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Who ever came up with this marketing hook up between a temple and a credit card really is a marketing genius.

I mean what can go wrong. You are using debt to buy merit. I guess this is the antithesis of pay it forward. Buy it forward for yourself....

I would like to say, only in Thailand, but it really might be, only in Thailand.

"marketing genius"?

Nobody has ever done better than the Augsburg based Fugger banking family in their dealings with the Vatican around the year 1500 : they were the ones who suggested to the Pope that sinners should also be allowed to pay penalties (indulgences) for their sins.  That was those days really "jackpot".

Just google for "Jakob Fugger"

Compared to this gigantic Fugger business the transactions by the controversial temple are stuff for the kids.....

And what about car and motorbike rentals who ask for passport deposit? Is this now illegal?

You should never leave your passport in the hands of rental companies : it is an invitation to loose them or to copy them.

Can't you give them a photocopy of your passport?

There are too many Muslims trying to be more Islamic than the Prophet :

- Muhammad did not order to execute his uncle Abu Talib who refused to convert : he loved his protector.

- the Quran Sura 2 verse 62 says : "Surely, those who believe, those who are Jewish, the Christians, and Sabians and anyone who (1) believes in GOD, and (2) believes in the Last Day, and (3) leads a righteous life, will receive their recompense from their Lord. They have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve" ....

Of course also here the fanatics have altered the translation to make if look as if this verse applies only to those living before Muhammad.

The believers in the One and Almighty God (and I belong them) must be aware that to kill innocent people is a crime according to the 10 Commandments and reinforced in the Quran.

And.. Almighty God can take care of Himself ...and those killing in His name ...are not contributing to His power ....but only to their own power and that power is in many cases fanatical tribal power.

 

 

Thera is no easy and fast solution for Germans. To get this certificate you will need to have a few more documents ready and translated. Not only from yourself but as well from your girlfriend. First she need to have the certificate that she is single. That she will get at the Amphoe where she is registered. This will need to be translated together with her birth certificate and tabien baan. Once this is translated you will need to get it legalized by the Embassy in Bangkok. After legalization you will need to send it to the "Standesamt" in Germany where you are registered. You will need to do this with an original birth certificate. They will then issue you a "Ledigkeitsbescheinigung" which you need to get the affidavit to marry from the German Embassy.
Easier way would be to register and get married in Hong Kong. No documentation needed. Just send in the request to get married together with the check. 20-45 days later you can go to Hong Kong and get married within 5 days.

 
Thanks for your post! If we get married in Hong Kong can i still obtain a non O visa based on marriage in thailand? 

You should be able too once it is recognized in Thailand. As far as I am aware it will be certified by the Thai embassy in Hong Kong. Afterwards you will need to get it registered in Thailand. Not sure about that process though.

 

Hong Kong is not Las Vegas or Gretna Green...

Be careful : I would be very surprised there are shortcuts to avoid getting documents from the city or town where you are registered in Germany (or where you were born).  German embassies or consulates do not have updates about the marital status of the whole German population....they can only act on documents which have been issued by your local German authorities.

The HKG marriage registrar will also want to verify the marital status of your future wife.

I cannot believe that HKG authorities will marry you without having seen those documents (translation in English and then legalised)

 

 

In Washington they are not always on the same page as in Berlin and Paris :  Germany and France refused to approve the Security Council presentation made by Colin Powell to justify a war and a regime change in Iraq.

I cannot believe the Germans will accept Ukraine as a NATO member : there may be fools in the USA but not in Germany after 1945.

All we need now is longer visa's for those married to thai citizens and to stop the 90 reporting, then we will be able to see that things are improving for the better.

For instance they could also think of Non Imm "O" Extension based on marriage or retirement for two years / I will be glad to pay the double fee accordingly...

What has this to do with Thailand?

We cancelled yesterday a 10 year old contract with ISP to switch to a new one : it took 15 minutes

All we had to do is to download an application form, fill it in and send it back with sufficient ID information

from Chian Mai there are also flights with AirAsia

for flights to Indonesia you need also to include visa fee for this country

only on Friday's from 4 p.m. and getting worse until midnight

NASA is full of bs.  Sorry space travel is a nice dream but we cannot travel at high speeds necessary to reach far away planets.  What NASA fails to tell you is that even if we could go at the speed of light necessary one mere grain of sand would blow a ship apart upon impact.  There is way to much debris in space to make any kind of serious distance.  Better to spend the money taking care of earth's problems and plenty of 'em.  Let the aliens come to us lol. 

 

NASA must be under a budget review.

I am too old to be still around in 2050 but my guess is that by that time climate change will be so damaging that the saving of life on this planet will become the top priority (world population could be 9 billion by that time..)

For instance the glaciers of the Himalaya's may have dried up completely...Now they still give birth to major rivers across Southeast Asia and the Far East, from the Ganges to the Mekong, the Yellow and the Yangtze, which provide water to 20 percent of the world's population. 

Melting of the polar ice and rising sea levels will also keep the Bangkokians busy (..or moving..)

As a very frequent flyer to countries in the region I moved 22 years ago to a place at 15 minutes by car from Don Muang.

Everything changed when Suvarnabhumi opened and I had to compete with traffic to the city to get to the new airport : I missed my flight several times during morning hours.

Now I enjoy flying AA from Don Muang without long check-in lines or long passport check lines.

However the parking at the old airport is really too small

We can see [from their passport stamps] if a foreigner has stayed in Thailand too long [on tourist visas].

But once again they did not say how long is "too long"...

In general too long is when you stay in total more than 6 months per year in a country...

From Bkk to the USA done with testmy.net on a ToT line

BTW if you all read your contracts with your ISP you are only paying for the bandwidth from you to their server in Thailand only.

:::.. Internet Speed Test Result Details ..:::

Download Connection Speed:: 23280 Kbps or 23.3 Mbps

Download Speed Test Size:: 26.4 MB or 27008 kB or 27656192 bytes

Download Binary File Transfer Speed:: 2910 kB/s or 2.9 MB/s

Upload Connection Speed:: 4484 Kbps or 4.5 Mbps

Upload Speed Test Size:: 3.8 MB or 3904 kB or 3997696 bytes

Upload Binary File Transfer Speed:: 560 kB/s

Timed:: Download: 9.504 seconds | Upload: 7.133 seconds

Tested At:: http://TestMy.net Version 13

Test Time:: 2014-07-15 08:45:13 Local Time

Client Location:: TH http://testmy.net/country/th

Target:: San Jose, CA US http://west2.testmy.net

Validation:: http://testmy.net/db/n0TeLJC.u86S245

TiP Measurement Summary (Download):: Min 7.42 Mbps | Middle Avg 34.29 Mbps | Max 78.55 Mbps | 67% Variance

TiP Data Points:: 7.42 Mbps, 29.66 Mbps, 43.15 Mbps, 45.2 Mbps, 25.06 Mbps, 19.31 Mbps, 41.12 Mbps, 78.55 Mbps, 35.48 Mbps, 28.61 Mbps, 27.59 Mbps, 28.97 Mbps, 31.82 Mbps, 32.46 Mbps, 30.48 Mbps, 30.8 Mbps, 29.41 Mbps, 25.18 Mbps, 14.67 Mbps

Client Stats:: http://testmy.net/compID/1148518629977

User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36 [!]

It has been written several times...indeed the impressive speed a Thai ISP promises is ONLY to connect to Thai based servers

I did many tests with www.speedtest.net and 100 pct of the time the servers based in Bangkok reported 28 to 30 Mbps download but when connecting to servers abroad you have a very different picture ...

- to servers in the US East Coast, Melbourne and Munich I get most of the time 10 to 15 Mbps

- because I assume the server for IPTV MAIGE were in Shenzhen I did many tests in this direction and this morning at 09.30 I got 29 Mbps ...but usually it is much less

- there in one big exception : every Friday evening the international download speeds from all origins go down after about 4.00 p.m.....last Friday around 7.00 p.m and later it went down to 1 Mbps and even 0.4 Mbps

MAIGE-TV replied to me that the location of their servers is confidential and that I could try their servers in the USA...but if the location is confidential ???

If they have evidence of espionage, how about putting him in prison?

Surely that would be a much bigger embarrassment to the US.

I mean.... Surely the US would hand down a huge prison sentence to a German for the same offence.

In 1985 the American Jew Jonathan Pollard was caught of stealing highly classified documents.

He got a life sentence and is still in jail.

Until 1998 Israel denied that Pollard was an Israeli source. Their official position was that he worked for an unauthorized rogue operation

Later on some negotiations were initiated to get Pollard released and sent to Israel as an "Israeli citizen" but in the US there is a very hard line and powerful lobby which opposes this "trick"

That is how the USA punishes American citizens spying on them for a "friendly" nation.

Samitivej Hospital (division situated on Srinakarin Road) has a complete Children Hospital which includes a Pedriatic Dental Clinic

Here they will certainly know how to deal with your problem

As this hospital is situated between city and airport it is easy to reach it from Pattaya

http://www.samitivejhospitals.com/Children_Hospital/en

I have 30 Mbps connection but of course this high download speed applies only if the server is based in Thailand and there are ups and downs.

I have done a lot speed tests at different times of the day and to different servers mostly in Europe and in the USA

It is obvious that after 4 p.m. Thai time the download slows step by step...even to a third or less of what I got before.

Also the ping to the servers is a strong indication of what is coming ...

- about 10 p.m. a test to the server of a major IT company in Silicon Valley shows a ping of only 33 and download speed of 10 Mbps and more.

- a test done at 10.03 p.m. to a server not far away from Silicon Valley shows a ping of 230 and a download speed of 2.5 Mbps...

Does somebody know where the servers of MAIGE - TV are located so that I can do tests in that direction?

http://testmy.net and select a server, a real java test not a fake flash cache test

I concur with harryseaman 3bb and tot fiber is the bees knees for international traffic.

thanks a lot for the Testmy link : I tried it and I discovered that linking to the USA I have download of 2.5 Mbps while I pay for 4 Mbps

your info helps me a lot ot accept an offer to get my condo connected to VDSL coming from an optic fiber cable box in the basement

I just moved here from BKK and I just had 3BB fiber to the home installed, It took three days to get the fiber in and another three days to get the router installed. Note that I was required to pay for a full year in advance.

I can't tell you how they compare but here are the results this morning at 8:30am till 9:00am on a Saturday. This is with the router hard wired to my computer. I haven't had time to test via wi-fi but a quick try at streaming video via wi-fi didn't work at all. I'll reserve judgement on how good it is until I have more experience.

BKK: Down 34.82 MB/s, Up 3.18

Hong Kong: Down 13.98, Up 3.15

Shanghai: Down 10.63, Up 3.15

Sidney: Down 9.27, Up 2.83

Melbourne: Down 8.06, Up 8.06, Up 2.45

San Francisco: Down 8.27, Up 2.77

New York City: Down 10.50, Up 3.11

Düsseldorf: Down 5.12, Up 2.27

London: Down 6.39, Up 2.79

Harry

It would interesting to do the tests also on a Friday evening around 19h00 when my internet connection is always getting slow

Did you use OOKLA to do the tests if not pls provide link to software you used

I use Hola which changes the VPN to UK..... that should do the trick .... easy to use and free!

http://hola.org/

Works on Firefox and Chrome.... You change counties as needed.... I think BBC asks you for a Brit Postal code..... (Might be ITV ? ....) but they both should work.... it's fairly easy to master!

Is Hola.org really a free lunch?

I went to Indonesia 6 times the last 2 years and most recently a month ago

I never go for more than two or three days but I was never offered a VOA for 7 days...I always had to take a 30 day visa for 25 USD...I consider a increase from 25 to 35 USD not a big deal

in our condo we have proposal from a ISP which has a very fast optic cable to a housing estate in the neighbourhood...they will connect our condo to this optic fibre cable but as it is too expensive to connect every single apartment they will convert this signal to a "box" in the basement near our telephone exchange and then every occupant of the condo can connect to this "box" with the old and normal copper tel line(s) and obtain what is called VDSL with download speeds of 30 Mbps and higher.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vdsl.htm

Does this really work in Thailand?

Good luck with that.

I have an independant FO line to my house. I get over 40 down and 10 up. When connecting to a site outside Thailand it drops to 2.8 down and less than 1 up.

Fibre Optic will give you faster speed within Thailand, but they do not give you additional bandwidth outside of Thailand.

If you are going to connect X condo owners to a single line, I doubt you will get anywhere near 30 mbps.

BTW.. the link you provided discribes how US providers provide service. They do not restrict BW like they do here in Thailand.

Plus.. connecting to the FO box via copper cable restricts the value that FO brings. JMO

Thanks a lot Jeffrey346 : the ISP will come next week to our condo and - as a free test - connect me to their VDSL during 3 days. You warning is most welcome because I bought an IPTV box (brand name PPi) which sends to my television set only "buffering" pictures.. T.I.T I would be happy to pay for 30 Mbps and get only 15 Mbps....but I need by all means these 15 Mbps from oversees servers.

in our condo we have proposal from a ISP which has a very fast optic cable to a housing estate in the neighbourhood...they will connect our condo to this optic fibre cable but as it is too expensive to connect every single apartment they will convert this signal to a "box" in the basement near our telephone exchange and then every occupant of the condo can connect to this "box" with the old and normal copper tel line(s) and obtain what is called VDSL with download speeds of 30 Mbps and higher.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vdsl.htm

Does this really work in Thailand?

We all know that our mother put her values on our "empty" brain between the age of 0 and 5

Here the Sudanese Muslim father abandoned his Christian Ethopian wife and his daughter of 6 years

How could one believe the kid to be other than her mother?

US president Obama was in the same way abandoned by his Muslim father and educated initially by his atheist mother until she sent him to the grand-mother in Hawaii where he was educated as a Christian.

It means the idiot application of Shariah Law in Sudan could have executed Obama if he visited this country.

If the Muslims proclaim "Allah o akbar" (God is Almighty) then they should leave also the final judgment to Allah ...now they create the impression that the "almighty" God is just a poor sucker in need of their tribal support.

The same thing happened 500 years ago between Catholics and Protestants but that is a poor consolation.

Let us not read information from "The voice of Russia" without caution.

If I were a citizen of the Baltic states I would also been worried to see appear masked self defence forces as was the case in Ukraine : indeed the 3 states have Russian minorities.

Poland is a special case : the country was in its history wiped from the world map several times by its Russian and German neighbours...but I am not sure if the majority of the Polish people wish a stronger NATO presence in their country despite their bad memories of the period 1939 - 1989.

NATO is a defensive coalition - only defensive - and must protect every member state also those without a bad memory of occupation...and this cannot depend on an increased NATO presence.

I would prefer that the Scandinavians have the last word in this discussion : it is also their region.

May-be they do not like to wait for the 72 virgins promised in paradise according to certain translations (not all) of the Quran?