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MESmith

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    Water experts - Some advice please

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    Anyone who doesn't plan for municipal water supply to dry up without notice, is a fool. The more storage the better. Personally, I'm off grid, with my own bore hole. Not sure when that will dry up, as rice farmers pump groundwater 24/7 to flood rice paddy. No one near me seems interested to grow something less water hungry. A few km away, similar rice paddy is used to grow corn & tobacco as cash crops.

    how do you plan for the dry if you live in a condo?

    Buy a few of the large plastic bins & fill them with water. They'll last you a few days until, hopefully, water supply is resumed. Don't expect a continuous supply. I reckon water will be intermittent.

    Water experts - Some advice please

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    Anyone who doesn't plan for municipal water supply to dry up without notice, is a fool. The more storage the better. Personally, I'm off grid, with my own bore hole. Not sure when that will dry up, as rice farmers pump groundwater 24/7 to flood rice paddy. No one near me seems interested to grow something less water hungry. A few km away, similar rice paddy is used to grow corn & tobacco as cash crops.

    Smoke, Smog, Dust 2016-2017 Chiang Mai

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    Smokey in CM today.

    The smoke I see is looking mostly to the east and south from around the CMU area.

    Can't see much past Kad Suan Kaew and the eastern mountain range is not visible at all.

    Any folks out past the city 12+ kilometers smoke free?

    Maybe it's the car exhaust fumes from all our unwanted visitors, heading back to Bangkok.

    • Like 1

    What's so great about Chiang Mai?

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    Thai people are very friendly and have made us most welcome here especially in the community we live in

    I have found my neighbors in the mooban -- a small one -- to be aloof and snobbish. They have been here forever and think that myself (and maybe the other two aliens in the area) are interlopers. I have never had anyone say, "Hi" to me. And before you jump to conclusions, I am quiet and unassuming and polite. If I dropped in the street of a heart attack, I doubt anyone would give a shit.

    The Thai "friendliness" is a hoax. I was recently in the US for a month and the people there ... no, any high school student could give master classes on politeness.

    One neighbor up the soi has a small ma and pa shop and they have put in a pipe along the outside of their wall that takes their kitchen and cutting waste and funnels it to the next house down from them. They toss rubbish in the (now) dirt gutter and have a nice colony of rats there. The woman who runs the place and lives there is a true earth pig. I have heard that their neighbors across the soi have complained to the tessaban and they come out and waggle their finger, she tidies up and then pollutes as usual.

    My landlord, after owning this property for 29 years, decides that the mango trees are "too big" and severely pollards them. He wanted to cut them down at the base, but I dissuaded him. He cut down completely a large longan tree because he could.

    On my soi and the next one there are six houses vacant and either for sale or rent. One is a "condo on the ground" with a small carpark; no soil only the house. She is firm on 8,000 baht a month, which is laughable. Probably why it's been for rent for years.

    The "superhighway" is undergoing massive refurbishment and the Maejo road intersection is being converted to an underground throughway and that's supposed to take three years. Haha...

    If you want to own your own house, not possible (that means the land too -- who the hell would spend the money to build a house on land they don't own? "My wife/girlfriend loves me! I trust her." Oh boy. ...)

    Thais are if nothing else, largely selfish and don't care about you. If I had a nickel for every Thai who gave their word to me (time to meet, work to do, etc.) and then broke it, I'd be rich.

    Thais have a litter mentality (not as bad as the Indians or the Egyptians) and my mooban is always gathering rubbish. Just last week someone dumped a bag of trash by the side of the road, by a house, and the solution? Pick it up? No. Set it on fire.

    The list goes on.

    I stay here because it happens to be where I am now; things are cheap; you can rent companionship for a song and then tell them to get the hell out and do another; there used to be a cool season but that's pretty much gone now; and you can break the rules in SE Asia and pretty much nothing happens.

    I am thinking of an exit strategy even now. It's an interesting place and if you don't give a shit about your environment and the year after year of humidity and oppressive heat and a people who have an average IQ of about 85, then it's great. You can get a girlfriend who is massively out of your league and you can even marry them, but you will never know if it's true or you are just a "big customer." I've seen several "solid" years-long relationships dissolve because the woman just got bored, or sick of the guy or found a bigger fish. "I will stay with you because you 'take care' of me and I don't want to continue working in some pissant job making nothing or working in a bar. I love you!"

    Most of the foreigners I see have women who can't speak English to save their life. Then the foreigner dumbs down so now he's speaking like a knuckle-dragging neanderthal. Loneliness is one thing, but having a person around you who can't discuss current events or even locate England on a map is mindboggling. But so many men don't recognize this as a downside. Sex soothes many evils. So that's a plus, I guess.

    Chiang Mai is fine if you don't care about the downsides. I know some men have "gone native" and move to some shitkicker village and live with the extended family who don't speak English (and most foreigners can't seem to be bothered to learn it, let alone read and write) and have fun counting chickens and setting traps for catching frogs. Hoo ho! My retired life is so good!

    Oh yeah, and there's Kad Suan Kaow, where you can have fried rice and a Chang in the food court. All that's missing is the pigeons to feed.

    Cutting it fine for post of the year biggrin.pngclap2.gif Love it smile.png

    Why so many openings at Prem?

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    "Why so many openings at Prem." Well, from the start, that sort of "loaded" thread title, we could tell a lot about the OP and where the discussion was supposed to go, according to OP. Then there have been some very uninformed posters, some of whom don't seem to have graduated from school but have masters degrees in ThaiVisa posting. Fortunately, there have been some sensible posts, as well. Further, for OP to take the opinion of one "straight-up guy" who is made to appear like some sort of malcontent is not my idea of a meaningful source about a school, especially presented secondhand. An insinuation that the head of school or "executive staff" are pricks is less than helpful. Looking more broadly, comparably, Prem is the class act in town --- and you pay for it. The diplomas provided by other schools in Chiang Mai don't "travel" as well as an IB qualification or experience in this school. The qualifications to sustain an IB program are numerous and expensive for a school. That is one reason it is relatively expensive. Other reasons are the amenities, of which there are many, plus the fact that Prem does take in and educate children with different levels of ability (but not all). To do this Prem is in the market for and expects to hire and pay for better-qualified teachers. And they are expected to work. Yes, additional duties expected, which is routine for any private school. For Chiang Mai, there are other international schools plus a couple who claim to be international, meaning that they have some sort of "international qualification" program. Don't be fooled. On the other hand, it does not mean that children can't do quite well out of NIS, CMIS, or Lanna --- but, generally, don't expect diplomas from those schools to travel anywhere nearly as well as one from Prem. By the way, having five vacancies is not high annually for a staff that size, and I know that over time Prem has sustained quite a favorable retention rate given the nomadic nature of teachers in the international school biz. And the above is not hearsay. Maybe it is time to have another go-round about Chiang Mai schools. There hasn't been one for quite a while. But I suggest a topic title that is not provocative as this one, and, if I read it correctly, just into trouble-making.

    Paragraphs, please, or I ain't reading your post...

    Star Wars IMAX 3D warning....

    in Chiang Mai

    Posted

    It's Star Wars and I think that was the intention, it's not a Ken Loach movie.

    I saw it in Maya today. I was quite thankful for the loudness as it drowned out the noise of the bunch of elephant Farangs behind me devouring enough flipping sweeties and popcorn to feed a Hilltribe village.

    All in all, I found the story a little far fetched though smile.png

    Do you think it had to many UFOs in it?

    Hahahahahaha brilliant! The humour goes further over your heads than the Millenium Falcon could only ever hope for...

    Not really coffee1.gif

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