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grin

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Posts posted by grin

  1. I have an APEC card that allows me to go through priority lanes in APEC countries. In Thailand I have been redirected to the Thai passport lanes and other lanes but no one has ever asked to see my APEC card when I have reached the counter. Now when I enter Thailand I just pick the shortest priority lane and go there. So far I have never had a problem.

  2. On 3/17/2018 at 3:46 AM, Johnnyondaspot said:

    It's great news and there is a 1and 1/2 hour layover in Tapei for flights to LAX and about 2 1/2 hours on the return.   That's perfect.  It's enough time to account for a slight delay on the first leg, gives you time to stretch your legs and gives the ground crew time to get your luggage on your connecting flight.

     

    EVA is hard to beat when it comes to service.  Their aircraft are clean and leave on-time.  I've flown them many times across the Pacific.

     

    Hopefully,  the other airlines at CNX will take notice of the boarding procedures that EVA uses.  It is orderly, fair and a nice change from the typical passenger gate loading from all of the other airlines at Chiang Mai's airport.

     

    Layovers for flights to and from SFO are not quite as good but the total trip time of 19 hours each way sure beats anything else out there. And Premium Economy for $1559 RT is not bad at all.

    Grin

  3. Big C accepted my pink ID card and entered the ID number into their system. They require you to show your registered ID to get the accumulated discounts that they have now instead of the coupons at the end of the register receipts. Also you only have to give them your phone number at checkout. It seems like the membership card has been discontinued. Works much better than the coupons for us. The coupons would usually expire before we got around to gathering them together for a trip to Big C.

  4. I would assume that filling out a form online will just result in an email being sent to them. Otherwise if someone has to login to check to see if forms were submitted I would guess that it would be even more unlikely that people would respond in a timely fashion if at all.

     

    While I rely mostly on email for communication with the rest of the world I find that it is of little use here in Thailand. Who knows if the website is even maintained and if filling out the form did anything at all? That seems to be the case for a lot of small company websites and not just in Thailand.

  5. It's funny but a few years back I brought a few of those yellow plastic containers of Comet with the green top back from the US. As these containers are full of powder I didn't bother storing them in a cool dry place. Now the containers have split open at the bottom, even the one that was opened and half full. Easy enough to fix with plastic bags and rubber bands but even those will deteriorate over time as well. Comet does cake up here but a good shake or two frees enough powder on top for a quick cleaning.

  6. Ditto on ThaiFirst, we have been using them for many years with quality results. They are on the road that runs between Chang Klan road and the river, just a few blocks north of the river crossing that goes over to the Ratchavej Hospital and Holiday Inn. They are on the west side of the road just a bit north of a building that kind of resembles a castle. They have a small shop front so it is easy to miss.

  7. Am I missing something here? How many people have broadband internet here that can match the highest bit rate of blu-ray Ultra HD triple layer disc players? They can play up to 128 Mbits/second.

  8. I may have misread the OP but it didn't seem like he was looking for such a woman. He seemed to me to just be curious about how this type of pairing comes about.

     

    I think it is also very subjective as to what women people consider beautiful. Although I am not particularly attracted to Asian women I see plenty of beautiful Thai women in all walks of Thai society. And I am not talking about women with a lot of makeup, surgery, or whatever.

     

    However, I rarely see what I would call a stunningly beautiful Thai woman. Basically a woman that would lead me to do more than a double take. A few weeks ago, for the first time in several years I saw such a woman in business class on a flight from TPE to BKK. She was absolutely beautiful and it was difficult not to stare. She was not wearing a lot of makeup and her expensive clothes were understated. She seemed to be accompanied by a handler so I assume she was an actress or celebrity of some type.

     

    But in any case I cannot recall seeing such beautiful Thai women hanging around with Westerners.

  9. I had Mohs surgery in the US with very good results. This is used to treat both BCC and SCC mentioned in the previous posts. Has anyone had this procedure performed here in Chiang Mai?

     

    My mom who is 88 in the US was recently diagnosed with BCC on her nose and was given a choice of surgery, chemo, and radiation. She opted for radiation which was 11 treatments over about a month. The results were excellent. She chose this as she was told with surgery her nose would have to be reconstructed and that chemo had bad side effects.

     

    I did not understand why they mentioned the chemo side effects as with BCC and SCC they usually perform topical chemotherapy as opposed to systemic chemotherapy except in advanced cases.

     

    https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/CRC/PDF/Public/8821.00.pdf

  10. Funny comments about Australian public servants. It's a small sample size but I've been to Melbourne Cup parties at the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Talk about mad hatters, literally, those people sure like to party. At one of these the ambassador who acted as the MC was drunk as a skunk and was telling off color jokes over his mic.

     

    Troll bait: Do Australians actually refer to themselves as Aussies or is it Ozzies? Do people from Kansas and Australia have any affinity?

  11. My guess is that they know this is undesirable and that they are burning this late in order to avoid detection. I was trying to make sense of that myself and was thinking that, well, I don’t know who is doing it because I’m not willing to get up that late and roam the neighborhood to find out who the culprit is. So maybe their ploy is working. I can’t even tell if it is a single culprit.

    An even more bizarre idea would be that they think they are being altruistic by burning at night in order to not bother people in the daytime. Maybe they just have jobs and get home late from work.

    Not being too facetious I hope, maybe I could get a drone and fly it around to figure out who the culprit is or culprits are and then send my wife over to ask them to please burn in the afternoons or evenings like everyone else. After all we are more likely to have our windows closed then. ;)


    Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect

  12. It's not just crop stubble burning and pollution from outside blowing in. Here where we live in Padaet we get people burning garbage upwind almost every night after midnight. They manage to do this even in rainy season. The acrid smell of burning plastic is overpowering and if we don't shut our windows every night and keep the AC going all night then we all wake up with headaches. The smell seems to blow off pretty early in the morning. In cooler weather we just run the AC without any cooling just to filter the air. I bought a thermal leak detector and used it to find the air leaks. I fixed the obvious leaks but not much more can be done but replace all of the windows.

  13. Never had this problem at the Chinese Consulate in Chiang Mai before. The visa fee was always high as I'm a US citizen and I'm pretty sure the fee was reciprocal. It has been a while since I did this as now US citizens can obtain a 10 year business visa to China.

     

    Grin

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