thaibeachlovers

Not where I live. I haven't seen a cute female since I left Thailand.

Hay? LOL. Climate change may well make hay a rare commodity and the price rises accordingly. Inflation will no doubt occur everywhere ( perhaps I'll finally get some actual interest on my savings ), but the real thing to consider is whether pensions will increase to compensate. From where I sit, I doubt it.

OMG. Don't talk common sense, as it'll upset those that are convinced that anywhere else is better than LOS, despite all the evidence saying that LOS is as good as it gets in these mad days. If sensible traffic and ever multiplying government regulations/ restrictions were a good thing I'd be in paradise right now, but somehow I'd rather be livin' the dream in LOS.

Not interested in being lectured to. Bye.

There was one reasonably priced guesthouse in Georgetown, but it was so popular that one had to be very lucky to get a room there. Don't remember the name now. I stayed in a refurbished shophouse, which was nicely decorated, but the rooms were tiny. People living in LOS don't know how lucky they are to be able to get reasonably priced, decent hotel rooms.

Somehow the thought of living in Sarawak doesn't fill me with enthusiasm. Given the choice of living in any country in the world with unlimited money, I'd still choose to live in Thailand. Sanuk just can't be bought.

That's not what I'm talking about. Before thaksin some of the gogos had spectacular shows every night. You'll never see such anywhere now, because purachai stopped all that. I doubt any gogo in all of Thailand today could come close to Hollywood Royale in Nana back in the 1990s. One of two gogos in Nana that went all night and only closed when all the girls were bar fined or after dawn. Fantastic shows doing things that one will probably only read about in fiction stories now.

I was accused of only posting negative stuff, so to be positive about Penang, it had a good public transport ( bus ) system, and I enjoyed travelling on the ferries to the mainland ( they were still the same as when I used them in the early 1970s, and some might have been in service then ). English was universally spoken. Sorry, but those are about the only positive things I can remember.

In short, probably most politicians in certain countries are corrupt, BUT, we are talking about Thailand, and we shouldn't even be talking about Thailand because the topic is about Malaysia.

To continue would be far off topic and become political, so rather than post stuff that will be deleted I'll pass.

You should stop digging the hole while you can still get out of it. I can only assume you were not visiting Nana gogos before thaksin to actually know the difference. Your understanding is as wrong as your opinion of the destruction of the farang bar scene. I never said there were no bars any more. I was saying that compared to before, they are pants now. More than pants- IMO just rubbish. I did live in Chiang Mai for a year, but I also lived in Pattaya, and spent many visits in Bkk right next door to Nana, in the excellent Dynasty Inn, and in Uncle Charlies when that place existed. My first Thai girl friend worked in Tilac Gogo on Cowboy. Perhaps you should accept that you don't actually know anything about me, and not make silly statements about other posters.

I read the newspapers AT THE TIME. I was always surprised how free they were to publish details of political corruption, and they had a field day during thaksin's time. Wasn't important to me at all. I was never affected by it, other than having to use the disaster zone airport. I never even had a wiff of corruption when dealing with the cops, or immigration. The people I knew that did have a problem were those foolish enough to try and go into business in LOS, or own property. As I did neither, I had no such problems.

LOL. Voters usually vote for the politician that will give them the most goodies. Getting elected doesn't mean that the politician isn't completely rotten. However, in Thailand it's often about more than the purely political promises, and while I'm not going to put in writing what I mean, anyone lived in LOS knows what I'm talking about.

Sometimes or most of the time you only focus on the negative aspects in the topic, very little positivity to read in your posts. I often write positive things, where they are deserved, but a thread like this is about the negative from the get go. If you should care to dispute that, you only have 43 thousand posts to sort through to prove it, and you should take care not to post personal erroneous opinions about other posters without proof.

So, what was the point of posting it? We were discussing thaksin, were we not? I certainly was.

Thou joke assuredly. The farang bar scene was destroyed many years before covid, and by purachai, but he must have had thaksin's approval to do so. If you think Pattaya bar scene was "immune", you obviously were not there before Thaksin. I saw the police sent from Bkk to destroy it with my own eyes. It was never the same after purachai was finished.

That anyone would consider Thaksin to be less corrupt than subsequent rulers based on some organisation's publication. I presume that it refers to the country as a whole and not just the PM. Don'ty forget that there are a lot more people now than then, so more corruption is probably inevitable. However, Thaksin elevated corruption to a whole new level, never seen before, IMO.

There is more to choosing a place to reside than just the cost of living. Thailand is sanuk, but Penang is IMO boring and a dump. I can't speak about elsewhere in Malaya, but if the tourist island is IMO a boring dump, I can assume the rest of the country isn't much better.

IMO the sex was better before Thaksin, and the gogos were certainly way more enjoyable.

If that is true, please explain how they built a dump at Swampy. The taxiways were so badly built they had to repair them from the get go. Badly designed dysfunctional monument to corruption IMO. They couldn't even build the railway connection for many years after. IMO for the usual reason. After all, if people are using a train, they aren't in a taxi.

I stayed in the old town in the area where the guest houses are. B O R I N G. I have zero interest in "charming eating places" and I'm pretty sure there is zero resemblance between a Penang bar and any in Pattaya, so why would I pay to drink overpriced beverages without any benefit for doing so? Nightlife? How do you define "nightlife"? Eating? I went to the other side of the island, where a dump cost more to stay in than a flashpacker resort in Thailand. Beach was worse than rubbish. I had intended staying in Penang for a week- I lasted two days. Back in the 1970s it was actually a great place to visit, and I used to go there all the time when stationed at Butterworth air base. Sadly, time has not been kind to it.

I'm pretty sure he is worth far, far more than we could imagine. IMO he was becoming unusually wealthy from day one as PM. BTW, while I'm happy to rubbish Thaksin, isn't it getting a bit far off the topic?

I doubt it was wonderful for the poor Thais, but it was wonderful for me. Yes, Thaksin destroyed the previous political system, and his stooge Purachai destroyed the farang bar scene. Unless one was there, I doubt anyone would know how fantastic it used to be for us farangs, and how far it has fallen since.

5555555555555555555 Of course any discussion about Thaksin is about corruption. IMO he was the most absolutely corrupt man I ever knew of.

Yes he was loved for that, but the hospitals couldn't afford it. He was responsible for the disaster masquerading as an airport, and IMO was the most corrupt politician ever to rule Thailand. I was there during his time so from personal experience. IMO no way he would ever have been allowed to continue, so one way or another he was toast.