OldAsiaHand

According to the Nation, the Bangkok Opera company is having an opera house built in "downtown Bangkok" - wherever that is. It's difficult to see why they would need one, since the Thailand Cultural Center is a good venue and the opera performances are never a full-house.

Jeez, I think the Cultural Center is probably the worst venue in which I have ever seen an opera mounted. The acoustics are dreadful and I'm told there is so little space backstage that every performance that comes in has to be stripped down to its very basics. We won't even mention the tiny seats that are pitched forward for some obscure reason.

As for a 'new opera house,' I think that's just a lot of rubbish. When the Siam Paragon shopping center was first announced as a competitor to the Emporium, the developers tried to make much hay out of what civic-minded folks they were by claiming they would be building a hall on the third floor of the shopping center (!) 'to accommodate concerts, operas, and plays.' Well now. Can you say f-i-a-s-c-o?

We have seen all of the productions brought into Bangkok in the cultural festival for the last several years and we have enjoyed most of them.

All of the companies have been Russian or Eastern European. Not the best known ones perhaps, but on the whole the standard has been very high. We have been particularly impressed with the depth of most of the companies that have performed here. They may have lacked real stars, but even the smaller roles were generally sung very competently and the orchestras were very solid.

'Turandot' in particular is one of my favorite operas. The prodution this past year in Bangkok was pleasant if not earthshaking. If the soprano singing the role of Turandot had not been so weak, the overall production would have been very good indeed; but she was not only too old and way, way too ugly, she just really wasn't good enough to carry off the role.

I'm delighted you brought all this up. It makes a nice change from the endless adolescent prattle of people who apparently only just discovered that have a penis.

Given the way things usually work around here, it is odd but true.

Thai banks are the most generous international financial institutions I have ever encountered with respect to the foreign exchange rates they offer on bank transfers, and for that matter, even on the buy-sell spreads they set for ordinary tourist currency exchanges. In the twenty years or so I have been effected by such matters, one was always better off, sometime vastly so, bringing foreign currency into Thailand and buying baht here or buying foreign currency here and sending it out than to deal with overseas banks in FX transactions involving the baht. I hope the local banks never work out how other international banks routinely rape their clients with FX rates and fees.

'Private Dancer' is not fiction. It's only labeled as such as a rather thin and dutiful fig leaf for the author himself.

Steve Leather really went through all of that more or less as he wrote it. He changed a few names just for the form of it, but it's a true story. That doesn't mean the same thing will happen to you, of course, but for what it's worth, it did happen to him.

Now speaking of prats, the question of whether Leather is a bit of one himself for waving around his dirty undies like this in public is still very much open in my mind. Yes, he did get badly ######ed over by this girl, but then of course he behaved like a moron to get himself into that postion in the first place. It's awfully hard to be very sympathetic. Worse, at least in my mind, when the cold water finally hits him, the petty vengance he takes against the girl is so graceless as to leave you shaking your head. Surely he is a bigger person than that.

David who is the MD at East Coast is a Brit, but other than that he's a first rate guy and a genuine professional. He's been in the real estate business around Pattaya dealing with expats for a heck of a long time (as such things are measured these days) and can cite you the detailed history of almost any unit you look at. I can recommend him without reservation.

As opposed to.....what? Wall furniture?

Yeah, same for me. The whole process was utterly routine.

don't give me any rubbish about dogs being eaten and all that. i lived there for 27 years

Gee, after a nice polite request like that I'm sure everyone will just be falling all over themselves to help you out.

Gee, so those nasty foreigners are victimizing poor little Thailand again, huh? How are they doing it? Ah...by buying low and selling high, it seems. Damned unethical if you ask me.

Falangs/Expats are basically.....Old, Fat, Bald, Sweaty, Smelly, and Socially Unacceptable Mis-fit Cretins, most of which are drunks, and that are in Thailand to force themselves on young girls working in the bars?

Is this the general perception?

Not only is it the general perception, it's the truth.

There was indeed been a rink operating for sometime on the top floor of whatever they're calling the WTC this week. There were usually a whole pack of Thai teenagers whooping it up there every afternoon.

I haven't actually set eyes on the place in a year or two, however, although the sign was still up on the facia of the WTC the last time I looked.

Ever hear this definition of mixed feelings?

It's watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff.....in your new Mercedes.

Lousy driving is hardly a character trait of Thais alone, but still, you do have a point.

I've always thought there was something cultural about it, a sort of Buddhist 'shit happens and there's not much you can do about it' approach to the whole process. Have even ever noticed how Thai drivers will frequently go right through an intersection without looking either left or right? It's almost like they were saying 'If I don't know about omething, it can't be a problem for me.' That attitude toward life seem particularly Thai to me.

Questions like this have been address over and over on this board. Run a search and you'll find more information, much of it wrong, than you ever wanted to find.

Your starting point, however, is this: in general, foreigners can't own land in Thailand. If you are determined to do it regardless, there are ways, of course -- owning it through a Thai company or through a Thai citizen who stands as a nominee -- but all of those ways have a tendancy to impact the liquidity of your investment, which bothers most foreigners. As it should.

I'm with Danu - i'm sure it can do domestic transfers no problem....

Yes, but international transfers are regulated by the Bank of Thailand, and depending on the political climate, sometimes quite closely regulated. If you have a Thai baht account and want to buy foreign exchange using that account and then tranfer those funds out of Thailand, you'll have some explaining to do and some questions to answer. Thus has it always been and thus probably will it always be. Welcome to the Third World.

Twelve years (partly in Thailand and partly overseas), two sons, and life couldn't be better. Don't let the cynics get you down.

I don't see how. The Bank of Thailand has always required banks to collect a certain amount of paperwork in connection with all international transfers (origin of funds etc) and I haven't heard anything about a change in policy. At least I know for sure that they were still requiring all the traditional stuff the last time I had any personal experience with sending an international wire, which was a couple of months ago.

I'd endorse Seamico. They have a lot of farang clients and have tried to make a speciality out of dealing with us. Most of the key management is farang and consequently their web site comes about as close to operating at a professional level as any you will find in Thailand.

A surgeon friend tells me that Thai doctors have developed an international reputation for innovation in sexual reassignment surgery. I guess that means you could say they perfected the man-made vagina. So take that and stick it up your light blub, Thomas Edison.....

In my own experience with a dozen or so different so-called Class A buildings, you have already grasped the first half of the essential point in understanding the condominum purchase process here in Thailand. The second half is that you either llearn to ive with it or dyou on't buy a condo.

While some buildings are better than others, it's not generally by all that much. On the whole, construction here is shoddy and slipshod, designed primarily to cut as many corners as possible in order to maximize the developers short-term profits. There is no premium for buidling a long-term reputation as a quality developer.

I hope you have better luck with the Thai I.D. card than my wife did. It's a long story but bottom line is it took her about 9 trips to several amphurs to finally get one.

Good luck

We had exactly the same experience. Thai civil servants live to piss on Thais who are associated in most any way with westerners, much less those who are actually so disloyal to their own race as to marry them.

For a Thai woman, changing her name to a farang name is seldom a pleasant or routine undertaking.

At the end of every traffic accident report you read in the papers, you will notice that the reporter routinely adds the line, 'The driver fled the scene' (usually accompanied by any police officers who might have been unfortunate enough to be witnesses).

Thailand is a driver-fled-the-scene kind of country. Nothing will ever change that.

Stickman took a lot of grief when he waxed lyrical over the opening of this place, but you're both dead right about it. I know it's only a sandwich shop, for God's sake, but they do what they do well, and they make a real effort to see that the customers are happy and get good value. Whoever is running Subway in Thailand has done a damned good job of training his staff to be less Thai and more Western about the way they serve customers, which is only fitting in a Western food joint. He deserves to have that noticed.

Correction to the last few posts.

Tequila Reef is NOT on Soi Yodsak (Soi 6) but a couple of hundred metres further South, across Pattaya Klang, in Soi 7.

But it's well worth a visit.

Right you are and thanks for making the correction. Somehow all those soi number tend to blur together for me when I start to tell other folks where places are. You would have figured no one could ever mix up the lovely and bucolic Soi Yodsak with any place else on the entire planet, wouldn't you?

Did Tequila Reef used to be called something like Blue Parot?

Nope, different place. The Blue Parrot is still around as far as I know however, at least it was a few months ago, but it is in Soi Pattayaland 2 (I think). I went into the Blue Parrot once and it looked so awful I left without eating. No aircon, dirty, stinky, and sweaty.

Tequila Reef, by happy contrast, is quite a nice place. A big aircon room with comfortable booths, a bar, and big windows. Regardless, I always sit at one of the small tables out on the porch and watch the girls from the beer bars across Soi 6 hustle the punters wandering by. You are sort of tucked behind some fairly big plants out there and get a nice view of the action without being in the middle of it. The best mealtime entertainment in town, I think.