GinBoy2

Lot of the problem is how most Thai houses are built A single brick wall, so no insulated gap. On a brutal heat day I can feel my interior walls radiating heat, so AC is always going to struggle. I can contrast that to our US house where either brutally cold or brutally hot the AC or the heat isn't fighting the external walls

Apologies But you have to admit it's a small percentage of us that actually speak Thai and Lao. But you're still in for some rocky waters there, but only you can figure out how much the grief/pleasure equation works out for you. All I can say is if you tough that situation out, you're a braver man than me

To be honest, if the kid is feral by 15, it only goes down from here. Try to visualize what he will be like at 18+ I'm assuming that the OP doesn't speak Thai, so any communication with the kid is through Mom, and it's pretty clear she isn't going to do anything! Trouble is you're coming from different experiences. All teenage boys are 'messy' but for most of us I think leaving your clothes on the bedroom floor was enough to get a clip around the ear and told to 'pick up your mess'. This is way past that I have no idea how old the OP is, but if you get to the point of this kid being a feral young man, don't exclude some violence if you try to restrain his activities. Terrible situation but really not uncommon for a farang to encounter a feral male step child! I be outta there faster than I could drop a pair of dirty underwear

I kinda agree with @OneMoreFarang I travelled a lot for work, I've lived in multiple countries and spent more time away from home that I care to think about. I tried full time retirement, that didn't work for me, so I went back to work. But, I don't like to be away from home anymore. I have to go to Atlanta next week for a training course, and I hate it. I'm happy being at home with Mrs G and the cats, don't need much more nowadays

Very few of us look at 60 like we did at 30. Thai women are exactly the same as any farang woman in that respect. Love is a funny old thing. Obviously the first attraction is physical, but over time when love kicks in and really the 'looks' are secondary. If we are critiquing the picture, well Pierce isn't exactly the adonis he once was, but he has someone to grow old with. Renting may well suit many here. But don't expect anyone to hang around when you need support in your final years, that takes love not something you will get from a woman a third of your age and working on the clock

We lived in KKC for 10 years, and we still have a house there. Not a bad place, but 'tourist destination' I think not.

This is more of a question and idle musing. But is it normal to have language in travel policy that defines this scenario, in particular the helmet thing. For <deleted>z n giggles I did a quote from Allianz in the US for a fictitious trip. I read through all the T&C's and the closest I could come for an exclusion was 'activities against local regulations' Now I know thats a pretty broad exclusion, but thats a hard thing to prove in this case, I would have thought

I do exercise and for my age I'm in pretty good shape. But no matter much you exercise, eat good, you can't fight nature. Testosterone is on a decline and nothing you can do about that without drugs and that is a pretty major part of the male physique Joints will age, and just wear out, your jaw line will sag, and hair, well you don't lose it it simply 'relocates' So I'm all for keeping yourself in good shape, but you need to accept to age gracefully and lean into it

As a basic Margherita pizza kinda guy, that raised an eyebrow when I read that

Well you might be confusing Thai and 'Isaan Lao' or one of the other many variants. Focus on standardized Thai to begin with. I met my wife in Singapore, and she taught me standard Thai while we were living there, and once I'd mastered that she moved on to Lao. She only spoke Thai to me when I was first learning Thai, never Lao The problem you will have is to the ear they sound almost the same, so try to only hear only one to begin with.

It depends where you are coming from. Tonal languages are hard for most non tonal speakers to master. I learnt Mandarin over 30 years ago so I crossed that bridge a long time before I got to Thai and Lao. Once you have mastered one tonal language the rest come pretty easy. Reading Thai is easy, unlike Mandarin which I really struggled with. But you'll need to put in the work to overcome the tonal thing, won't say it's easy, but it'll just click one day

Grand Canyon Central Park Times Square Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island 911 Memorial Mount Rushmore Crazy Horse Memorial USS Arizona memorial Alcatraz Mt Rainier Yosemite ....the list is endless, but these are some of my top ones

Ditto Brother. The wrath of an Isaan woman is to be much feared, no smiling involved! Curiously I was visiting my son a few weeks ago, and the topic came up of 'keeping your head down' when Mom was on the warpath!

Years back I saw a documentary on PBS about this 50/60ish woman from the UK who went on vacation to Ghana. She got hooked up with a 20 year old guy, and she actually said on screen; "Once go go black you never go back" Long story short, when she got him into the UK, he failed the immigration interview and just disappeared, leaving her high and dry And as I was searching for the docu I watched, I came across this; https://nypost.com/2020/09/29/why-are-elderly-women-seeking-love-with-young-men-in-gambia/

Well thats the whole incel problem. If you just want sex, any man in any country can pay for sex, been that way forever. What the incel 'thinks' is why don't women fling themselves at me? As I said before if 'sex' was the only thing these guys wanted wanted, Thailand would be a paradise for them, but sex alone really isn't it for them

Now thats a man who clearly got burned!

Terribly tragic. But when the young boys go to Thailand, they think (as we all did) they're immortal, can do all sorts of stuff that they could never do back home, and unfortunately Thailand teaches you that when the sh*&*t hits the fan, some of those annoying rules back home were made for a reason!

I have a slightly different take on your comments. Misogyny is defined as 'hatred of women' Rather than that, what I think defines a certain section of the farang male population is rather the mentality that women are a commodity to be bought and used, no different to a buying and consuming a bottle of beer!

Well me and Mrs G have been together 20+ years, and like every couple been through our ups and downs. But here we are, and against all the odds still love each other. Seen our kids grow up, and now it's just the two of us. None of us, without the surgeons knife have the body we did 20, 30 years ago, but the older you get the less it seems to matter, or indeed care As for sex, well perhaps we don't go at it like we did 20 years ago, but we still have a great sex life Life has a habit of rushing by and in the wink of an eye one day you're 30, the next day 60+

Insane? Whats more worrying is someone that is 'Bat Sh*$&t Crazy' as MTG can actually get elected. Says something about the Georgia electorate I fear, since MTG never hid her insanity

I agree, sex just for sex sake isn't what they want, so a trip to Pattaya for paid sex doesn't work. I 'think' a lot of them are teenage boys who just never made that transition to manhood successfully. We all go through the trauma of late teenage High School angst. I'm sure many of them are in the geek crowd (I was one), or the simply socially awkward teenage male and simply can't fathom why the girls wanted the football jocks and the bad boys over them. Well back in the day, you just figured it out and became a man. Nowadays they hunker down in an online world of angry teenage boys in mens bodies, seething with rage and that peaceful transition to manhood gets stopped in it's tracks

Well I think many societies have internal racism. I'm hispanic American, so I'm very conscious of how that can pan out! Internally Thailand is horribly racist, or maybe prejudice would be a better a word to use When me and Mrs G were going to get married, we went to a pretty upscale dress shop in BKK to buy a wedding dress. My wife is very clearly Lao, albeit US raised and college educated. The ignorant shop girl, who probably was at best High School educated demanded to see my wife's hands, to check that she wasn't a 'farmer' before she would serve her! I lost it, she lost it, needless to say we didn't buy anything from them! What was the story a few years back, when Bangkok guy posted a social media post at Songkran saying the air in Bangkok smelled better now all the Lao had gone back to Issan. Yep they have racism in spades. So for whitey folks, you get it easy

We used Asian Tigers to ship our stuff to the US. Great service they came to our home, packed very efficiently everything we were taking, did all the customs paperwork, 8 weeks later delivered to our house in the US, no damage. This is the contact we had, who knows if he's still there, but it's a start

Well cos if you want something more than quick sex, relationships take some work. These kids seem to think that if a woman doesn't fall into their arms, and bed, and I'm not talking some bar girl for money thing, that it's the woman's fault for rejection. 'Work' means many things; dinner dates, a movie, and maybe some flattery etc etc These kids don't wanna hear that

This whole Incel 'thing' is ridiculous. Some men have always had problems with finding a sexual partner, be it through looks, personality or whatever. But you got to prepared to put in the effort. A lot of this current generation are just simply lazy, and it's so much easier to throw up your hands and declare 'I'm an Incel' retreat to a keyboard in Mom and Dads basement and fume. Figure out why women don't seem attracted to you, then man up and go do the work!