brommers

A fitting memorial to the hollow promises of Prayuth to have high speed trains running within a few years from his coup. It cost 43 million baht just to ship the rusty hulks from their graveyard in Hokkaido and untold millions more to refit them to metre guage, refurbish them and repaint. So much for SRT to be proud of! Not

Very soon we will see the grandiose new parliament building is leaking from the roof and flooded by the Chai Praya. A fitting tribute to the incompetence of choosing the site and the shoddy building standard of Sino Thai. A fitting metaphor for the crowd of idiots who claim to run this country.

And the authorities said that the new flood control gates built after the disasterous floods of 2011 would prevent flooding in the city. When will Thailand swallow its pride and bring in real experts like the Dutch?

Quite how many visitors does he think can read Thai!

Sad to see that part of the city wall near Chang Phuak Gate has collapsed. It is to be hoped that a careful restoration is rapidly undertaken. Rapid is not a word usually associated with Chiang Mai but this time the mayor and the governor need to wake up.

Yes it is beginning to look much more like a planned park and less like the overgrown weed patch that it has been for years. It remains to be seen how much more development is going to take place. All we need now is for 7/11 to start keeping its frontage clean. It is an absolute mess of discarded food containers, drinks cups, old masks etc. They don't even have a litter bin so that the few decent patrons can dispose of garbage responsibly. And the Bangkok Bank ATM is so filthy it is unusable if you value your health.

Anyone who feels more confident is suffering from temporary unwarranted exuberance. The coming months will see most of the world enter into economic stress and consumers will have to cut back spending on discretionary items like travel as well as anything but essentials. Only the wealthy minority will avoid a major lifestyle downgrades throughout 2023 and governments worldwide will be unable to fund major support programmes. Those who think Thailand can evade the effects of this are delusional..

Just more PR from some hyperventilating drone at TAT. A very small percentage of Europeans will travel long haul because of high airline prices and seat shortages. China will not open up this year according to Nomura and maybe not even next year if they continue the zero Covid policy. Indians might increase in number but they do not spend freely and markets like Japan and Korea will hardly bring in major numbers. So Teflon Thailand will in fact be a historical tourism hub and will remain a laggard in terms of recovery.

The interpretation of the latest regs can differ from place to place. But in CM a friend who was overseas recently for three weeks went to Immigration on his return where he was told it was not necessary if he was living at the same address as last time he did a TM30 report.

The state of personal finances in most western countries is deteriorating rapidly so discretionary expenditure is under threat which means much less demand for long haul travel. We have noticed that our customers split into two groups, higher income well behaved and lower income badly behaved. We have never before suffered theft and crass behaviour like we have in the last 3 months. In fact we will soon introduce measures to keep the loso creatures away in order to protect the decent customers. It will impact our already stressed revenue in the short term but should enhance our appeal long term. We see no chance of the country meeting the breathlessly optimistic rantings of TAT, not that we ever paid much attention to them anyway.

As my dearly departed mother used to say, "<deleted> sticks to a blanket".

Yes, sadly David's Kitchen is permanently closed. It became very reliant on Chinese customers and so it's business was devastated by Covid. I much preferred it when it was at the original out of town riverside location rather than its city one.

I second Weladee, Enoteca and Wanlamun Rim Naam. For a pleasant outdoor lunch beside the river try Nakara Jardin near Alliance Francais and for beautifully presented Thai cuisine there is Krua Ajarn Sayud, but take your own alcohol. Very inexpensive northern Thai food at Gramber is also a pleasant option being set in delightful gardens. And finally in the old city is la Fourchette for good French influenced cuisine opposite Wat Chedi Luang.

Love the irony of a "government" that came to power holding guns is so enamoured of soft power!

I went to Immigration at Central Festival yesterday, at 10:26 am to be precise. The young lady, amongst 5 colleagues seated beside her at the check-in desk, checked my documents and gave me a queue number before indication of to where I should go. I sat for 2 minutes while the Immigration officer completed the processing of the person seated at his workstation. Less than 2 minutes were taken to complete my processing and I left at 10:32. All very well organised and pleasant staff to boot. Count me satisfied.

You can enact all the regulations you want, if they are not enforced at ALL relevant venues you will achieve nothing. Thailand is indeed deep in laws & regulations already but the utter corruption that infects every RTP member and other enforcers simply negates them and will do the same to new regulations.

The next one admitted on humanitarian grounds will be Putin!

Just another smokescreen behind which a herd of civil servants pretend to undertake futuristic projects, when in fact it is nothing more than a job creation scheme allowing otherwise useless paper pushers to draw huge salaries paid for by taxpayers. Show us one example of how all this technocrat has created one meaningful benefit for tourists or the Thai tourism industry.