Johpa

Don't wait, go! And without rain gear would be my advice. Over the many years of biking here, I was in a lot of rain, but it never bothered me. Unlike home, the rain here is warm, not cold, and it rarely last more than a few minutes. And during the rain, you can stop in one of the sala's set up along the road, where you can meet some nice people!

I agree wholeheartedly with Ajarn. I have driven from the city northwards up through Thaton and into Chiang Rai countless times since the road was built, and even a few times when the section between Thaton and Mae Salong was still all dirt. And some of fondest memories is hanging out with Thais in the salas or local noodle shop awaiting the rains to stop or ease. If you speak even some modest Thai you will most likely get some invitations to some homes for a meal. But be careful as more than once I was offered up a glass of lao khao while waiting out the rains in a sala.

...Would my phallus be smaller than yours if I drive a bigger / faster / more powerful car? Or does your fixation with the measurement of another mans ‘piece’ or ‘member’ involve only his ‘time piece’ and ‘memberships’?

There should be a rule in usernet and web-forum rules for how many posts it takes before a poster says "You must have a small dick because you are richer/more powerful/bigger spender than I am."

As a moderator, you have the ability to unilaterally impose such a rule on posters.

How do I know this? I just visited them last week them to inquire about the card.

I dropped by the Elite office on North Sathorn Rd a couple of days ago and met two reps from the company.

Do they have nice complimentary cookies and coffee at their offices? Is that why you go there weekly?

Sheeesh there are are bitter people on ThaiVisa. I've been to see the Thailand Elite people once to get some FACTS, which is something ThaiVisa is particularly lacking in with regards to this visa on offer.

But then the Elite card scheme is clearly not designed for the great unwashed hoards of riff-raff that seem to view Thais and Thailand with contempt, so I can see why it upsets some so much.

No indeed, the Elite card was designed for the small overly manicured set of riff-raff that seem to view the world and humanity with contempt and who need overly priced trifles such as Rolex watches and Elite cards to compensate for imagined inadequacies in other departments. : )

Yes... should be

เสียงสามัญ = 'mid tone'

เสียงเอก = 'low tone'

เสียงโท = 'falling tone'

เสียงตรี = 'high tone'

เสียงจัตวา = 'rising tone'

The direct translations of the non-mid tones in Thai is simply tone 1, tone 2, tone 3, & tone 4. So the question posed by Lute remains whether the traditional English descriptions can be improved with more technical descriptions based upon phonological recording equipment and whether such descriptions might improve the learning of the tones by those of us who come from the tonally challenged languages within the greater Indo-European language group. I hope to see the local professor of Thai here in the US this weekend and I will try to get some thoughts from her.

The cited article by Reuters quotes the PM as saying, "They are not releasing her, but they will not interfere with her. They will put her on the shelf and not bother with her....We think it's OK if she is put on the shelf."

Does our PM have the IQ to know that putting The Lady on the shelf interferes with her? Did the PM permit Thaksin to come back so that his confinement would no longer interfere wth Thaksin?

Hey, not many in Thailand care a whit. The Thais are taught in the public schools to live in the past, never look in the mirror, and to hate the Burmese. The majority of the ex-pats are happy to live in a right-wing banana republic as long as the beer flows and there is easy access to both the Internet and to affordable oral sex. I mean what is a small military coup but a road bump to Paradise.

Chaiyo!

If you're interested in the medals they're wearing take a look through this link. http://www.mof.go.th/mofhistory/sort.htm

Click on the Thai writing on the left side of the page to see the medals/awards. Note there are male and female awards and medals.

Perhaps someone could update that website by noting the current cost of acquiring each award.

Without referring to esoteric and inapt analogies....

As to my use of the term orthographically shallow in referring to the Thai writing system, I refer you to Henry Rogers "Writing Systems: A linguistic Approach", 2005, Blackwell. Rogers defines and uses the terms shallow and deep to refer to orthographic systems which represent the morphemes of a language with varying degrees of transparency. Deep systems, such as English, Burmese, Tibetan, are those in which allomorphic variation is not well represented in orthography e.g. the vowel in the English word 'child' /tʃajld/ is written the same when the word is pluralized 'children' even though the vowel of the root has changed /tʃɪldrɛn/. Likewise in the words 'south' /sawθ/ and 'southern' /sʌðərn/ the changed vowel and consonant phonemes are represented with the same -ou- and -th- digraphs. This is what we refer to, in linguistic terminology, as an orthographi

cally deep writing system because there is no graphic representation of allomorph

ic variation. You must know the language to know how to pronounce these spellings

I stand corrected relative to this relatively new metaphor of "deepness" regarding orthographic systems. I left academia quite awhile ago and confess and I am not up to date on the current fashion terms in linguistics, and yes, the terms deep or shallow as used by Mr. Rogers are indeed metaphors that are defined by Mr. Rogers so that we know what the heck he is talking about. I am a bit surprised that the "deep" metaphor is still used in linguistics as I thought it had gone out of favor back in the 1990s. Ah, but fashion is always cyclical.

As for my analogy, we shall have to agree to disagree whether it was inapt or apropos. However inapt you may have felt it to be, and I thought it was a bloody good analogy, esoteric it was not.

I should note that most of the people here do not have a linguistic background nor are they able to parse all the IPA characters. And I can count on my fingers the number of regular contributors that are capable of following your academic arguments. I think you have much to add to this forum and look forward to your contributions. But best to spell out and explain the jargon and not dwell too much on the phonetics unless they are realized phonemically as well, as it will only serve to confuse those trying to simply learn the language.

I have long been surprised at the number of people, often individual women, who either take in or take out in open view to all at the teller windows, very large sums of cash in and out of Thai banks.

Excellent post, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

Svenske, Lute's points are indeed mostly about sound, but not about language. The fact that an oscilloscope shows that the human voice rarely makes a perfect level tone is akin to the statement that nobody is able to draw a perfect circle freehand. Some people can clearly draw a better circle than others, but I have no problem recognizing anyone's attempts at drawing a circle and recognizing it as a circle and not confusing it with a square or a triangle. Of course language is far more complex than simple geometric figures and Thailand, until recently with the advent of national media and national education, was occupied by many dialects with influences from neighboring languages, not to mention the existence of historically relocated minority groups such as the "Yong" speakers south of Chiang Mai. So variation is still quite common and in the rural areas where these dialectical differences are still quite common, Thais love to sit around and talk about the differences in speech between one tambon and another.

And I am a bit confused over Lute's statement that Thai is a "shallower" orthography than English. Last time I looked, the Roman alphabet had a total of 26 symbols to represent some 44 English phonemes. Now if it was me looking for a metaphor to describe this situation, I might say that English is the "shallower" orthography.

Great article.

recent medical tourism numbers are taking a bit of a hit partially due to exchange rates

The savings have the potential to make the exchange rate insignificant. My wife's surgery in Thailand cost just shy of $3,000. The same surgery in the US would have cost a minimum $40,000. Even with medical insurance we saved thousands of out of pocket money.

50 Swedish Homebuyers Cheated For Millions In Thailand

BANGKOK: -- Up to 50 Swedish families and disabled have been cheated in a property scandal in Thailand.

Uff da, just goes to show that you can put many square heads into a round Thai black hole.

One of the relative weaknesses in traditional Thai culture is that the economy did not truly become monetized until the 20th century. And until the latter part of the 19th century, a very large proportion of the population were slaves. For most Thais, paying taxes came in the form of corvee labor. So to ask the families to teach monetary economics is not so simple when many of the rural families have never had much exposure to modern economics.

This is in contrast to East Asian culture where even the poorest farmers knew what it was to be in debt to a landlord. Sure, my family in the west had long been exposed to the concept of money, debt, etc, and the basics were taught and simply observed in the home as well as taught in the schools. But sometimes it is hard to teach some of the basics to my Thai family as they do not have the extended context in which to place such lessons.

And the battle for education is not made any easier by the relentless and insidious advertising campaigns promoting the materialistic lifestyles that not all can afford, combined with the equally insidious promotion of the credit and debt industries (AKA the banks) that knowingly promote loans that the borrower should not be taking, pushing loans on borrowers that they themselves, being educated over such matters, would never take if they themselves were in the same economic position as the borrowers. What are the ethics of bankers who promote and sell loans that they know are bad for the borrower? That is not to say that the borrower has no responsibility, but the lenders in such matters being better educated, may be seen to have the bulk of the responsibility.

This is not just a matter for the Thai nation. I highly recommends the documentary film Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders by James Scurlock which looks into the same problem here in the US.

I don't see any examples of Buddhist compassion in this country. I see the exact opposite in most cases.

I also do not see Buddhism in practice too often in Thailand, and I am in disagreement with a number of respected western academics in that I see Thailand as being fundamentally an animist culture. But I am friends with an owner of one of the larger elephant camps up north and I consider him to be one of the more compassionate hi-so Thais that I have met, a man who has gone the extra mile to provide for the elephants under his care.

Plus, from everyone I know who has ridden on a elephant, it's not that fun and certainly not as rewarding as feeding and/or bathing them. Elephant rides are offered because it's easy to copy.

Riding an elephant is a bit of a once in a lifetime experience in that it is, for most people, quite fun the first time, but not all that exciting the second time. Unless you have a large covered howdah with lots of pillows and a few concubines along for the ride, elephants are not the best form of personal transportation.

That being said, if the elephants were not domesticated, not a pleasant transformational process as one can imagine but not as horrific as many would have you believe, then the alternative would be eradication.

And yet a few of us dinosaurs on these boards remember the days when we had to trek to a city's Central Post office and wait in a long line to make an international telephone call.

Here in the US there is a great deal of hording occurring. Asian restaurant owners are purchasing up to a years supply of rice to secure supplies. And a few families I know have stored several 25kg bags of rice into their newest pantry, their garage.

Certainly there will be a few more Benz sold upcountry this year.

You are perhaps implying, quite falsely by the way, that farmers are the ones benefiting from these high prices? The bulk of the increased profits are going to the families that, in effect, control the rice exporting cartel in Bangkok, and rest assured they are already driving such automobiles. Some of the profit might find its way into Thailand, but most will never enter the Kingdom but rather will be places into offshore accounts.

Chaiyo!

Kateoys though, hmmm. Just can't see a bayonet charge by Thai troops in high heels and chest implants as likely to inject fear into any enemy, except perhaps a Muslim Kateoy splinter group.

I don't know about that. A brigade of ladyboys would be a fairly scary sight.

We could dress them in kilts, and like the clansmen of yore they could line up and lift their kilts displaying their family jewels to show their contempt for the enemy all the while whooping and hollering. Certainly would add to the fog of war.

They also caught a Leopard in the wild around the place.

Wow, having lived off and on in the "wilds" around that place for decades, the last time I remember anyone stumbling upon a wild cat was around 1987, more of a bobcat, not a leopard. Although my father-in-law has a "trophy" picture of himself with a larger cat draped over his shoulders that was taken sometime in the 1970s.

Indeed they do.

Height: Between X cm and Y cm

Weight: Between A kg and B kg

Other: Must be attractive, personable, and have light-skin tone

That's depressing. Well, I guess that's not as bad as racial discrimination, since I think skin tone is just viewed as something like hair color in Thailand (something not necessarily related to race, i.e. if you're darker it doesn't necessarily mean you're more aboriginal Austronesian, though I guess thais might see it as being more khmer). It's such an artificial characteristic to differentiate people by... correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we in the West have more 'sophisticated' and varied ideals of beauty than that... we don't automtically think a girl's beautiful based on one single characteristic.... in thailand it seems like a girl can be really ugly, but if she's white, everyone thinks she's beautiful... I know if you took a dark-skinned thai and plopped her in the West, most westerners would think she's more attractive than those boring looking white poster girls. right?

Wrong. It is a hiring code that infers that Isaan folks and other ethnic Tai people need not apply and that there is a strong preference for Thai-Chinese hires. It is a code understood by most Thai people when reading the want-ads.

I loved the book. It did read a bit like a text book, but it was full of facts.

Yes, well Achaan Phasuk is indeed an academic and her books are most commonly read by other academics, graduate students in Southeast Asian area studies, professional bureaucrats, and foreign service professionals. They are not commonly seen being read on the beach in Pattaya or Phuket. They are indeed used as text books at places like Cornell and Monash. The book in question as little, if anything, to do with Cambodia.

Anything written by Achaan Pasuk is worth a read and should be required reading for all long term ex-pats in oder to reduce the numbers who are afflicted with the neo-sahib syndrome. She is one of Thailand's most respected and prominent academics and has many works in English. I first read her back in the 1980s with her excellent small book From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses. If you are attracted to intelligence, this woman is hot.

Little of her works becomes overly dated as Thailand has changed little relative to macro social trends. Certainly the middle class has grown and I would suspect that the percentage of women who have at one time or another worked in the sex trade to have dropped over the past few decades. But the underground economy described in Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja, the shadow economy that fuels Thai politics, the profits of which are mostly wired overseas, continues as in the past with only minor variation such as meth substituting for ganja.

Who can spot a locally made replica first?

Or perhaps the torch returned will be found to be a replica and the actual torch will turn up in the social pages of the Hong Kong (or more likely Macau these days) press carried by a buffonted visiting Khun Ying. Perhaps China will then fall into the footsteps of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and declare the Kingdom of Thailand to become persona, or should it be nation non grata.

I always thought a bar in Thailand would be the proper venue to play that greatest of American disco artists, Blowfly, composer of those classic hits such as "What a Difference a Lay Makes", "Panty Lines", and of course my personal favorite, "Who Did I Eat Last Night?"

It's on the Mae Taeng - Hang Dong irrigation canal out at Mae Rim.

Crikey! I do hope they have secure cages I mean it is one thing for the other animals in the Mae Rim menagerie of tourist attractions to escape, but tigers raise an entire new element of concern. It would be just a short tiger walk up to the Prem School for a nice IB flavored morsel of hominid meat.