More and more i stay here, the more and more you become frustrated with behaviour of foreigners here. It's really beginning to effect me, and also a few other guys i'm friends with. It may well be irrational, but honestly it's getting on your nerves. You come to Thailand to embrace their culture, not export your own values and believe you can do as you please with an arrogance that look downs on those people, an attitude screaming 'look at me look at me'.

Guy today on the BTS platform at Phromphong that leads up to Emsphere walking around with a pretty decent size dog of lead. The dog was jumping all over people, with the idiot in question shouting 'it's harmless' over and over, in his idiotic tank top, all beefed up.

Whilst there has been a increase in Thai's keeping dogs these past few years (especially in condo centric Bangkok), most are kept on lead, smallish dogs, put into those crazy pushchairs and respectfully not disturbing to others. Most Thai's still don't view dogs as pets.

But i have seen a few foreigners now just exporting their own values from the west on Thais. The younger set of visitors we now have residing here on the horrific visa relaxation rules are the worst arrogant type of foreigners i have ever witnessed.

When the dog approached me, jumped on my chest, i told the guy i want it away from me. He uttered the 'it's harmless mate' in his British accent. I told him the dog needs to be on a lead, to which he shrugged, stating 'he lives in Thailand' like it was some mark of honour and entitled him to do what he wanted. Arrogance on the guy was breathtaking.

Few days earlier i saw one guy let his dog lose around the park, throwing sticks. I could not believe it ! Most of the polite Thai's just got up and walked away. Another throwing bird food around for masses of pigeons, when there are signs everywhere stating not do so ... as the pigeons wreck the park with bird poop everywhere.

The worst thing Thailand ever did was these visas.

Am i getting old ?

54 minutes ago, DonniePeverley said:

Am i getting old ?

Yes - but we all are to a certain extent when we start letting stuff like this bother us enough - this one is a viab;e rant though - the guy was clearly a t!t - but it would easily have happened 20 years ago too...

People like this have always existed - across every nationality, including Thais.

We tend to look for explanations why... visas, cheap flights, marijuana, backpacking culture, retirement policies - as if there must be a clear cause. In reality, what we are often seeing is something far simpler: our own bias being reinforced. Once an idea takes hold in the mind, we begin to notice more examples that appear to confirm it.

Take the common complaint about Toyota Fortuner drivers. There’s a persistent narrative that they are uniquely aggressive or reckless. But in truth, they are simply more visible. The same poor driving exists in less conspicuous vehicles - the girl in the Toyota Yaris with hello-kitty plates drifting lanes without checking, or the pasty skinned foreigner unsteady on a scooter while a Thai rider sweeps across three lanes with multiple near-misses. The difference is not behaviour - it’s perception. Once something stands out, we start seeing it everywhere.

The same principle applies to the idea that “foreigners are getting worse.” If that belief is already in your head, you will naturally notice and remember the examples that support it, while overlooking everything that contradicts it. Its classic confirmation bias.

The explanations shift over time. It was once cheap flights. Then backpackers. Now it might be marijuana, relaxed visa rules, or retirees behaving badly. The reasoning evolves, but the underlying pattern does not.

Thailand attracts large numbers of visitors and residents, so it will inevitably attract proportion of people who behave poorly. That proportion has likely remained fairly constant.

Of course, poor behavior is not unique to foreigners. The same spectrum of behaviour exists within Thai society. The difference is familiarity. People tend to notice, judge, and even feel embarrassed by those they perceive as “their own group” differently than outsiders. Yet if you browse Thai-language discussions about Thai tourists abroad - in places like Japan, for example - you’ll find identical criticisms being made.

There will always be a segment of any population that behaves foolishly. That doesn’t fundamentally change over time. What has changed is visibility. Social media and online platforms amplify incidents, making them seem more frequent than they truly are.

IMO the behaviour isn’t increasing or worsening - not in the the past 20 or 30 years or so - its simply that our exposure to it has, and our tendency to notice it, there is....

9 minutes ago, DonniePeverley said:

The worst thing Thailand ever did was these visas.

I'm sure it's nothing to do with visas, it's the vloggers promoting Thailand as a cheap destination, etc. they're attracting all the weirdos.

I saw a freaky foreign woman in Big C with her cat in the shopping trolley. Supermarkets in Thailand do not allow animals in their stores, bloody foreigners ignoring rules and regulations

10 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

it would easily have happened 20 years ago too..

BS, I was here 20 years ago, you'd never see stuff like these.

Thailand is changing, so many mentally ill foreigners here now.

Plenty of those types back in UK too, best avoided, poorly educated, rubbish parents, shady farang maybe with criminal links. The problem for us is eventually the Thais will get totally fed up with it and potentially end certain visas and extensions

12 minutes ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

38 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

it would easily have happened 20 years ago too..

BS, I was here 20 years ago, you'd never see stuff like these.

Thailand is changing, so many mentally ill foreigners here now.

BS, I was here 30 years ago and the weird s#!t started happening 20 years ago !!!! 🤣

Seriously though, first hand, I don't see any more "crazy stuff" today than I did 10, 20, 30 years ago... What I do see is a shyat load of dumb and crazy stuff on every social media platform I care to look at.... its what draws in the clicks, the the echo-chaimber baiting for more clicks.

25 years ago - you could walk out of a bar at 6am, tip the TukTuk driver extra so you could drive it, accidentally roll over a Coppers toes, see him so surprised he'd laugh about it, join you for another beer before calling a cab for you to get home.... Stuff was a lot crazier back in the day as I recall - the difference is, such silliness was not all over social media before the taxi go you home...

Go skinny dipping with a group of hotties in Samui and its 'netizen outrage' today... back in they day it was just another night out.

Things have changed - the dynamic has changed - we have most definitely changed - we've got older and matured - I'd shake my head at most of the silly stuff I did here back in my 20's but remember most of it fondly.

I think the real difference people are noticing is perhaps not the silly, dumb, fun-spirited daft stuff people do - but perhaps a shift in respect of a few - and that it amplified a hundred fold by social media.

29 minutes ago, scubascuba3 said:

Plenty of those types back in UK too, best avoided, poorly educated, rubbish parents, shady farang maybe with criminal links. The problem for us is eventually the Thais will get totally fed up with it and potentially end certain visas and extensions

As tourism grows - and realistically, it’s only going one way - familiarity inevitably and always seems breeds a bit of contempt on both sides....

In the high-tourist-footfall areas - markets, bars, restaurant strips - the dynamic has shifted - it did years ago... There’s still warmth if you look for it, but it’s diluted. What you get more often now is transactional - a bit more calculated, a bit more “what can I get out of this?”.... That’s always existed, but when visitor numbers surge, so does the expectation to extract from them. It’s not really a fertile ground for mutual respect and chilled exchange - but that still exists in many other areas...

To put it in context, Thailand had around 10 million international visitors in the early 2000s, about 28 million by 2015, and peaked at nearly 40 million in 2019. Even with the reset during Covid, it’s climbing back fast. Places like Pattaya, Patong, and Koh Samui have seen their visitor volumes multiply several times over in the last 20-30 years. Samui, for example, went from a relatively quiet island in the 90s to handling a couple of million visitors a year pre-Covid. Patong’s transformation is even more extreme - what was once a backpacker strip is now a full-blown global party hub.

So for those of us who remember these places when they were quieter, the contrast feels stark. But I think there’s a bit of nostalgia bias in that too. If you dropped yourself today into an area with the same level of tourism those places had 20 years ago, you’d probably find the same kind of interactions - relaxed, friendly, a bit more genuine. Assuming, of course, we haven’t become a bit jaded ourselves along the way.

Social media hasn’t helped at all. It amplifies the worst behaviour - both tourists and locals - and feeds this idea that it’s all gone downhill. But that’s a very distorted lens IMO. Day-to-day, most if not all interactions are still perfectly decent. Most foreigners behave themselves, most Thais are still welcoming. The extremes just get the airtime.

Bangkok, interestingly, has improved in a lot of ways - cleaner, more organised, more aligned with how many of us have aged out of the chaos of our 20s. Pattaya and parts of Phuket, on the other hand, have simply scaled up - more people, more noise, and inevitably, more idiots - thats just scaling - its proportionate...

...But step outside those pressure zones - places like Chanthaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Rayong, even parts of Krabi, or up in Khon Kaen and Nong Khai - and it’s a different feel altogether. The pace drops, interactions soften, and that sense of mutual respect is still very much there. Thailand hasn’t lost that - it’s just been pushed out of the busiest corridors.

In the end, it’s less about the country changing completely, and more about where you choose to experience it - and of course - and of course how 'we' react in every situation - I now know more, speak far more, but still enjoy interactions when they are organic and genuine whether with a Thai or foreigner....

A guy with a dog on the BTS - total tewat-head... Its certainly a new level of cokwomblery - but nothing that really exceeds the idiocy that passed decades past.

7 hours ago, DonniePeverley said:

his British accent.

That would have bothered me more than anything else.

Shocking for me to learn now, after more than 20 years living here, that most Thai's still don't view dogs as pets.

Nearly all of my Thai friends have dogs as pets (a few cats too), some have multiple.

I guess my circle must be unique. 😂

5 hours ago, sstuff3 said:

Shocking for me to learn now, after more than 20 years living here, that most Thai's still don't view dogs as pets.

Nearly all of my Thai friends have dogs as pets (a few cats too), some have multiple.

I guess my circle must be unique. 😂

Where do you live? The vast majority of people live in no pets allowed condos in Bangkok. It's only recently high luxury condos have started allowing dogs to stay, and even then there have been a raft of complaints in many.

Most will keep the little accessory type dogs. The geeza in question here was letting a rather chunky big dog lose.

12 hours ago, sstuff3 said:

Shocking for me to learn now, after more than 20 years living here, that most Thai's still don't view dogs as pets.

Nearly all of my Thai friends have dogs as pets (a few cats too), some have multiple.

I guess my circle must be unique. 😂

Your circle isn't unique, just different. One of the things I learned to turn a blind eye to was the way they treated dogs in Isaan. They weren't pets there.

What has changed in the years since I moved to Thailand? Mobile phones, and mobile phones with (video) cameras. Influencers. Social media and things like Facebook Groups. We can easily get inundated with all the crazy things going on around here. It's sometimes just too hard to ignore.

If accused, I would admit to being a bit of an old curmudgeon. OTOH, I think people have become much more selfish and self centered. I find the general population simply annoying. Is that old age, or did things change. I'd say its a 30 / 70 split.

On 4/22/2026 at 4:40 AM, DonniePeverley said:

More and more i stay here, the more and more you become frustrated with behaviour of foreigners here

Yes, I agree.

I've been yelling from the rooftops for years now, my hate for some of the foreigners coming to Thailand.

Beware, there's a few here who will attack you if you say negative things about foreigners.

Edited April 26Apr 26 by SAFETY FIRST

21 hours ago, sstuff3 said:

Shocking for me to learn now, after more than 20 years living here, that most Thai's still don't view dogs as pets.

Nearly all of my Thai friends have dogs as pets (a few cats too), some have multiple.

I guess my circle must be unique. 😂

Many locals do have dogs and cats but they are largely ignored after puppy and kitten stage. Dogs here wander through hospitals like they live there, and I don't see anyone casing them out. There are some locals that do have animals, and I see them accompanying them on their scooters, with and without side carts, so there are some that appreciate their animals. It's just not near the same as it is in the west, where pets are part of the family, from birth till death.

It's not all video phones. I was in Thailand some 10 years ago and there was nothing on the scale of the level of bad behaviour we have now.

I don't need a camera, or social media clips to see the terrible behaviour and effect on society in some areas.

Two major things have changed - the visas and entry system, and relaxation of drug policy (marijuana but also enforcement of other drugs is not as strong as it once was) - it's attracting the worst of the worst from around the world. Policing has not caught up.

11 hours ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

Beware, there's a few here who will attack you if you say negative things about foreigners.

Awww... You poor thing getting attacked by words...

But... You don't get called out because you say negative things about foreigners, you get called out because you express a clear bias and ONLY say negative things when a foreigner is involved - if you were equally critical with balance - your comments would be taken as being less unhinged.

It was the same for Bob Smith when he was making pest of himself on the forum - he got called out for ONLY saying negative things about Thai's.

Edited April 26Apr 26 by richard_smith237

51 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

Awww... You poor thing getting attacked by words...

But... You don't get called out because you say negative things about foreigners, you get called out because you express a clear bias and ONLY say negative things when a foreigner is involved - if you were equally critical with balance - your comments would be taken as being less unhinged.

It was the same for Bob Smith when he was making pest of himself on the forum - he got called out for ONLY saying negative things about Thai's.

I've been here a long, long time.

The Thai's doing Weird things, their strange ways were here well before I arrived, why would I call them out, it would be childlike, adolescent to complain about something that was here before I arrived. To me people like Bob Smith and Yourself have never grown up

What's changed since I've arrived are the unacceptable numbers of weird foreigners, the nasty disrespectful foreigners, that's why I'm calling them out.

These idiots were NOT here when I arrived, why should I have to put up with these nasty, freaky foreigners that are making me feel uneasy, uncomfortable?

Edited April 26Apr 26 by SAFETY FIRST

Same guy tonight. No top on. The skywalk towards Emsphere, dog just let lose.

Imbecile.

What is it with British guys not wanting to wear tops? Even pushing it i can fathom you may not understand it if you on an island, but in the middle of a city, and furthermore claiming to live here - thats the problem rite there. The guy wants to exports his habits from the west to Thailand.