WongKarWai

Its all in the game.

I had arrived in Thailand on business with the slightest knowledge of the country or its culture. I had a few days off and a hotel clerk suggested I visit Pattaya, a lovely city by the sea. It sounded like a better idea than battling traffic in Bangkok so I caught a three hour bus ride and arrived in Pattaya shortly before dark. On the bus I met a pleasant 'farang' named Jim who was from England. After hearing that it was my first trip, he insisted on showing me around.

Our first stop was to his watering hole to 'meet the wankas', as he put it. He took me to a back room where his three friends were already in deep conversation debating why Asian women love older men.

"Its the buddhist culture," said John, an Aussie with tattoos covering his entire upper body. When Jim told them that I was a journalist they took the opportunity to share their life stories. John, lifted up his shirt and showed me the various prison tattoos he collected in 'Aust-rail-yala's Finest Institutes', and looking me dead in the eyes said "I'm never going back." He continued to stare at me for a seconds to make sure I understood that he was serious.

"My first wife turned into a feminist," Glen from Manchester expained as he fondled a young Thai teenager bringing him his drink.

"We got into it one night and she fell down a flight of stairs." This must have been an inside joke because the room broke into laughter. "This is my new girl friend, Ping."

"I is Erb fam Finland." Jim's final friend was a tall and lanky Finish man with a scar running the length of neck. "Thai women is nice. I love em. You are do what in Pattaya?", he asked of me?

"Oh, just vacationing, you know. Maybe I will go see a temple or something or smuggle some heroin back into the United States", I said jokingly.

The room grew silent. Four sets of eyes examined me closely. Jim was the first to speak, slowly, he asked of me "How much are you looking to move?"

(to be continued)

This guy comes here and gets a cheap third world heart transplant and he wont even campaign for PPP?

my past gf was raised by relatives, whom she disliked, and she hated her mother for it.

Humans are not meant to remain faithful but social conditioning over the years has bred this trait into us.

Do you have some evidence to back-up that assertion.

you didn't study evolution in school?

i recommend a book called "the red queen" which covers the topic of sexual evolution.

(i'm not trying to condone cheating or make an ethical judgment in defense of cheating, but human beings are not wired for monogamy, that is definitely society's doing)

seriously, this is so unbelievably common that i would wager that atleast 25%+ of Thais or more are raised by someone other than their parent for at least a year or more in their youth... for those in the lower income brackets its probably closer to 50%+

since kids take care of parents i guess it is seen as the best system. let the parent earn money and not have to worry about the kid. let the grand parent who cant work take care of the child. let the parent support the child and grand parent.

why would you want to do the work when you can hire 2 people to do it for 40 baht/hour?

this is very common in Thailand. both dumping your kids on a blood relative and dumping them on a friend.

you better getting moving on that 150k baht investment plan dude esepcially with 3 more mouths to feed

temples, if you know what area then ask around at thai/asian food suppliers. but thais tend to stick to themselves so not that many places really. ifyou know the husbands name then the telephone directory.

they dont give each other up. its all in the game.

Asian people will just say she got unlucky.

look you are not going to get rich buying 711 franchises. they are on every block. the moment you hit X baht in sales, they go and open another a block away from you, that is the game. but if you want it as an investment to earn a small amount of money or to impress girls half your age who otherwise wouldnt give you the time of the day (like i try to do) than go for it.

Maybe there are so many mini-marts because you do make good money with them? Doesn't sound very logical to me that people would open yet another one if the prospect of making a healthy profit is not there....

i imagine the profit is better than the keeping it in the bank or the stock market but i mean, its probably much less than people imagine. if there was such a large margin for profit, than the company itself wouldn't bother franchising, they would just open as many locations as they could by themselves. they make their money franchising, so that should tell you something right off the bat. i imagine the returns on a 7/11 is in the 10-15% range. and yeah he is right, location is obviously keep and if you judge it wrong you can lose your money.

there was a farang not too long ago who tried to open his own mini mart at the bottom of Asoke BTS, next to Soi 14. It quickly failed.

about 50,000 imho, but who can judge the occupancy rate??

1. If I wanted to make my own daily Thai Language or English language Thailand News show and air it on my website, would I need a work permit for that?

1A. If I were to accept money for advertisements from Thai based companies, would I then need a work permit?

2. Would I need some kind of license to do this? I know the government limits the amount of telesivion stations but I don't know if they limit internet broadcasts.

3. Would I have to submit the content to a censorboard or some government offical to make sure its peachy enough?

please try and let other thais without as much money as you also enjoy the beautiful animal. personally, i will never be able to afford a horse for my children so you are very lucky. please share your horse.

look you are not going to get rich buying 711 franchises. they are on every block. the moment you hit X baht in sales, they go and open another a block away from you, that is the game. but if you want it as an investment to earn a small amount of money or to impress girls half your age who otherwise wouldnt give you the time of the day (like i try to do) than go for it.

that seems to be the situation with every business being sold on any newspaper or internet site. the owner is leaving for personal reasons. that may or not be the case, i have no idea... but its weird that you never see "The owner wants to sell because the business sucks and is losing money or he thinks it will lose money"... instead, every business being sold is an amazing opportunity for you and the owner has personal reasons to move back home....

did you get her phone number ???

as long as there are not strings attached. i was once offered a trip like that from a female boss, little did i know how i was supposed to pay about it. although i didnt mind because she was attractive.

i see that you own 16 restaurants in LOS, can you please tell us the names of them all? are all the subway franchises yours? if that is the case, i just want to say that Paragon Subway seems to routinely have much fresher food and service than the Silom branch.

farang cannot trust thai in these situations, so its hard to blame him.

it is NOT civilized here when it come to manners same same this.

I finally got a hot University student at my girl friend. She is a good girl. I am thirty years older than her, but I think that age is just a number and that a rose smells just as sweet regardless of its age. I think we can make it work as true love knows no boundaries.

Thais arrest French man suspected of smuggling in nearly half a kilo (1 pound) of cocaine

BANGKOK, Thailand - Police on a popular south Thailand resort island said Monday they have arrested a French man who allegedly smuggled in 454 grams (1 pound) of cocaine from South America.

Acting on a tip, immigration police at the airport on the island of Samui searched Alain Bellaiche, 40, after he arrived Sunday on a flight from Bangkok, and determined that he was carrying the drug in 65 small packets that he had swallowed in an attempt to avoid detection, said Police Capt. Narongpol Pilmolsiri.

Narongpol said the suspect told police he had swallowed the drug while in Sao Paulo, Brazil, before flying from there to Bangkok and taking a connecting flight to Samui, which is in the Gulf of Thailand about 410 kilometers (290 miles) south of Bangkok.

X-rays showed several capsules in Bellaiche's stomach, and police took him to a hospital where he took a laxative to help him excrete the packets, Narongpol said.

Police said Bellaiche, whose hometown they were unable to provide, was in custody pending further investigation. He could face life in prison if charged and convicted of drug trafficking, police said.

Cocaine is mostly used in Thailand by the wealthy. Methamphetamine and heroin, both produced in the region, is more popular among the less affluent.

- Associated Press

Wrong destination! He would be jailed less than 3 years for 500gr of cocaine in Netherlands. He maybe took the wrong plane? ;-)

really?

unless you happen to like Chinese looks and the money grubbing religion that goes with it.

I agree with almost everything that Arkady said in his last post except I have to comment on this phrase above regarding the 'money grubbing' chinese thing.

Do you seriously believe that the countryside girls and families are any different?

I think they're worse... but simply just not as successful nor skillful in acquiring such money on their own as compared to the chinese;

...which is why they result to the 'easy way' by just looking for farang ATMs instead.

Moreover, in my experience with the rich Thai chinese girls' families...

They're not so much money grubbing as they are 'status' conscious.

Being very concerned about their potential son-in-law's money can be very intertwined and inter-related with his status; yet these are still DIFFERENT things which merely overlap... although it would be very hard for westerners to understand this.

Of course you are right about Sino Thais being a lot more efficient at making money than Thai Thais. Most are willing to work extremely hard at their own SME businesses and put the money into educating their children. Once they are successful they or rather their children do become very preoccupied with keeping up with the Joneses. Whether we like it or not they are the ones that make Thailand tick economically. Otherwise it might be like Burma which expelled its Chinese in the 60s. Having said all that I worked with Thai Chinese for many years and never found their culture or insularity particularly appealing, even though they are generally well educated and efficient workers. Fortunately living in Thailand has softened them a lot, so their Chineseness is less harsh that the most extreme version that you can see in Hong Kong. For a life partner I still prefer the real Thainess of my current gf. After all Thai culture is the reason I came to Thailand, missing out on business opportunities in East Asia, as Thailand has drifted off the map economically. Real Thais at best have a great sense of community (one manifestation is the "phi-nong" system) and "nam jai" Village culture doesn't condone bad behaviour and cheating other Thais, even if it may often be powerless to prevent it. The difference in Chinese culture is that your have an obligation only to your clan and it is quite OK to cheat others, if it is to the benefit of your clan. A Chinese colleague in Hong Kong once explained to me that Hong Kong Chinese feel that with 5 million people there it doesn't matter if you lose a customer through sharp practice because there are plenty more fish in the ocean. They blend in fairly well here and most affect Buddhism which is a very tolerant religion that doesn't have a problem with their main ancestor worship religion. Since they control the advertising, marketing and media businesses, they have been very successful in recent years in advancing the stereotype of Chinese looks which are now well up there with "look krung" looks as fashionable today. If you look at Thai movies from the 70s, you can see that the stars had to have very Thai looks to appeal to the mass market upcountry audience. Now they have all been brain washed into believing that Chinese looking stars are lovely and they are ugly. Even aggressively Chinese looking and thinking characters like Thaksin can become hugely popular politicians, whereas Chinese tokays in the past could not participate directly in Thai politics or had to tone down their Chineseness.

I agree 100% I would rather marry a poor village girl with a 2nd grade education whose family will endlessly demand that I give them money than marry some educated chinese thai who familes worked hard to educate her.

oh wait, i must have missed where in your analysis you explained why the former is better than the later....

everyone gots to be paid yo