Pete'S Peregrinations

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Walking Street Renamed

Pete’s Peregrinations – By Peter Lloyd

In a little-publicised shock move, Walking Street has been officially renamed by City Hall.

Keen to reflect the changing nature of Pattaya tourism, and supported by TAT, proud of their success in filling cheap hotels with impecunious sub-continental tourists, poorer than most Thais themselves, it has been renamed GAWKING Street, narrowly pipping “Hawking Street” which reflected the earthy commercial nature of much of the “ten-on-one ugly one” new tourist group leisure activities being negotiated down there.

“Whoreking Street” was deemed too offensive to the burgeoning freelance trade.

As the cheapest entertainment for broke tourists available on Gawking Street (aside from watching beggars beg) is watching teenage kids trying to break dance, these spectacles now attract record crowds, second only to hordes of slavering swarthy men looking at the mannish Russian dancers in upstairs window displays, and ogling, pawing and photographing the girls with placards outside bars like they’re in a zoo (which I suppose they are).

Apparently Pattaya’s casualty departments are full of innocent strollers with severely bruised arms caused by the new tourists who barge their way along the street, staring left and right, but never ahead, at the unaffordable wonders of Pattaya.

One bar owner lamented “The new broke tourists are even less inclined than Russians to spend money and buy booze in bars. Even the 7-11s are missing the Russians”.

Pattaya Tales

Sometimes I get the feeling that, for whatever reason, crimes don’t seem to be reported locally with anything like the frequency they are being committed around the town.

This impression was recently reinforced when I was out with a friend who told me he had been burgled twice – in three days. And he also prevented a third burglary in the same week when he heard a suspicious noise and went to investigate.

This was on a nice, quiet residential estate, where my friend is renting a large house.

During both burglaries, he and his heavily pregnant wife were asleep in the bedroom as their house was ransacked, and their dogs did not bark on either occasion.

During the first burglary, the burglars stole everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down.

My friend thought the culprit might be living in a nearby construction worker’s camp, and the next night, for the first time ever, that camp was a riot of song and drunkenness, for which my unhappy friend believed he had paid.

A couple of nights later, another burglary. Again, they slept through it, and again the dogs didn’t bark, and this time the burglars stole everything that WAS nailed down, and even hung around to get drunk on my friend’s whisky whilst raiding the fridge for a meal which they ate at the kitchen table. Needless to say, they moved out as soon as they could.

However one crime that WAS widely reported when I was in Jomtien a few weeks ago, was a theft in a 7-11 by a gang who were caught with something like 200,000 baht’s worth of stolen shop goods in their car.

By chance, I had gone into the shop just after the burglary had been committed (er, honest), and saw police, staff and the ubiquitous motorbike taxi drivers huddled around a monitor, where they were watching remarkably clear security footage of the miscreants robbing the shop blind.

Next day I read reports of both the crime and the arrest of the thieves, who were quickly apprehended by the police. This was another extremely fast response from the boys in Dongtan police box, who I have said before, have what must be one of the hardest policing jobs in Thailand, from the smallest of premises, with little manpower, covering a huge catchment area with a lot of traffic accidents, tourists and crime to deal with.

International Banks

Whilst I am a happy Siam Commercial bank customer, having banked with HSBC in London for over 20 years it made sense for me to also open an HSBC account in Bangkok.

But for an international bank, HSBC Bangkok are letting themselves down by offering worse than local standards of service, which again became apparent when I recently tried to effect a simple transfer of money from my SCB branch in Jomtien to my HSBC Bangkok account.

How long is that going to take me? Even sending money to my London bank from SCB only takes five minutes. Unfortunately this simple bank-to-bank transfer took me FORTY MINUTES, and a ton of hassle.

Apparently HSBC won’t accept a payment, even a bank-to-bank transfer, from a customer, without pre-clearing it first, which took three phone calls from an increasingly moody SCB teller in the busy bank, who was put on hold on HSBC’s automated menu, and then cut off TWICE.

Eventually she got through and in a 10-second conversation obtained the stupid and probably pointless authority for me to pay money into my own bleeding bank account.

Yet another own-goal for HSBC Bangkok.

Contact me at [email protected]

-- Pattaya One 2010-10-01

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