dluek

Starbucks is experiencing a PR storm in China as well after state television did a 20-minute piece on how they're ripping off the Chinese consumer. Same deal in Thailand -- the Starbucks coffee I've had here is watery and smells burnt, and it's considerably more expensive than in the US. There are so many good, comfortable coffee shops and cafes throughout the kingdom that sell quality northern Thai coffee for no more than 40 or 50 baht. Why anyone goes to Starbucks is beyond me.

STARBUNG FOREVER.

Initial story pretty unclear, but in the US if you hit anything from behind you're usually the one at fault.

"Man made tourist attraction".

Do I smell a casino?

Or maybe a 200 foot tall concrete rooster?

I'm gonna be up all night dreaming of the possibilities.

I had a heart in mouth moment last week. I took the bus from Phuket bus station to Satun and it made a stop at the checkpoint, like they all do but this time a policeman came on ( something I've personally, rarely seen )

He checked a few bags and saw me ( only foreigner on bus ) came straight to me and asked for my passport. I was shitting myself because I had overstayed. It was only two days but still I thought it was going to end bad. Luckily for me he opened it, looked at the main page and then the dates on the departure slip which said July 15th 2013 funny enough and gave it back to me. If he had a mind to check it closer he would have noticed my overstay but thank God he never.

A lucky escape indeed and will I overstay again in these risky times? No bloody way that's for sure!

I had a similar occurrence two years ago. Was driving through through the south with my girlfriend, en route to Hat Yai for a flight to KL, while on two weeks overstay (please no lectures; it was the only time I've ever done it). We were stopped at a police check point in Khuraburi... The lovely officer gave me quite a hard time, more than I've ever received from Thai police. He looked straight at the most recent visa and said, "Tourist huh? You working too?" But either he didn't look at the expiration date or thought the "use by" date was the expiration date. I thought for sure I was about to see the inside of Khuraburi jail. But no, my LOS angel must have been watching over.

I went running in Lumpini Park this past Sunday around 4:30pm. There were some crowds out front by the Rama VI statue and the MRT entrance, but it really wasn't all that big of a demonstration. Felt like any other Sunday in the park except for in that relatively small area. Maybe it's getting bigger, but the press could be blowing this one out of proportion.

In addition, two suspects were detained with 8,000 kilos of heroin

That's a mind-boggling amount of Hbomb. Whoever those two suspects are, they're really gonna fry.

It would be great if they improved both the bus and boat services. For buses I just hope they put bus routes up in English at each bus stop. As of now the system is so complex that even many of my Thai friends don't use it except for maybe on the street where they live. As for the Chao Phraya express, the boats are old, too small and there's not nearly enough of them. You often have to wait up to 30 minutes for the next boat, and from 4:00pm on they're so overloaded that you often have to wait another 30 minutes. The river could be a really reliable transport line if they updated the boat fleet and added more of them. I've heard that the super rich family who runs it just doesn't give a hoot -- hence the disorganized fee collection system. I feel bad for those orange-shirt wearing lladies who have to scream their way up and down the boat trying to collect 15 baht from everyone, which they can only manage to get from half the riders at busy times.

A more accurate headline for this story would be "Don't go to Phuket".

People getting drugged in a crazy nightlife town like Patong? Please, it happens in bars all over the world, usually to people who leave their common sense at home.

In constant travels around Thailand over the last two years (though almost never to Phuket), I've - knock on wood - never encountered any of these problems. These problems usually happen to people who choose to go to sketchy places and act like idiots once they get there. With that said, there's no excuse for the behavior of a lot of people, foreigners and locals, in Phuket. That's why I avoid it. Good thing Thailand has so many other destinations that are so much better (and safer) anyway.

To put it in perspective, I don't think there is any organized religion in which the majority of adherents really live the teachings. Could even be argued that the majority do not even really know the teachings, and no religion has a monopoly on this problem.

And they all seem to get corrupted in the same ways. Donations to temples to "buy" merit, or burning candles/commissioning masses in a Catholic church, same idea i.e. knowingly doing what one should not and expected to more or less buy your way out of it. Buddhist amulets or St Christopher medals. Same same. Looking for short cuts/quick fixes and ignoring what had been taught about the actual path.

Likewise in any religion there are people who do take it seriously and try to walk the talk, I certainly know plenty of Thai Buddhists whom that is true of but yes, they are a minority. As are the number of Christians who actually try to live by the teachings of Christ.

Exactly what I was thinking. Every organized religion has problems. A small minority of Islamists blow up themselves and others in the name of Allah. Some Hindus think it's okay to beat women. A handful of Catholic priests take advantage of kids. In comparison, a few Buddhist monks having sex and driving fancy cars doesn't seem so bad.

I agree that money would be better spent, both from a karmic and social perspective, on building hospitals or giving food to the poor rather than erecting the latest lavish temple structure. But merit-making runs deep in the Theravada; it's as ancient as Buddhism itself, even if it's often misguided today. While their intentions are perfectly fine, I feel that foreigners who've read a few books on Zen and maybe attended a meditation group in their home country have no authority to proclaim what is "un-Buddhist." It's evident in the early scriptures that the Buddha himself ate meat if it was offered, unless he deemed it to have been killed specifically for him. And people in every Buddhist nation eat meat and drink plenty of alcohol. This utopian Buddhist society where it's all love and generosity and forgiveness simply doesn't exist in the world -- not now and not at any time in history. But that doesn't mean that people in every Buddhist society, including Thailand, don't strive to live up to true Buddhist principles.

Buddhism in Thailand is a long road that's gone through many twists and turns. To get a flavor of what traditional "Thai Buddhism" was all about before Thailand was modernized, I suggest reading "The Buddha in the Jungle" by Kamala Tiyavanich.

I pretty much agree, although I find it depends on my mood. If I'm in a good mood, I get a chuckle out of a lot of the stuff people say on TV. But if I'm already having some negative thoughts about some aspect of Thailand and living here, reading TV is the worst thing I can do. It's the exact same reason why I avoid the depressing expat haunts in the real world.

Well I wish they'd hurry up. I've been sitting here in a painfully slow moving traffic jam on the way to Pak Chong for the last 3 hours. Please, build me a road!!

This is the master plan:

http://www.urbanrail.net/as/bang/bangkok.htm

I looked into this last year. All the new car dealers we checked out would accept an American credit card (it's a Mastercard) and charge a fee. Used car dealers generally don't take credit cards.

My personal solution is to avoid going out from 07:30 to 09:30 and 17:30 to, well, at least 21:00. It's usually not so bad outside of those times. And also on the bright side, they did just add a fourth train car to the BTS trains, which has made a huge difference. The sky trains here are nowhere near as packed as Kuala Lumpur's get (though the roads there are much better). And in terms of road traffic we're still nowhere near as bad as Delhi or Jakarta! Just sayin'.

According to Thai law, no foreigners are allowed to work as tour guides in Thailand whether they have a work permit or not. But tour companies in the islands desperately need Russian speaking guides because they have entire boatloads of Russian customers booking daily tours. The majority of the Russian visitors speak very limited English (and not many Thais are fluent in Russian) so many of these companies rely on Russians to lead tours. This could be big problems for the tour companies, which are mainly owned by well-meaning Thais. Personally I think the law that says foreigners can't be tour guides is dumb.

Taxis play games with us so I play it with them....

I open the back left door and ask if they are willing to take me, when they refuse I gently shut the door so its not closed all the way and walk on

Its a serious stretch for them to reach the back left door to shut it

I like that - will give it a try.

Looks out the window

Nine more to go.

We've had 5 storms in the last 5 days in Bangkok, and each one has seen torrential downpours for extended periods of time. A buddy of mine in Lat Phrao is already walking through ankle deep water. Judging also by the pictures I'm seeing on the news right now, we're already half way to 10.

When I go swimming it's "Look, farang's going swimming!" When I get on a bus alone, "Where's farang going?" When I was learning concentration meditation at a Thai temple, "Can farang see the white dot?" And all of the above said loudly so I can clearly hear it.

Sure, "Black", "Asian", "Hispanic" etc. are all acceptable terms in other countries, but when a Thai person gets in a pool in Germany there's not a group of German people loudly saying, "Look the Asian's going swimming!"

That's the difference, and that's why it does annoy me sometimes, but I know that Asian people and other minorities do get stared at and perhaps treated differently in other countries too.

"it's wise to ACCEPT it, but to PROMOTE is a step nobody needs to take!"

I agree with this - it is a negative thing about Thailand and it annoys me when I see guide book writers and the like talking about how "you won't see many 'farang; here' or 'there's farang food at this place'. It's just not classy. And it's worth mentioning that there are cultured Thai people out there who use the term only to describe something as being "foreign" and use the term "foreigner" when speaking to an actual foreigner regardless of their race.

Ubonjoe, thank you very much - extremely helpful!