OldAsiaHand

all i ask was a good mexican food restaurant in bangkok, they all gave me a restaurant across the sea. its not gonna help now would it. 

You've been working awfully hard to get an answer here, man, so let me see if I can acutally give you one that's useful.

Over the last ten years or so I've probably tired every excuse for a Mexican restaurant in Thailand at one time or another. And here's the answer you been asking for.

In Bangkok, they're all awful. Maybe worse than awful. Don't waste your time. If you're really desperate, Doug Harrison used to have a Mexican buffet on Tuesday nights at Bourbon Street and that's where I would go. The qualitity is about equal to a collection of frozen El Patio TV dinners, so don't expect much. Still, the food is recognizable and the place is pleasant, and both of those things do count for something.

If you want a decent Mexican meal in Thailand, you're going to have to drive to Pattaya. There's a place in Soi 6 just off Beach Road called Tequila Reef that in the past has served unquestionably the best Mexican food I have ever eaten anywhere outside of the US (maybe even outside of Texas). One of the partners is (was?) a San Francisco guy who is actually an experienced restaurant professional and last year at least he was cooking in the kitchen there personally most of the time.

However, THIS IS A WARNING. He and another partner have since opened a restaurant in Bangkok in additiona to the one in Pattaya and my understanding is that he is now 'back and forth.' If there's a white guy in the kitchen in Pattaya, I recommend Tequila Reef without reservation. If he's left it to the local lads on the night you're there, you're on your own.

I hope this helps. Your persistence has certainly earned you a sensible answer to the question you asked in the first place.

They go to the brit embassy, get a form, fill it in and tell lots of lies....

Surely it would be easier to open a bar, fill it full of ladies who will have sex for money and make a killing pimping?

Bash

Might those ladies be leaving a plain brown envelope with the immigration officer as a thank you for favorable consideration ?

There have been persistent rumours for many years that the visa section of the British Embassy does tend to leak a bit. Are the rumours true? I venture no personal view here, but instead I will simply quote a character in Robert Altman's, 'The Player' who was asked a similar question about entirely different sorts of rumours of unpleasant things: "The rumours are always true."

The problem with Phuket, of course, is that it is unquestionably the most expensive province to live in anywhere in Thailand.

Although I know that the kind of careful and methodical approach to purchasing property you describe is routine in the US, frankly I have never heard of it being done here at all. Not once. And as far as I know, no one here holds himself out as available for such work.

Even if you did find someone you trusted and paid for a thorough engineering inspection of a property, and assuming your consultant's conclusions were both honest and sufficiently critical to mean anything, his report still probably wouldn't be of any real use to you. In my experience, it is generally accepted that all construction in Thailand is more or less equally slipshod, and if you insisted on repairs or corrections prior to making a purchase, I imagine any developer would just laugh at you.

Far better to follow the Thai approach of what-I-don't-know-won't-make-me-feel-bad. Do the obvious, superficial inspect yourself and don't worry about detailed engineering work.

I never thought I'd actually tell anyone something like that, but there you are.

Seems unlikely given the political climate right now. You hear the possibility mentioned fairly often, of course, but as far as I have noticed, it has been mentioned no more recently than normal.

My guess is that either (1) it was the usual media pontification trying to explain every market movement as if there were a rational explanation for it; or (2) that the usual suspects were up to their usual games of trying to manipulate the SET by floating rumors and then cashing in on the inevitably exaggerated volitility that results.

Still, I'd say the trend line for the SET is unquestionably downward pointing, at least for the time being.

My advice is not to bother.

Medical care is so cheap in Thailand, at least by US standards, that just paying cash for almost anything you might need (other than treatment for something truly serious, I suppose, like a heart attack) would probably cost less than your insurance premiums. And all the major hospitals cheerfully take major credit cards.

I thought the stuff was made out of dead mosquitoes to start with. Maybe that explains it.....

Yep, I've lived here just under fifteen years and I can also confirm that your impression is absolutely correct. There is also another factor at work which kills the sales of individually owned residenial property stone dead, however, and it is even more important than the Thai preferences you described.

You will have very little success selling residential property anywhere in the world without an effective agent who can expose the property to whatever the market may be, and Thai agencies are overtly hostile to selling property for individuals. All the large agencies work to get exclusive deals with big developers to market newly developed property, and rather than seeing the sale of properties currently owned by individuals as helping to seed the market for these new properties by encouraging people to move up to a higher priced place, Thai agents see your property as competitive with the new property they are trying to sell and do everyrthing they can to prevent its sale.

Yeah, I know how stupid that is, but Thais have never been noted for being commercially astute, have they?

If you are looking for a good bussiness...

We currently have a bussiness in retailing...

only a small or no investement needed.

Hummm.

It seems to me that the real business opportunity here might be teaching spelling.

Gee, I don't know. It sounds a lot like Metro....except of course all the fat , ugy foreigners in Metro are making fools of themselves with bar GUYS. Any suggestion of foreign diddling with bar GIRLS is of course strictly forbidden as a matter of cultural and political rectitude. As well it should be.

All courier services to Thailand are equally useless and I've used them all. Regardless of what duty ought to be charged (or not charged), the courier service simply calls you after customs decides and tells you how much you have to pay them. If you dispute the amount, they say there is nothing they can do and that you must pay or your shipment will not be delivered. Their command of English also begins to deteroriate noticeably at that point.

Presumably, if you refused to pay, your shipment would be sent back to its point of origin, but if it has any real monetary value, I'd doubt that it would ever make it back out of customs.

I've even been charged duty on forwarded mail (!), and there was absolutely no recourse available to me but it pay it or tell them to throw the mail away. I told Fed Ex to toss it and they got very snotty.

unless you are an American, you are going to need Thai partners.

Actually, that's not true. You will need Thai partners regardless. Treaty or not, Americans don't get a pass on the licensing requirements for the distribution of publications in Thailand.

And, yes, the Thai-language market is much larger, but there has been a huge number of new Thai magazines launched in the last eighteen months or so. Some of them have already failed and shut down, but yet others seem to be popping upanyway. Grammy, the Post, the Nation, and other companies with access to the means of distribution have been largely responsible for this flooding of the market with new magazines and they don't seem to be pulling back.

I think you'd have a better chance of success opening a beer bar.

Both Metro and Thailand Tatler are examples of magazines that are beneficially owned by foreigners.

Of course, everyone publishing a magazine in Thailand does so through a Thai company structure, so both these and other locally published magazines that are effectively foreign owned can also say with a degree of accuracy that they are owned by Thai companies and thus Thai owned.

I hope you're not thinking of going into the English-language magazine business in Thailand. It's notoriously unprofitable.

Thailand was never colonised because it formed a useful buffer between British Burma, Britsh Malaya and French Indo-china.......Were you aware that until the reign of Rama IV the Thais paid tribute to the Emperor of China.

Thailand was never conquered because the Thais always give up before anyone has to conquer them and then go on with life pretty much like nothing was happening. Jeez, we're talking about people here who managed to finesse World War II.

You got your break.

Hm, I think that only goes for the no-name (In Thailand) cars, i.e. anything but Benz, BMW and Porche - the demand for these brands keep the depreciation similar to a pickup truck.

Problem with all those otherwise nice cars such as Jags is a complete and utter lack of spare parts. Anything break and you can forget about your car for a couple of months until new spare parts have been shipped over from where it was built.

None of that reflects my experience. The lack of a used car market is primarily because, on the whole, Thais see not buying new cars as low class. At least the kind of Thais who buy the expensive cars see it that way. In large part the reason they buy a Mercedes or Jag or Land Rover is to show how much money they have. Buying a used one, to most Thais, makes them look poor, and cheap, and they sure don't want to look like that when they're shelling out millions of baht.

As for the parts problem, that's something I've just never experience although I've heard stories, of course. I've owned three different makes of expensive imported motor cars over my years here and I have found utterly no difference among them when it comes to supplying parts for repairs.

Chingy you mentioned having a Cherokee. How was it to own one there?

Aren't there cars that are manufactured in Thailand? Are they less expensive.

I've owned a Cherokee here for several years. They are assembled in Thailand for export and you can buy a locally assembled model here as well, but you can also buy a fully imported version. It's a couple of hundred thousand more expensive for the improted version, but that's what I would recommend to anyone.

The Cherokee been a good vehicle on the whole, solid and reliable, although I'd describe the service history as pretty average. Still, it comes with a four year warrenty, so other than the nuisance of putting it in for service occasionaly, it doesn't cost you anything to keep it in good shape.

And, for whatever it may be worth, you can forget about selling anything you buy after driving it for a few years.

Thais don't buy used cars unless they are very, very cheap -- if then. There's really no market at all here for better cars when they are used.

Say you buy one of those four to five million baht Jags. You drive it two years and decide to leave Thailand. What could you get for it? My guess is you'd be lucky to get one million. Real lucky.

I don't know about that observation concerning 'good Thai musicians.' Those I've heard do mostly lousy immitations of the most common current pop stuff, and there are a couple of reasonably talented classical piano players around, but forget jazz. Thais haven't a clue.

Rosser was a truly fine jazz musician, whatever his moral failings might have been. He played at the Bamboo Bar in the Oriental where they bring in good, although not particularly famous, western musicians there. It's worth a try at least.

There are also a few other five star hotels that appear to have some interest in featuring western musicians when they can get them. Give it a shot, although you can't expect anything remotely like US style wages here.

The Nation news was such an awful program that it's hard to miss, but I know what you mean. Anything would be better than nothing. Even those dimwitted women speaking broken English very badly. At least sometimes they were really funny, although ceertainly not on purpose.

I looked myself about six months ago. There is no equivalent of the US self-storeage facilities here, and no one I asked, neither Thai nor farang, had the slightest idea what to suggest. I ended up cutting a deal with one of the large moving and storeage companies to put a small container in one of their warehouses, but that was a 'buddies' deal and very expensive regardless. Good luck.

I do not fully get your point.

Do you mean in Bangkok and urban areas, middle and upper class Thai are jealous of the money farang make and see us as a threat for their financial well being?

Or is it just that --on the whole-- Thai people see us as a "threat" because we are just foreigners with a different culture, different habits, different...

In one word, just very DIFFERENT and showing it, if not boasting it,....

I wasn't really thinking in terms of money or income when I made the comment.

In my experience, Thais think of themselves as living in a carefully ordered world protected by rules that apply largely to other Thais. When a foreigner enters into any social or commercial mix with Thais, he is a threat to them since he makes his life outside those rules-- and even if he doesn't think he does, few of us appear to be very impressed by those strict rules of social intercourse that control the lives of all Thais anyway.

Thais are never really certain what we are going to do next. We make them uneasy. On the whole, we are too big, too loud, too assertive, too confident, too hairy, and yes I suppose, too rich as well. Ever notice how Thais giggle when they are uneasy, and how ofter they giggle at us?

That's a poor basis for anything remotely resembling a friendship.

Is your wife an ex-BG? If she is, I'd be real careful, mate. The fastest mode of communications ever measured by science is the BG and ex-BG network, and no matter how certain you might be that you are outside it, you cannot EVER be certain.

On the other hand, if she isn't an ex-BG, then I wouldn't worry too much. Communications between BGs and real world Thais are almost non-existent.

Otherwise you'll always be secretly despised as the rich falang, Thais are very jealous of money.

No, in fact, they are not.

If your living conditions in your country would be similar to the one of the majority of Thai people and you would have "foreigners" visiting you with the same "difference" in purchasing power and "burning" money (by Thai standards) like there is no tomorrow, you would probably be very, very upset,...

Ah, I think you're being a little starry-eyed here, mate.

Your observations might very well be right if applied only to rural Thais, but the original poster had a good point if you're dealing with, in particular, middle and upper class Thais in Bangkok or some other urban area.

I've lived in Bangkok for nearly twenty years, and I'd have to agree that -- on the whole -- those folks really don't like us. They see us as threats, not as possible friends. My advice is that, speaking again in generalities, when you start thinking too many urban Thais might be real friends of yours, you probably could use a reality check.

I have always booked flights for us from the states and was curious if the cheaper ticket rumours were true. 

Well, yes and no. Generally speaking, there's not much difference if any at all in the deep discount economy class tickets that most people travel on regardless of where they are sold. On the other hand, both business class and first class tickets from Bangkok to the US are a good deal cheaper than tickets for the same routing that are issued in the US.

A few years ago the difference could be as much as 50% or occasionally even more, but Thai-baht fares have been moving steadily upward for the last three years (Singapore Airlines, for example, more than doubled their first class fares ex-BKK over a matter of about eighteen months). The differences are far less now than they were even fairly recently, but still pretty significant all the same.

Almost any agent in Bangkok will give you about the same price on unrestricted business and first class fares since they are sold mostly at so-called 'published tariffs.' Even then, however, there are occasiona local deals. Thai Airways, for example, was recently selling round-trip first class tickets at B130,000 in spite of the published tariff being something like B190,000. Still, TG's first class is really no better than business class on anyone else, and B130,000 is about what you would pay for business class on, say, Singapore Airlines.