Sydebolle

Well, just make sure that Bocelli is not singing to an empty audience ......... I also like the fact, that the average Joe is prohibited to use fireworks yet the government officially burns millions of Baht - I for one never saw the need for such extravaganza ......... your call!

Was the “Super poll” agency the same institution which did the North Korean job? I remember faintly, that the popularity of Kim III plummeted to 120% of the voters - a sad day for the Juche boys .....

Once they arrested the bad bad Omicron, I might suggest to put them in charge of the police force and go after the Red Bull grandson. If you can nail the first locally transmitted little nasty virus .......

I always got better prices on compareable vehicle sales

Register it - by all means - in your name. Resale value of cars pre-owned by foreigners fetch considerably higher prices as Thais are aware of the fact, that non-Thais play it by the book as far as preventive maintenance etc. is concerned. Costs and paperwork for registration is the same but selling it on later on is a different ball game.

The yearly spending of the visa runners is 324 billion Baht, the quoted 27 billion Baht are monthly!

This pr1ck keeps amazing me with his announcement. Good luck Thailand has such a gifted fortune teller; the bad, bad virus promised to stay indoors at home in his litte shell for New Years Eve but would appear on 1 January 2022 after 1am. Are these idiots serious - honestly?

Well, saw a policeman the other day on his motorbike wearing a mask but no helmet going 80+ km/h. I assume the boys are getting ready to cream off their New Years Eve bonus of 50 - 100 Baht each - good luck and keep up the good work!

What are you talking about? Your schools were closed for (accumulated) more than one year; some schools with online/home schooling were mostly an absolute joke. The kids missed a year of dreadful brainless education; get on with live and figure out, what you could improve in the curriculum. If you ask me, throw the entire curriculum and those semi-divine teachers out, all of it. Then just copy/paste proven education systems like central Europe. Take German speaking Europe where kids leave public school (completely free of charge) after nine years with knowing at least two national languages, common sense and logic approach to life. But the flip side of the coin is, you cannot take your people any longer on a big, big ride on the perpetual merry-go-round of lies and cheats!

I just love it, a new day and a series of new ideas and comments by some nobody somewhere hidden in the dungeon of bureaucratic government officials. The tourism people have been faring very well ever since they had a reason why tourism started to nosedive. Your sinking figures and corresponding sinking revenues started long before Covid19, Corona or whatever other excuse you flag. 35 years ago some smart brain coined "amazing Thailand" which, at the time, was spot on. Tourists came in droves, mostly quality tourists on an FIT basis and lucrative group tours visiting the countryside beauties of mainly central and northern Thailand. The rest was sneaking around the tens of thousands of houses of ill repute. Likewise the girls, the customers, bar owners, hotel operators and the police lining their pockets were happy. Dual pricing on a, the longer the more expensive, product started to explode, the individual and small tour groups made way for the avalanche of Russians until their currency went down the drain. The red brethren from the North replaced them with zero dollar tours in the millions. A ferry "sank" in Phuket ringing in the first visible bump in arrivals from China and from there it only went downhill. Meanwhile the local boys blocked visa-runners (900,000 non-Thais with an average spending of 30,000 Baht/monthly) got screwed with visa regulations and 27 billion Baht got erased; yearly that is. Long term tourists wanting to spend the chillier winter months in Thailand were facing ridiculous visa requirements. Asking German retiree couples, owning a 15 million Baht condominium, on a yearly basis to present a health certificate confirming no "Syphilis" nor "Elephantiasis" by a German doctor was sofar unmatched. Others, married to a Thai national, had to physically bring along their wives to the visa-issuing Embassy or Consulate as the (European) paperwork was not sufficient. Then they added the 90-days notification for the sole reason to employ another few brainless university graduates (with normally no knowledge of any foreign language at the immigration); the TM30 followed. Next step was the officially backed practice of charging the dirty farang and alien upto 20 times the local tariff when passing through a national park or visiting a historical site. Here the answer would be much simpler; Thais go free and non-Thais pay a reasonable access fee. The booze tale was next, no booze from midnight to 11 am and between 2pm and 5pm. Official reason given; keep kids away from alcoholism. Well, during the hours kids are in school = no alcohol, during lunch breaks and after school = booze agogo! No beach chairs on Thai beaches and 100,000 Baht fine for smoking or drinking a cold stubby at the beach followed. The Covid19 sank in and the regulators went into idiotic overdrive with closing everything, making access to Thailand literally impossible and hoping for the flu to disappear into thin air. Did not happen, the 14-days quarantine followed at rip-off 5* pricing for shabby accommodation and cold food served in plastic containers by staff wrapped up on transparent garbage bags. The multi-million Covid19-insurance followed, testing, retesting and reretesting followed. The dirty farang would come last with vaccination until the international community worldwide told the Thais to hold it; then - all of a sudden - it was foreigners first with real vaccinations and not the locally boiled-up soups under a monopolistic license from God-knows-where. The first few millions of Thais landed on the road, without social network protection and the rigid access had to get loosened; now down to one night in a quarantine (see above). Every governor can instruct rules (fly domestically into Suvannaphoum does not require any papers; landing at Udon Thani without a vaccination certificate = off the a quarantine sojourn as so instructed by the local bigwig). You want to get tourism back? Really? then get rid of all those weed smoking clowns in the governmental tourism offices, reassign 75% of the immigration goons into inactive postings and streamline your regulations on a common sense basis; stop bashing on the dirty farang, alien, kaek, cheks and whatever the semi-divine Khon Thais meanwhile call non-Thais, teach them foreign languages and hope for the best. The last could be easily and free-of-charge implemented by no voicing over the endless stream of cartoons on local TV stations; let those cartoons run in their original languages like English or Japanese and most kids will have an excellent basis to learn English/Japanese at school. I'm not a day dreamer; nothing will happen as those in charge of invoking changes are the same group of gangsters who directly benefit from the status-quo! Welcome to Thailand! Enough! Just quit squirming around with all the useless hype, remove the hurdles, and truly open the country. Tourists will come, but it has to be easy.

They are doing <deleted> a..l and could not care less. Not only Bangkok or Chiang Mai; same in Nong Khai. Apart from the yearly haze which starts earlier each and every year we also are blessed with a sludge of dark God-only-knows-what from the nearby Thai Beverage brewery boiling up some stuff which results in local firewater and possibly beer. The stench is terrible and it is pumped out, across the main road into some fields and those living nearby (like me) may enjoy this total disregard on sustainable liquid waste management. Never got access to the big wig in said booze factory and the local police - upon enquiring - just had a good laugh. So, what exactly do you expect, whose responsibility and who is in charge?

This country must be eternally grateful for experts like Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn; he contributes on a daily basis to entertainment of the finest order. What do these people really think - if at all? If you don't know the job then have a look how experts in other countries are filling empty hotels, restaurants, pubs, beaches, tour buses etc.

While this terrible incident is non-excusable I might suggest to send some gifted criminal experts from the Thai police; they've proven faultless in many cases on i.e. Koh Tao where quite a few dirty farang never left the island alive again ........

Well, what I see when shopping for fresh vegetables and fruit - is a completely different picture. Hydroponic (local) leafy stuff comes at +/- 180 Baht/kg, a Baht buster are bell peppers at 150 Baht/kg while local long beans go for 15 Baht. Bananas cost in supermarket +/- 90 Baht/kg while along the highway nicer bananas are 35 Baht/kg or 100 Baht/3 kgs. But, irrespective of this, someone has to explain to me, why hydroponics or bell peppers are sold at 150 - 180 Baht/kg while chicken parts (drum sticks, breasts, thighs) come at anything between 52 - 65 Baht/kg. My limited knowledge of the industry would advocate considerably higher production costs of a kilogramme of chicken. But yeah, same applies to seasonal shortages of tomatoes (75 Baht/kg) in a country, where the sun shines 300 days a year ...........

Well, it will allow Somchai in uniform to replenish to New Year's bonus with little contributions and gifts by all those drunk drivers - keep up the good work!

Given the average Thai intellect it can be safely said, that the upcoming Xmas/New Year business out of Bangkok just got nicely toasted with the compliments of a siht stirrer in Saraphi.

Maybe it is just me but 30+ years ago, when I moved here, the jasmine rice was definitely the loveliest complementing delight to any Thai dish. Wonderful flavour, consistent consistence - a culinary treat. Today you can literally buy any "jasmine" rice which, to my limited knowledge, seems to be a hybrid version of the previous perfection. Manipulated gens, crossings with cheaper crops and the monopolized rice trade in Thailand has sent also this subject down the tube. I - for one - resort these days to Indian basmati or Italian risotti; there is no first class Thai jasmine rice anymore ????

And then all these pr1cks wonder why tourists go to Senegal, Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and other nice, sunny places with beaches, holiday beers and the works. Congratulations to all those bureaucratic dinosaurs sitting in all those offices splurging incompetence on the go! Another "high" "season" gone down the toilet. Maybe Khon Thai will start to realize that their biggest enemy is sitting in all those government caves of self-importance!

What a joke - tell those pr1cks to go after those thousands of rice, corn and other agricultural fields being burnt just after harvest. In the 80s there was no such haze which meanwhile starts in December and carries through to the first rains end of April. You cannot fix stupid and the Thais will be paying a very high (health) price for all this damaged done by their fellow country men. I could move away, a privilege hardly available to any of the locals in and around Chiang Mai .........

Just to underline my comment - here some photos from this very website, apparently taken yesterday at Pattaya's immigration office (or rather outside for hundreds of metres) ????

Very, very simple; get rid of the ridiculous bureaucracy serving nothing but employing thousands of officers with zero skills on a patronizing level. Your entire visa system is absolute madness. Get rid of the two-tier pricing policy by allowing Thai people free of charge access. Facilitate bank accounts for tourists (as in the past) as nobody is carrying around thousands of dollars in cash nor is willing to accept juicy withdrawal fees on foreign credit cards only. Tell your people that non-Thais are not aliens - it alienates the idea of "welcome" in the word already. Stop lying 24/7, the figures and news releases by the various government agencies are nothing short of an absolute idiotic compilation of lies.

Meanwhile it is literally impossible to find hospitality staff for restaurants (not girlie bars and other institutions of ill repute) willing to wait on tables or kitchen helpers for 13,000 Baht. Only once arrogance is abolished in favour of willingness to learn and work on a reliable basis .....

"Thai farmers worry as Chinese-Laos high speed trains bring competing produce..." Not only the farmers, the entire country will be facing the music anytime soon. Having being "protected" by governments and Phuyays for generations will backfire anytime soon as Khon Thai is not semi-divine but rather two generations behind all the rest. Once this coronaphobia is under control you will see that in agriculture, tourism and assembly, foreign languages, international trade laws and free competition is definitely very far behind already. The absence of any decent education - responsibility of the government - resulted in overpriced underqualified labour force to the benefit - of the same government crooks. Good luck Thailand, embrace the nippier weather outside Thailand as there is no way around it.

1,304 people: 40.57% of the respondents will not travel = 529.0328 persons 34.35% said they will definitely go somewhere = 448.1848 persons 25.08% said they have not yet decided = 327.0432 persons 529.0328 persons + 448.1848 persons + 327.0432 persons = 1304.2608 Apart from this mathematical carp I - for one - query, if 1'304.2608 persons are reflecting the opinion of +/- 70 million people - go figure ????

Regretfully I have to agree with you ....... ????