Guderian

Check the Thai government's list of reserved occupations - only Thais are allowed to kick foreigners. lol

Yep, it seems to have started today. I just drove from Soi Wat Bun north along Second Road and it was very busy around the Soi 5 area, which had warnings about it being a one-way road but I'm not 100% sure that it had been implemented yet. Judging by the traffic snarl-ups and the general confusion, my guess is that it was. Enjoy the next 5-10 years of this endless SNAFU, lol.

Ten months away, it must be one of their main priorities then. <rolleyes>

There's a U-turn on Second Road just after Soi 7 so, if you're coming from the Thepprasit/Thappraya direction, just continue along Second Road past Rompho market then take the U-turn back to Soi 5.

It's only a short step from this to announcing that Thailand will become the leading hub in SE Asia for Indonesian food by 2030.....

Me too, but having been out of the UK for 20 years I no longer have an MP as my Overseas Voter registration ended two years ago (after 15 years, but somehow the ERO didn't realise I'd left until 2007, rather than 2004 when I told the council I was offski). Now, of course, the system has just been changed and we can register to vote in general elections and referendums for life, and get an MP with ears to bend once again. Which makes me wonder, if any reason were needed, whether the UK government has a clue what it's actually doing? On the one hand, it's desperately trying to win the votes of pensioners by refusing to abandon the unaffordable triple lock, yet at the same time with this careless and offhand message it's deliberately alienating hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, I'm not sure, of potential expat voters, if they can be bothered to sign up as Overseas Voters. Perhaps this is what counts as "joined-up" policy-making in the UK nowadays, lol.

I remember my time working in Switzerland as a consultant fondly. A very generous day rate, 40% of which was declared to the local tax authorities, while the other 60% went tax-free into my offshore bank account. Good old Swiss, they've always known how to do things efficiently, lol.

A few months ago they announced that they'd remove the duty on imported wine, but so far the prices haven't changed a Baht that I've seen.

I've been surprised this last year or so to find the local 7-eleven selling certain beers cheaper than any other shop in Pattaya, including Makro. I've no idea how they do that as you're supposed to pay a premium for the convenience of buying stuff locally, but I'm quite happy to just go 200 yards down the road rather than all the way to Makro or Friendship.

When I read about the long delays last year I was already in contact with a lady at DWP via e-mail about another issue, which she was very helpful with, so I mentioned the problem to her. She hadn't heard anything about it and passed the info along to her manager who was supposed to look into matters. Apparently, they regard 8 weeks as an acceptable delivery time, but 16 weeks is not. If the form they're sending me now is likely to take north of 10 weeks to arrive then I'll hassle them some more about sending me an electronic copy.

Last year, a number of people reported delivery time for mail from DWP to Thailand of 16-20 weeks, using the postnl service. Has this now improved? I ask as they're currently sending me a document to claim a foreign state pension and if it's going to take 20 weeks to arrive that's far too long. I asked them for a printable electronic copy but they ignored my request. Has anyone had a Proof of Life certificate from them recently, or an invitation to claim your UK state pension, and if so did you notice how long it took to arrive here? Alternatively, if anyone happens to have DWP form CFN 901 I'd be very grateful for a copy. I already asked this question on the UK& Europe forum, but only received one reply, I doubt if that forum's anything like as popular as the Pattaya local forum, so I'm hoping I might get more responses here where I know a lot of Brits check every day.

Thanks.

Same here, I arrived back in Thailand in October with a new passport and then got the visa stamps transferred immediately, free of charge in Jomtien and very simple. I was buying a new car so needed to get the passport in the system straight away. The TM30 was the old one from 2 years ago, I asked and there was no need to update it, and that was also fine to get the residence permit to buy a new car and to do the annual retirement extension in December. I did the first 90-day with the new passport online in January. Probably not surprisingly, I entered my name and new passport number and clicked the auto-fill widget but nothing happened, so I just filled it in by hand and submitted it. It had been approved the next morning when I checked. I'm pretty sure that the autofill widget will work for my next online 90-day report in April now I've resubmitted my personal data with the new passport number. All in all, very efficient service from Jomtien Immigration and the online reporting app.

Last year, mail sent by the DWP via postnl was taking up to 20 weeks to arrive in Thailand according to many reports. I sent them an e-mail explaining why this is ridiculous in June or July, especially for proof of life certificates, and they said they'd look into it. Has anyone found that mail from DWP is now arriving more quickly, and if so how fast? Did they stop using the hopeless postnl service? The reason for my current interest is that I want to claim a Dutch state pension for the 7 years I spent working there. That becomes due at the end of May, and so I sent a query via the IPC portal a few weeks ago. They just got back to me saying that they're sending me form CFN 901 by snail mail to make the claim, even though I specifically asked for an electronic version. If it's still taking 4-5 months for mail to arrive here, then that's not likely to arrive until mid-year, and I'd like them to submit the claim to the Dutch AOW before the end of May, ideally. If the mail delivery time is much better than last year then I won't worry, otherwise I'll ask them again to send me a printable version of CFN 901 by e-mail. Alternatively, if anyone has a scanned copy of CFN 901 or knows where to download a copy (I looked but couldn't find it) then that would be great too. Thanks!

Probably working overtime to try and clear some of the 300 billion Baht they owe, lol.

Why not just bake your own, it's not difficult? If you don't have an oven then buy a bread maker, they're not terribly expensive, simple to use and give decent results.

Can someone please explain what they mean by 'deflation risk concerns'? Are they concerned that their inflatable toys might get a puncture, lol?

Still no mention of the long-promised law recognising civil partnerships in Thailand, though.

Interesting. Back in about 2008 or 2009, I guess, I was getting bored with condo life in Jomtien and looking at renting a house instead. One place I looked at was pretty much exactly where you describe, on Soi Eurostar as it was often called back then. I liked the place but it was way too big for my purposes. I had an idea of sub-letting a room to a bar girl desperate for some decent accommodation, but in the end that didn't seem like a good idea at all, drunken hussies, possibly with their customers, coming back at all hours of the night, lol. The house I was looking at was one of these, I think the one on the right: Out of curiosity, do you remember what you paid for the land back in 1987, or what it was going for in that area per rai or talang wah?

Please show us the forecast for Songkran, if the temperature chart is red to black in mid-February, then in 2 months from now it should resemble a black hole, lol.

So about 300 head cases from a single province decide what the other 70 million can do? No wonder Thailand's plummeting down the table of democratic countries.

I think they showed what they thought of the Muslims when they banned hookahs about a decade ago. (P.S. for the sex tourists, a hookah is a Middle Eastern smoking device, not a Thai lady of loose morals, lol)

I thought the Thai government were big mates of the junta in Naypyidaw. Or was that only under our long-lost but much-loved former military dictatorship?

It seems they've already made up their minds then, and this is just a game to make people think they've open-mindedly considered all the options.

In the Pattaya area, apart from the occasional mango shower (and there were very few of them last year), usually there's not really any rain in that period, so the threat of less rain than that is hardly worrying.