small they lack the economies of scale the big condo blocks have their maintenance fees are high and the public amenities are relatively poor. I had a look first at the one next door to View Talay villas and the condo actually had its own garden, which was a first for me. But with 5 or 6 floors of people above you looking out, it was hardly private. It didn't have its own swimming pool, but you could go next door and use the first VT Residence pool which was OK. Then I popped across the road to one of the new blocks which had just been built at the top end of Soi 5. At that time, the maintenance fee there was something like 30 Baht/month/sqm, which would have meant around 5K Baht/month for the condo I liked. Compare that with less than 1K Baht/month where I was living at the time. On top of which, the condo swimming pool was smaller than some private hot tubs I've seen, and there was no rubbish collection, you had to take it down to the communal bins on the ground floor yourself. Needless to say, I looked but went no further, and then decided to buy a house instead. This was back in 2009 or 2010, so a long time ago, and things may have improved.

You can always subscribe to the Al Jazeera English news channel on YouTube for free, assuming you've got a smart TV. It's exactly the same as what Sophon shows, there's a very short advert when you start watching but that's all. Paid for by the Qatar government.

At least they're being honest for a change instead of trying to claim that millions of Chinese tourists are already returning.

Just getting ready for when the vast hordes of unwashed Chinese zero dollar tourists return. May as well skim the usual 30% of the top of the contract while they're waiting.