nisakiman

What a pointless and misleading post. You will find dishonest people everywhere you go, particularly around airports. Just because there are a few bad apples doesn't mean it's a general trait.

Maybe you've just been unlucky. Personally, I find Thais in general to be as honest as people in most other countries. And I've never had a problem with taxis. If they want to work on a fixed fare (quite rare, in my experience), I just get out and find another cab.

I quite often stay in a hotel close to Hualamphong, and on the odd occasion I wanted to go to Kaosan I would walk or tuk-tuk or taxi to Sri Phraya pier and get the boat to Phra Athit. Fast and easy. Not to mention much pleasanter than sitting in traffic in a hot bus.

This law only seems to apply to the big sellers, 7-11, Tesco and so on. All the small family shops will get an extra income, because they don't care about this restriction - and this makes them really happy, courtesy of the General.

No difference at all the 11-2 and 5-12 law has been in place for years now, maybe 8 years or so.

True, but 8 years of stupid doesn't change the fact that it still remains stupid. These rules are made by people who generally have no idea of the consequences of their actions, and actually don't care. Their main motivation is to be seen to be 'doing something'. The fact that that 'something' serves merely to inconvenience everyone without offering any discernable benefit is irrelevant. The cry went out from the puritans: "Something must be done!", so a knee-jerk reaction was instigated. Doesn't matter that it will screw things up for millions of tourists. Doesn't matter that it will achieve zilch. Doesn't matter that late venues will lose shedloads of money. SOMETHING HAS BEEN DONE! "Look at me! I'm addressing 'the problem' (whatever that is...)".

Just like the idiocy of covering cigarette displays. Doesn't stop anyone smoking, but it sure as hell makes life difficult for the tourist who wants to know what's on offer behind those shutters in the local 7-11.

In fact I had a combination of both idiocies last week in Bangkok. I went to a bottle shop in Paragon to buy some rolling tobacco, but not living here, I have no idea what's available, so I tied up the till staff getting them to open the doors and show me what they had etc. This was just before 2 pm, so of course an increasingly irate line of people, bottles of wine or whatever in hand were hassling to get to the till before the 2 pm deadline. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And for what? What benefit derived from that little circus? None, except a bunch of people, including me were unnecessarily, pointlessly inconvenienced.

A few weeks ago when we were in Bangkok, we bought a small carry-on suitcase. It looks well made (it's made in Thailand) and carries the Swiss flag logo on the zip handles etc. It's very handy, as it has a padded pocket inside for the laptop, and is quite capacious, Only trouble is, after a couple of flights, the telescopic handle now only opens one stage (half way). I've taken the top part of the handle off to investigate, and the problem is inside the tubes at the bottom. Having dismantled one of these handles before, I know from experience that something has probably broken inside, and it is unlikely it is repairable. Being with the in-laws, I don't have any decent tools available anyway. Trouble is, most of these handles are made in China, and their QC is not very good. Basically, I think it needs a whole new handle. As we will only be in Bangkok for a day before we fly back to Greece, it will be too tight to try to get it done under guarantee by the shop we bought it from.

So.....does anyone know where I could take it here in Ubon (we're here for about 3 weeks) where they could fit a new telescopic handle? Or failing that, does anyone know a shop that sells suitcases, as they may well know someone who does repairs. I'm sure this is a fairly common problem, so I would think that someone will have taken advantage of the poor quality of the handles and set up a repair sideline.

Any info would be much appreciated.

Damn! I used to follow her on Twitter. She tweeted as @christinadarling, and was a very intelligent and quite politically opinionated young woman. And very funny too. She came across as a slightly dippy but very nice young girl. She was well liked and had lots of followers. Expect a reaction somewhat stronger than the one to the other poor couple who died recently. I have a feeling that this time.

RIP Christina. You were much too young.

110 million mobile phones for a population of 65 million people, how many do you have ?

Every bargirl knows that you must have several phones to keep the 'sponsors' away from each other if you get my drift.

Ah, so that's who buys all those dual-sim phones!

I use a dual SIM phone, and I could actually do with a triple SIM, as I have a Greek SIM, a UK SIM and a Thai SIM, and at the mo I need two phones. A triple SIM phone would be really handy, but I haven't come across one yet (although I haven't looked that hard, I have to admit). And I need three active cards because I have bank accounts in all three countries with internet banking, for which I need an active mobile phone number. Nothing sinister or unusual, I wouldn't have thought. Must be loads of people in my position.

Back on topic, though, I got a SIM from True only a month ago (in fact we got three - one for me, one for the wife and one for the dongle), and there was no mention of registering. You would have thought that with this legislation imminent, they would have started registering new cards straight away. Now we've got the hassle of registration as a seperate issue.

As an aside, about six (?) years ago, everyone in Greece got an SMS from their provider saying that they had to take their phone in to one of the the provider's offices with ID, tax number and (I think) a utility bill for registration. As far as I know, there has never been any registration for SIM cards in UK.

I place a normal 12cm men's hair comb in the fold of my wallet and another comb under the flap of my phone case. Rubber band is then wrapped one each around wallet and phone case.

Comb teeth catch the pocket lining and lip. Rubber bands provide friction. Wallet and phone are in a single front pocket - easier to protect.

But bloody uncomfortable when you sit down. I can't stand having my pockets stuffed with bulky things like wallets.

Yet another reason to carry your money in just a folded wad. Difficult for a pickpocket to remove and flexes easily to the shape of your body. I use a card holder wallet, which being more or less the same shape as a card is much smaller than the average wallet, and I find even that a pain to carry around in my pocket.

Bangkok has many many places with gardens you can sit in, some really spectacularly nice places.

Just a couple you might want to try

Hemingways - just inside Sukhumvit 14

Coffee Alley in the Garden - just down Sukhumvit Soi 16

Cottage 66 - Sukhumvit soi 66 (bit far out but a beautiful place

Suggest you Google each of the above for details, which are easy to find.

You might want to Google this which will give you a great article on the subject "nomadicnotes.com bangkok cafes" (I don't think I can post the actual URL)

Thanks for that info - I'll check them out when I can.

A few posters seem to have got the impression that I'm complaining by the tone of their posts, with one even suggesting I move to Greece! LOL! I've been living in Greece for the past 14 years, and I'm just here for a couple of months so my wife can see her folks and to do a few things we need to do. What made me write the original post was not that I was complaining, but the fact that I'd come across this large pedestrianised square just over the road from Paragon, and it was a soulless, concrete desert with absolutely nothing going for it. And smack in the middle of one of the busiest and most upmarket areas of Bangkok. What a waste! It was just crying out for some imaginative development (NOT another air-con mall).

It could, I'm sure, be a thriving spot that people would seek out if it was full of café bars with nice seating and tables.

Other posters here seem to think being outside means sitting in the sun - it doesn't. You won't find any Greeks sitting in the sun at their favourite café - they aren't masochists! There will be plenty of large umbrellas providing shade and plenty of fans providing a breeze. Even in the hot weather, it makes for a shady, cool and comfortable environment in which to enjoy an iced coffee or a cold beer. And to watch the world go by.

And as a previous poster pointed out, air-con wasn't the norm 20 years ago - it's a relatively recent phenomenon, and personally I think the Thais have gone a bit overboard with it.

Sitting outside in an non-airconditioned space is not aspirational for your average Thai, young or old.

Nor is there an alfresco style café culture.

What works in the West, doesn't always have appeal in the East.

It's odd that you should say that, because about 6 - 7 years ago we were living in Ari (during the summer months), and there was a café / bar / restaurant where I would often meet my wife after she finished work. It had a smallish enclosed (and air-conditioned) central core, with some seating and the bar and kitchen, and was surrounded on two (maybe three, I don't recollect) sides with a wide verandah which had tables and seating and oscillating fans bolted to the pillars. It wasn't cheap, but it was always busy, and the majority of the people sitting outside were what I would have called 'aspirational' Thais - thirty-something professional types, both male and female.

Sadly, it has disappeared now. A couple of days ago we went to have a bite at Lau Lau, the fish restaurant just round the corner from Ari (one of the best in Bangkok to my mind, although in a distinctly unglamorous location!), and went looking for our old haunt to have a pre-prandial drink. There is now a multi-storey condo on the corner, and the bar is lost forever.

However, I still maintain that if a café bar of the type I suggested were to open in that soulless square I mentioned in the OP in Siam, it would attract more business than it could cope with. Humidity notwithstanding and 'aspirational' types notwithstanding. Does anybody think that the 40% odd of male smokers actually like going out to the street to smoke a cigarette when they are out for a drink? Or would they rather sit in a nice (if not air-con freezing) location and be able to light up without leaving the table?

I know what I'd prefer (although I am biased, hating air-con as I do ).

They are called beer bars and there are thousands of them.

Around Siam? I didn't spot any. And are they comfortable, upmarket places? Where you can get a decent coffee and a nice snack? All the beer bars I've been to in Thailand have been distinctly downmarket, and not very comfortable.

Well right now the weather is akin to that of Southern Med Europe...

I can assure you that it gets a hell of a lot hotter than this during the summer in Athens. 40C+ is not uncommon, and 35 - 38 is the norm. Perhaps not quite as humid as here, but not far off sometimes. And Athens sits in a bit of a bowl and is as polluted as here - the traffic is terrible. But the Greeks still have thousands of nice outdoor café areas where you can sit comfortably with an Ouzo and meze (or coffee and toasted sandwich, if you prefer) and watch the world go by. And in the more upmarket areas like Kolonaki they charge a fortune (€5 for an espresso coffee, anyone?), and yet they are still heaving, year round.

I don't think the weather is very much more extreme here than it is in the southern med, and in Greece they have these fans which blow a fine mist of water in front of the fan, which doesn't make you wet, but makes the airstream from the fan much cooler. They work really well.

I'm quite sure that if someone was to open a nice café bar in this square I was in today, with comfortable seating, lots of plants dotted around, plenty of large umbrellas for shade and a good range of drinks and snacks, they would make an absolute killing.

I think they must have been watching too much Monty Python.

I wonder why they chose toothpaste rather than the much more high-value cigarettes and booze from behind the counter? Perhaps they really were Muslim. I hope they didn't pick up any shredded pork sandwiches in error - that would have only left them with the toothpaste. Still, I guess they might get a couple of hundred Baht for that on the black market. Split between the three of them, that should give them at least 60 Baht each. Well worth risking a lengthy prison sentence for...

Downside of learning Thai is that you get to hear what the majority of Thai people talk about on a daily basis: the most inane, trivial conversations and gossip that I've ever heard in my life. Yes, you can become totally fluent in Thai with a lot of work, but then what are you going to talk about? When I reached a level where I could understand 75% or so of what I heard around me, I completely lost interest in the language.

It's not the first time I've heard this feedback. I met a few British expats (age mid 50s onwards) living on Crete this year and spent a few hours hearing about their experience of living there. All but one of them was now fluent in Greek. Many positives from them about living there, but their main complaint echos what you say here, that on the whole the local conversation is inane and predictable.

Yeah, the Greeks like to talk about all sorts of inane things. A particular favourite is the weather. And whether Panathinaikos are going to beat Olimpiakos this year. And how tourism is down - again - this year.

Pretty much like the Brits, really. And I would guess most other nations. It's not often you go into a pub in the UK and hear a couple of beer swillers discussing the merits of 'Hamlet' as opposed to 'King Lear', or the finer points of Plato's philosophies.

And I imagine the Thais are pretty similar. Small talk is the grease that oils the wheels. Don't knock it.

Back in the 70s I worked for a small company, the owner (and his sons) of which was also an on course bookie at the Flemington racecourse in Melbourne. I'd sometimes work with them 'on the bag', and one of the first things that Bruce (yes, really!) told me was NEVER to carry money in a wallet, particularly in your back pocket. He himself just folded the wad and stuffed it into his back pocket. Very difficult to extract loose notes, but a nice, shiny and slippery wallet slides out very easily.

So that's how I've carried my money ever since.

And I've never been pick-pocketed, although I think that's just the luck of the draw.

I don't get the OP's 'not wanting to question' the delivery men. My wife has no hesitation in asking questions or, if she wanted something like a mattress moving, asking the guys to do it. All very politely and nicely, of course, but I don't think 'face' comes into it.

As to learning the language, if/when I move here, I will certainly try to get some Thai under my belt. I live in Greece, and I know for a fact that my ability to deal with most things in the language makes life one hell of a lot easier, particularly when dealing with people in the government, even if they know how to speak English. The fact that I've made the effort to communicate in their own language (even though my Greek is not really very good) tends to make them much more inclined to help, rather than hinder. They see it as a compliment and as respect. I would have thought that the same would apply in Thailand.

I have a return with Qatar going back to Greece next month. I wonder if they'll offer me a refund...

Somehow, I rather doubt it.

I haven't flown Aeroflot since about 1999 when I flew LHR-BKK-LHR. I have to say that it was far and away the worst flight(s) I have ever experienced, and I swore I would never again fly with them.

Granted, they were cheap, and had the added bonus of being one of the few airlines that still had a smoking section at that time, but everything else was terrible. The London-Moscow legs weren't too bad, but the flight to Bangkok and back was in ancient jumbo jets - the plane on the return leg was appalling - the fabric on the seat backs had worn through and the sponge filler was poking out, the plastic shroudings on the aisle side of the seats was broken and jagged and the carpet was like the carpet you used to find just by the bar in a spit'n'sawdust pub - sticky and stinking. The stewardesses were rude and unhelpful (and ugly, to boot) and the food was inedible. Awful.

I'm sure they must have changed for the better in the intervening 15 odd years, but I very much doubt I would ever use them again. I stick to the Middle East airlines now. New aircraft, good service (even in economy) and edible food. I've used Qatar the last couple of trips as the stopover times coming from Athens are good. Just a couple of hours, which is enough time to have a coffee and stretch the legs a bit - breaks the journey up nicely.

moreover, a lot of not so poor people make their living from those poor people...

btw, seriously, apart from the corruption issues associated about rent pays, etc,........ many of those vendors are anything but poor!!

mystery to me if they make money. i just dont see a lot of business going on.

you got rent , boys to build and tear down the stall, people to run the stall, is their that much money to spread around?

My wife was in hospital at Sanam Pao for a couple of days earlier this week, and I would nip down to the street for a ciggy every now and then so got to see the street vendors near the hospital operating. There seemed to be two or three shifts - as one stall packed up, another would take its place. I saw the women who sold clothing packing up after the morning, and they were putting all their gear into pretty new cars. One of them was collected by her husband, and they loaded the stuff into a Honda Accord still on red plates. So it seemed to me that they were doing very nicely out of their street trading enterprises. And good luck to them.

100 % Juice is usually a bit more than 100 %.

Production usually: Press it (or on apple you just destroy the cell walls with enzymes which is cheaper). In case of Orange juice disable the natural enzymes else it get bitter. Extract the aroma from it. Get rid of the water and make concentrate.

Than: Mix the concentrate with water. Add the aroma back, add Vitamin C you lost in the process (doesn't need to be declared as you just fill up to the natural levels). In case of orange juice add a little bit of oil from the peel as it compensate a bit for the lost aroma.

The sugar: If you drink a glass of orange juice in the morning it won't be a problem. Also a glass of coke won't be a problem. Problem is that people drink 2 liter coke and it lots of sweet and icecreame at the same time.

Exactly, but, instead of going through all that trouble, just eat a small bowl of Broccoli, you have everything you need.

Or better still, just take a pill with all the essential vitamins! Yum yum! I can't wait!

Everyone on TVF is married to or has a GF with at least a degree if not two from Chula plus a Masters and the occasional Doctorate.

I thought everyone knew that. It's one of the conditions of membership, to have a verifiably hi-so wife. It's in the name - Thai VISA = Very I So Attachment.

As already stated, in a free market it is not the business of government to seek to influence prices. People will vote with their credit cards. That's enough to keep the airlines on their toes.

Tobacco Control is the product of a prohibitionist mindset which uses highly dubious 'research' to justify its 'war on tobacco'. Their approach is the reverse of what it should be. Instead of 'evidence based policy' they have constructed 'policy based evidence'. They start with the conclusions they want, and then design research studies guaranteed to reach those conclusions. Most of the medical establishment actually haven't a clue, and don't question the mechanisms involved in smoking tobacco, they just parrot the line that was drummed into them at medical school. (I know this because I had a client who was a doctor, and when I sent him some links to original research and the actual, as opposed to cherry-picked, results, he was absolutely staggered). If you actually study the original research on which all the scaremongering about smoking is based, you will find that it is very, very shaky. To quote from an article by Richard White, an assiduous researcher and author of 'Smoke Screens':

But it’s only recently that smoking levels have decreased to a point that it can all be more accurately analysed. for some reason we always seem to just look at the 1930s onwards, but people have been smoking for millennia. Humans evolved in smoke-filled huts, by open-fires, tobacco-filled rooms. Tobacco has been used medicinally for thousands of years, and people have smoked for thousands of years. Only in the 1930s did we see a surge in lung cancer rates. To me, that’s very non-specific of tobacco being a causative agent and we need to look at what else happened in that time – how about the introduction of diesel? The Great Fire? Smog? Testing of the atom bomb? Also indicative of it being innocent as a causative agent is the fact that the Semai people start smoking aged 2, and in a study conducted in the 1970s, of over 12,000 participants not a single case of lung cancer was found.

Doll himself acknowledged that the consumption of vitamin E, through proper diet, could offset (or drastically lower) the risk of lung cancer from smoking. In fact, diet has consistently been shown to have a massive effect on the risk of lung cancer.

https://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/catch-2/

Also there is a theory that governments saw smoking tobacco as a convenient red herring, which is why they encouraged and funded the anti-tobacco fanatics back in the 60s. Much cheaper and easier than being faced with multiple law suits over nuclear testing / diesel emissions or whatever. Personally, I'm dubious about the conspiracy theory side of it. We've always had prohibitionist nutters screaming about the evils of whatever they personally don't like, and unfortunately the current crop of fanatics managed to attract billions in funding from the government and the pharmaceutical industry, who have a vested interest in smoking restrictions. However, there is much to be considered about the government / nuclear testing theory when you see just how much radioactive fallout has been dumped into the atmosphere between 1945 and 1970, during which time cases of lung cancer exploded:

And if you're interested to know how the anti-smoking fanatics managed to turn a once social and socially accepted pastime into one where those who continue to enjoy tobacco are stigmatised and reviled by the indoctrinated majority, here's how it's done: