OldAsiaHand

If you want to fly with a reasonable amount of confidence and comfort, then go with Finnair, their flights are usually pretty fairly priced, around 5K return.

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Swiss and Cathay Pacific also have one flight a day each in the market and are solid airlines. They both generally have deals on offer. I would at least check out their web sites before signing up for a flying adventure with one of the so-called low fare carriers.

I know a Thai businessman in Bangkok and he owes someone about 750000bht, He has cash difficulties and is in the process of selling his 30 million bht plus home in Bangkok.

Is it possible to legally put a claim on the funds he recieves so as he has to pay off the debt on collection of the sale proceeds?

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No.

People tend to use the phrase "offshore bank account" as if it were somehow magical, but all the phrase really denotes is the existence of a bank account in a country where you are not resident. If you live in Gurnsey, for example, a Gurnsey bank account is not offshore.

Offshore accounts are not secret. Some jurisdictions will furnish less banking information to government authorities than others, but what they furnish and to whom depends as much on your country of residence as it does on the country where the bank account is held.

The advantages and disadvantages of holding bank accounts in countries where you are not resident turn on a great many things, far too many to discuss here. The laws of the country of your residence, the laws of the country where you hold your account, and what you wish to accomplish by having that account are the major factors but, by no means, the only ones.

I don't mean to lecture here, but you asked a hugely complex question and, without more information on your particular circumstances, there is really no way anyone can give you a specific answer that is of any value.

Where's the troll patrol when you really need it?

hahahaha... I'm sorry, but Channel 11 "Newsline" is laughable. Amateurish hosts misspeaking about non-news items. Their "news" is so sanitized by government censors, it's hardly worth a view. About the only thing worthwhile is their stock market and currency exchange reports (their business correspondent is the only reporter with a clue).

Well, hahahaha yourself. I think you've got your head waaaaaay up your butt on this one, pal. This ain't New York. It's not even Toledo. The anchors will never make it onto CNN, I know, but --- and I use this phrase for the second time --- "by local standards" they're just fine.

And as for the news being "sanitized," well golly, no kidding? Gee, I never thought of that when I was watching Channel 11, just like I never think of it when I read the Bangkok Post. Duh.

I have it on good authority that he flunked out of community college. Some problem about all his assignments being inverted, I think.

I have just read in the 'Your Money' section of the Bangkok Posts that the architecture profession in Thailand is to be opened up internationally. I wonder does anyone know if this means architects could more easily work legally in Thailand.

Joe

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One of Thailand's most famous architects is an American: Robert Boughey. You ought to be able to find him easily enough since he's quite high profile and his office is out in the Sukhumvit area.

Why don't you give him a ring and ask what he thinks? He's a very pleasant and approachable guy.

It's called "GOOD MORNING",and it's on the Thai outlook channel,7o'clock to 9o'clock,in the morning .It's very iformative ,a good show,they have some good guests'

Channel 11 also has an English-language news broadcast around 10:30 at night, which is probably a better schedule for most of you guys. The exact time seems to move around slightly depending on other programming, but it's a western style news-weather-sports show that runs about forty-five minutes. The presenters are quite good, at least by local standards. Worth catching.

3. Very important: close all running programmes, even anti virus.

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4. Then bend over, place your head as far back between your legs as you can, and kiss your ass goodbye.

With respect to brokers, might also take a look at Seamico (www.seamico.com). They've made a minor speciality here of dealing with resident expats.

No broker will provide you US style service, however, so don't look for it. About the best you can hope for is the execution of your orders more than half the time without screwing them up. Unless you can talk the institutional guys into handling your account, many of whom are foreign, you'll be stuck with a retail broker. They're all Thai and not much more sophisticated than the Thai kids who work at McDonalds.

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Utter rubbish! I told you to stop using your left hand, didn't I? You ought to have your bum spanked, salted & umeboshi-plumed for spewing out such torrents of false data!

The brokers here provide a level of service that eclipses that offered stateside; and very often here a broker will go out of his/her way to provide hours of one on one indoctrination and methodology for Farangs and Thais.

They have this in common, but some are better than others.

Top honors goes to Philip Securities in Bangkok, on Silom road.

IB Securities, Adkinsons, Kim Eng Securities in Phuket -- Tisco in BKK is also very good. BFIT in BKK is top-notch.

My personal rec. would be Kim Eng Securities in any city in LOS.

And orders are handled electronically or via Telephone etc. -- I've never had a problem and I've done many, many, many buys/sells.

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Utter, utter, utter rubbish. Do I smell a dose of self-interest in the avalance of misinformation above, or is that odor something a little more organic? My oh my, I hope those dolts at Kim Eng are paying you well for all this blatant and inaccurate advertising, old buddy.

Still, fellows, mark me well, you buy into this guy's unrestrained touting at your own risk. Thai retail brokers are, on the whole, both ignorant and uneducated. When you deal with American brokers, at least you usually get your choice.

The O-A is a bit special. You should defintively have a re-entry permit, regardless of what the conuslate said.

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But it says "multiple" entry right on it....

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You're getting confused over the difference in your status when you are here on a non-immigrant visa issued outside Thailand and here on an extension of your non-immigrant visa issued inside Thailand.

Here's how it works.

You get a multientry non-immigrant visa issued outside Thailand. It's usually good for entering anytime within a year, as ofter as you like, and is always good for a ninety day stay per entry.

You go to Immigration here after you enter on your non-immigrant visa issued outside Thailand and, assuming you qualify for a one-year stay on some basis, they extend your last entry for the one year period. The extension has nothing to do with when your visa was issued, but only with the last time you entered Thailand. If it was ninety days earlier, say, your 'one year' extension effectively becomes a 'nine month' extension since it dates back to your last entry.

Still with me?

This is where the reentry permit comes in. Once your original visa is extended, the extension is only for you to remain in the country. If you leave, you lose the extension and the visa and have to start all over. Unless you get a reentry permit before you leave. It's readily granted and comes in both single and multiple entry versions. It permits your extension to continue on as if you had never left the country and is more or less just a way for the fine folks at Immigration to soak more baht out of you. I can't remember how much the multientry reentry permit cost, but it's certainly not an insignificant amount.

This is the way it works. This is the ONLY way it works. Stick with the program and it's an easy ride. Start with the American-style 'but-if' questions, and you're digging a hole for yourself.

Hope this helps.

Does anyone know if the Treo 650 is available in Bangkok?  

And if so ... where?    Panthip??

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Widely and easily available.

Go to PalmOne Thailand, run the 'Where to Buy' function, and you'll find a whole list of dozens of local sources complete with addresses and telephone numbers. The advertised price, if I recall, is something like B29,000.

I arrived here (Thailand) on a ticket that I bought in Oz (Yearly ticket.). Is it possible to buy another return ticket here (Thailand), return to Oz, then come back, and when going back to Oz to use the return portion of my initial Yearly ticket?

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Unless I'm missing something here, I can't really see why you'd ask if that's a problem. It sounds utterly routine to me.

As for prices, while I don't have any specifics for Melbourne at hand, I have no doubt you would find that BKK-MEL-BKK is at least a bit cheaper than the same flight originating in Melbourne. A couple of years ago it was a lot cheaper, particularly in business and first, close to 50% of the overseas price, but the gap has narrowed a great deal recently.

Call around to some travel agents. The prices quoted will all probablly be about the same from all of them. General discounts here are rare, but sometimes a particular carrier offers cheaper deals for a while and only one or two travel agencies will be smart enough to know about it. Also look at the big travel ads in the classified section of the Bangkok Post almost any weekday.

tx a ton madsere.

i have dtac unlimited gprs....now will visit dtac site to sign up....then gotta move into starbucks...;-) ... anyways whats the speed you guys get in starbucks....i believe 11 mbps would be the connection between you and the accesspoint not the internet....

anyone run any speed test while on the starbucks hotspot?

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I've run tests a couple of times when it seemed to be running so slowly that I became sufficiently annoyed to do it.

I never saw anything much over a standard 56k dialup speed, absolutely never over 100kbs. It depends on how many people are logged onto the particular access point , of course, as well as how many people are clogging up the KSC system, but don't count on much speed. The Starbucks hotspots work adequately for email, but I wouldn't count on doing anything heavy duty on them.

With respect to brokers, might also take a look at Seamico (www.seamico.com). They've made a minor speciality here of dealing with resident expats.

No broker will provide you US style service, however, so don't look for it. About the best you can hope for is the execution of your orders more than half the time without screwing them up. Unless you can talk the institutional guys into handling your account, many of whom are foreign, you'll be stuck with a retail broker. They're all Thai and not much more sophisticated than the Thai kids who work at McDonalds.

I use Starbucks' hot spots with a Powerbook running Safari all the time.

Just ask the cashier for an internet card. They come in three varities: 1 hour, 5 hours, and 20 hours. The only price I can remember is the one I usually buy, which is five hours for B600.

Then sit down and open Safari and the first browser window you see will ask for your user name and password. Type in the ones on the card you just bought and you're connected. Be sure to hit the 'yes' button when Safari asks if you want to save the information and from then on all you will have to do is open Safari and you'll be good to go.

One caution. Remember to log off when you're done. There is nothing to remind you to do that and it's easy to forget. You can either go back in Safari's history to the log on page and hit the log off button or, easier perhaps, type 1.1.1.1 as the IP you want to access in the URL window and hit return. That will log you off immediately.

Hope this helps.

OldAsiaHand, I'm quite interested in this topic too, can you post some of your experiences on here please?

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I hate to seem ungracious after you've been nice enough to ask for my opinion, but whenever I've previously offered my views on filming in Thailand on this board I always seem to have spun the I-am-more-Thai-than-you crowd off into a frenzy. Observations about Thailand that are not entirely positive frequently seem attract an avalanche of name calling and I'm really not up for another round right now.

If you'd like to PM me with a specific question, however, I'd be glad to answer it as well as I can.

I have heard that you have to pay taxes for the profit, unless you invest in a Condo again with a Year or so from sale. Are there any other legal ramifications?

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You really do need to consult a property lawyer, my friend. You're asking the right questions, but the answers are complicated and not necessarily logical and, if I may say so, you seem to have a tendancy to lean too quickly on what you may have "heard."

The tax situtation when you sell a property here, for example, is very murky and reinvestment has nothing at all to do with it.

Yes, you will pay a transfer tax at the time of sale, but in addition to that you will pay income tax on gain. The odd thing is that 'gain' has nothing to do with accounting gain in any rational sense of the term. Your 'capital gain' is calculated based on a percentage of the gross selling price of the property, adjusted for how long you have owned it. Please note that this means that, even if you sell at a huge loss, the tax authorities will insist you have a gain and demand a large tax payment. Also note that the longer you have owned a property, the greater this implied gain may be.

Believe-it-or-not, the following senario is absolutely true.

You buy a property for B25 million and sell it five years later for B20 million. In addition to the loss you have taken, you will owe income tax on slightly over B10 million of capital gain, or a little over 50% of your gross revenue from the sale. Yes, of course this makes no sense, but this is exactly why you need to pay a good property lawyer to provide you detailed counsel that is relevant to your circumstances.

I think you've more than exceeded your quota of free legal advice here.

Lonely Planet suggests that most Thai businessmen wear off-the-rack 100% polyester suits. How accurate is this assessment?

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It's about as accurate as a lot of the other backpacker crap in Lonely Planet. Asking the kind of people who write for Lonely Planet (or read it) what 'businessmen' wear in Bangkok is like asking Michael Jackson what to wear for a day in court.

Business people dress here pretty well the same as they would in any other major city -- i.e. in tailored wools if you are a top guy (or aspire to be), in off-the-rack blends if you're a middle manager, and in a tie without a jacket if you're a worker type.

What you are bringing sounds fine and, if it's not, there are wonderful businessmen's tailors in Bangkok that will deliver you better goods than you will find almost anywhere at less than half the price. Just stay away from the lower Sukhumvit Indians who hustle the tourists.

Marine police make massive heroin haul

Police were first alerted to the crime when a speedboat carrying the drugs left Trat Province yesterday, taking the heroin to Songkhla Province where it was transferred onto the fishing vessel.

Actually the truth is that police were really first alerted to the crime when the American DEA told them about it. That's how almost all of the big drug busts are made here. You don't think the Thai cops want to do this kind of stuff on their own, do you?

Using the USB modem or what?

The Airport requires an ethernet connection with your modem, but on request, True will provide a modem that provides both USB and ethernet ports. The brand name they gave me is, believe it or not, a Billion. Those Taiwanese sure can come up with great names, can't they?

If you use the free USB modem, couldn't you connect the Mac's ethernet port to the upstream port of a router/switch/hub and then use the Mac's built-in software router (or something like IPNet Router) to share the connection?

Yes, that should work, but if you're using a PowerBook, there's an even easier approach.

I'm using an Airport here with several PowerBooks. Just plugged True straight into the Airport and off I went. No muss, no fuss, no configuration problems at all.

There was one fairly recently about two American girls who were tricked into smuggling heroin and got arrested.

One of the girls took the rap and was sentenced to life.  The other one went free.

Not too bad actually but I can't think of the name right now...

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You're probably thinking of 'Brokedown Palace.' I thought it was dim-witted melodrama for the Lou Diamond Phillips teeny bopper types, but hey, each to his own.

Regardless, it was filmed in the Phillipines because it portrayed Thais, particularly cops and government officials, as stupid and corrupt. Gee, nothing could be further from the truth, huh?

I wish I could say something more encouraging to you, but the last poster is dead on. You asked for the simple truth about Pattaya and that's it.

It's in J-Avenue, the new shopping centre about halfway between Sukhumvit and Petchburi on the west side of Thonglor. There's a Villa market, a Greyhound restaurant, an Au Bon Pain et al there. The Apple store is owned by the same folks who own the one in Saim Discovery, It's on the ground level right in the middle and facing the (small) parking lot. Ask for Ben.