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Everything posted by Bob
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Are you near one of the main roads (what we call the "Hangdong Road)? And do you know how to flag down a baht bus? I'd guess (but really don't know as I've never tried it out there - I usually go to Baan Tawai area being driven by a tuk tuk buddy) - they've got baht busses that will come into town from there.
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Glad to see it was finished with a minimum of heart attacks to yourself. Yea, the extended family, usually always there (or will show up soon). I'm at least happy you didn't mention that a buffalo or two didn't show up in the yard. All's well that sorta ends well ("sorta" is about the best that can be hoped for in many of these situations).
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Lol. Many of the rural houses are built on stilts (often concrete columns) due of course to their knowing that floods can come every year to most parts of Thailand. I suspect that elevating houses might also have something to do with controlling bug infestation and/or ventilation/cooling during the hot season. Your story is actually pretty funny - not how they're building the house but how you as a falang are reacting to how they do it in the boonies. It may not be pretty but they do get it done! I'm guessing that you slowly learned to skip the occasional shocked looks at some things and the urge to advise them how to do it "right" (they'll politely listen to you, actually act like they understand you, and then totally ignore you anyway....hehe). Looking forward to reading the continuing saga (time to adjust the seatbelt as the ride might get a little bumpy....).
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I know about where you are but I'm fairly sure that there are no other posters on this board who live within a few miles of you. There are a couple, myself included, who live in the city (Chiang Mai) on the west side not all that far from the mall (Kad Suan Gaew). Up to you but the address you list above seems a bit incomplete. For use by friends mailing from other countries, you might want to add "Thailand" at the end. And, if you had a street name, Soi number, and house number, it'd look a whole lot more complete. But I suppose if a mailing gets to the Hang Dong post office, it'll likely get to you. Typically (there are variations) addresses would be listed as follows: NAME House number, Soi number, and street name Housing cluster or condo name (in your case, maybe Baan Nanbun) T. Namprae, A. Hangdong Thailand 5xxxx (The "A" stands for "Ampur" which is the Thai name for "District" and the "T" stands for "Tambon" which is the Thai word for "Subdistrict")
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That'd be my guess too but, although lowering your price to get more business is one of those wacky (being somewhat sarcastic there) notions in the west that I've never seen adopted here in Thailand. And, with regards to hotel prices outside of the Bangkok area, the influx of the escaping Bangkok residents might just cause the prices to go up a wee bit.
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I'm presuming (just a wild guess) that you're talking about Tambon Namprae of the Hang Dong District south of the Chiangmai airport? I doubt if 99% of Chiangmai residents themselves (there are a couple of posters who live in Chiangmai) ever even heard of the Namprae Tambon. On the other hand, with my luck, there are 1000 other places in Thailand with the same names.....
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I wish you well with your new venture. Good luck. That being said, I cannot fathom the need for another message board about "gay Thailand." There are already several boards and two out of three of the "reasonable" ones have slowed down quite a bit over the years. It's my view (just my opinion) that the gay Thailand message boards are slowly dying out for a variety of reasons, some of it due to the oldtimers, expats and tourists, getting bored with the whole deal and some of it being due to a lack of new members (or, perhaps, younger potential members simply not being interested). And maybe some of it's due to Thailand simply becoming less of a magnet for gay travelers. As to running a board, I imagine you'd have to be willing to expend a whole lot of personal time and also have the patience of Job. While I admire the guys who have done it over the years, there's not a large enough caliber gun to make me even think about it.
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Ditto....and try to make sure you get one of the ocean-facing rooms. It's a walk down to the corner to grab a baht bus to town or elsewhere but Tui's is a great place to stay as it's quiet as a morgue at night. The rooms are decent (especially the ones fronting on the ocean) and the restaurant on the first floor is very handy and good too.
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Amazing Thailand: 25 percent of worldwide HDD production,
Bob replied to TotallyOz's topic in Gay Thailand
Yep, there's no reasonable basis at least in this thread to get pissy about anything; after all, the discussion really has been about rather mundane things wrapped up in confusing, almost cultish, terminology. Some of us and the media just get orgasmic delight with using and confusing new terminology such as "cloud" computing, databases, or whatever. It ain't all that complicated and using new-age terminology to somewhat suggest what one's talking about doesn't help either the discussion or the understanding. A storage device - whether a spinning electromagnetic thing-a-ma-jig (a/k/a, a harddrive) or a solid-state device (electronic storage device as simple as a flashdrive) - is just that, a closet or location to store data or programs. Who the hell cares what it really is as long as it works well (let's us do what we want to do), is economical (as in cheap!), and doesn't cause us problems (like some asshole gaining access to your social security number or that photograph of you peeing in the snowbank when you were drunk and screwing up your financial or personal life). Cloud computing - remote storage of data (hotmail, photo websites, etc.) or use of remotely stored and accessible programming (every time you use your mobile phone?) - isn't new or even exciting in my view. As long as it's secure (hackers or others can't get into those remote storage devices to obtain access to you or your personal information), it's kind of irrelevant to me how it's done. But, for very personal information (I'm not talking about such things as music collections but, rather, personal family photos, tax returns, financial data, and the like), I see zero reason why to ever allow that information to be stored anywhere but on your own person (either on your own harddrive or electronic storage device) as that's the only way to guarantee it will remain secure. It's simply too cheap and easy to be secure in that manner and, to me, there's no argument out there as to why it would be more beneficial to me to do it otherwise (other than I guess I do lose the benefit of dropping at the tea social that "I'm on the cloud"). I can put all my very personal and private information on a little thing-a-ma-jig not much bigger than a ball point pen and that's where it will stay. Somebody can (and did)hack the Facebook page I used to have and we periodically read about what outfit (Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) was shockingly relieved of customers' financial data by the millions but nobody, not even god or Steve Jobs, is going to screw with the data on my little thing-a-ma-jig. By the by, it's partly "cloudy" here today in Chiangmai and I'm beginning to wonder if those white fluffy things floating across the horizon are electromagnetic, electronic, or, perhaps, cocaine deliveries from the Mexican drug cartels.... -
The Bangkok Post this morning indicated that 85% of the Don Muang district has 50 centimeters or more of standing flood water. It also mentioned that the Don Muang terminal has flood water in the building (terminal) although the article didn't mention how deep it was within the terminal. Amazing - and I sure as hell hope that Suvarnabhumi, the golden land built on a swamp, escapes the deluge.
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The current flood problem was largely due to several things: (1) the annual gamble by somebody as to how much water to retain in the main dams (the gamble being how much rain to expect versus attempting to keep as much water around to benefit local farmers as possible)and simply guessing wrong, (2) failure to adequately build infrastructure to take care of the known periodic problem; (3) building other items (roads, buildings, etc.) without maintaining any thought as to how such activities fit into the overall drainage plan that should have been in place and (4) mother nature. The current Prime Minister wasn't around for the first three failures and she, with or without a magic wand or the right amulet, can't control the fourth. I'm doubtful that anybody who was made Prime Minister in August could have avoided to any significant degree the mess they have right now. Yingluck may have appointed less than competent people to some jobs but they didn't cause the current mess either and the "incompetence" part is simply a part of what's normal in any Thai government I've ever seen. Hell, it was the head of the Ministry of Science and Technology that 2-3 years back proclaimed that Bangkok didn't have to worry about the melting of the north and south poles as Bangkok was "too far away" from the poles. That, sadly, is about on the same par with the "boat propeller maneuver" recently tried and touted (and, for whatever reason, only laughed at by falang!). Will the Thai government decide to hire a group of international engineering experts to intelligently decide what massive infrastructure plan is needed to prevent almost all future flooding? And then implement the plan (1) putting thousands of Thais to work, (2) preventing this from happening again, and (3) doing it in a fashion that 10-30% doesn't get siphoned off in tea money? I'd guess "no" on all aspects of those notions.
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You mean like that long-toothed guy in the movie Deliverance?
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Amazing Thailand: 25 percent of worldwide HDD production,
Bob replied to TotallyOz's topic in Gay Thailand
There have been too many hacker attacks that have stolen financial information, etc., for me to put my personal documents on some server located in Timbuktu (or god knows where). For the stuff (documents and the like) that I want to take with me, I simply take a flash drive or two. I suppose, in a way, that anything within my gmail account is essentially my own private cloud space...but even there I don't keep very personal documents (like copies of a Will and Trust, financial account data, and the like). Just a personal preference and I'm sure I'm more wary than most. -
The symbol has been used by cultures for thousands of years but, sadly, it's original meaning (from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix) of good luck, strength, life, etc., has been forever darkened by its use by and association with the Nazi thugs.
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I'm not sure what it is but I've always thought that some British accents are a joy to hear. Sir John Gielgud, Alec Guiness, Sir Laurence Olivier, just to name a few. The accent or diction, for whatever reason, seems to just scream out that what's being said is extremely intelligent and interesting. I was only in my teens when Richard Burton appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and they had Burton read a New York City phonebook from a podium. That's probably the best example of how some of us yanks are absolutely enthralled/spellbound when hearing some British accents and diction. I don't react like that to any American accents although I find some of them a bit quaint (the Kennedy's "Boston", for example). As a "northerner", I've never found the slow-talking "southern belle" accent appealing (we northerners always figured they talked as slow as they did due to brain damage.....).
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Yes sir, that's likely the animal. I couldn't think of the proper name as my upper lip was a bit stiff....
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Lol....and which form/version of English in Great Britain(Scottish, Welsh, Irish, etc., etc.) is the form of "our language" that you claim we yanks are trashing? I also voted that I speak US English (which has it's own varieties) and really don't care what version (Cagean, Welsh, hillbilly, South African, Australian, Jamaican, brogue, etc.) that somebody else speaks. Now you didn't ask the key question - whether somebody is understood (which generally, for me, is "yes" depending on the accent and terminology used). "London English" is fairly easy for us yanks to comprehend but some of the other accents can be damn near impossible for us to understand. But, then again, it's difficult as hell for me at times to understand some people from Lousianna.
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Hmmmmm.....okay, I'll slide to the edge of oblivion here (although nobody's ever called me "charming"). What is the pronounciation??? Looks like the last letter of the alphabet (which we goofy yanks would pronounce it "zee", not "zed") followed by the number 909. There something more esoteric than that? Second question: Any particular meaning to your user name? If you've told us before, forgive me - I'm old and I'm even about to forget what question I just asked. Third question: Presuming you met a charming American (yea, I know, a rarity...), why would they call you by your username unless your parents had a wacky sense of humor and actually named you that?
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How has the economic crisis affected your travel or life in Gay Thailand?
Bob replied to TotallyOz's topic in Gay Thailand
Given your first statement, you might not qualify for the proposed business career! As we've heard so many times, you only need a large fortune to turn it into a small fortune owning a bar in Thailand! I'd sooner go play in traffic than even contemplate owning a bar in the Land of Smiles.... -
I'm so dense I have no clue who the "mystery poster" may be and I'm so mentally lethargic that I will make no effort to go back to re-read some posts in an effort to try to discover the answer. And I'm much too lazy to even think about it. Yet, Khun Thaiworthy makes a most valid point. Not too long ago, I participated in a trivia event at the Olde Bell bar here in Chiangmai. Besides myself (a midwestern US guy), our team consisted of a guy from London, a guy from Ireland, and another English guy who may have been Welsh or Scottish. After about a hour of chatting, one comment I blurted out in a fit of laughter was: "You know, guys, not one of us is speaking the same English!" (They all agreed too!) And, yes, Thaiworthy, the "correct" spelling is "behavior" (don't for a moment believe anything that our former colonial masters might say to the contrary!).
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Nor do I. You get "an" F also....lol (use "a" before a consonant sound; use "an" before a vowel sound)
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How has the economic crisis affected your travel or life in Gay Thailand?
Bob replied to TotallyOz's topic in Gay Thailand
I'm not sure what a "fixed budget" really means but I've really seen no evidence that the economic downturn has affected the cost of day to day life here in Chiangmai. Prices have slowly gone up over the last few years - the usual suspects such as food and gasoline - but I haven't noticed much difference (but, admittedly, I'm not on a restricted or tight budget). The biggest cost difference I've noticd the last 4-5 years is the cost of flying to and from the US once a year. That cost has probably gone up at least 50% (think I paid about $1,100.00 once for the evergreen deluxe/elite class on EVA but now it's over $1,800.00). Long-term, the exchange rates make some difference. And, for those from the US on a tight budget while here, I'm sure the recent changes (from 29 to 31 baht per dollar) will make some difference. But I still pine for the days a decade+ ago when you could get 44-45 baht to the dollar! -
Nope, sorry, haven't used any hotel up here for a few years; regardless, I'd still recommend PJ'S Place (which indeed is a gay-owned place) based on all the glowing comments I've heard about the place. But they're usually booked up unless you contact them a fair time ahead. The Mercure off of Chang Phuak is probably fine. You can at least walk to a few bars from there but, if you're plan is to use baht busses or tuk tuks to get around, it probably doesn't matter much where you stay. It's somewhat difficult in my view to recommend one hotel versus another when we're not sure what the poster likes. If you want to be able to walk to the night market bars or be by the night market itself, then stay by the river/Chang Klan. If you want to be by a couple of the gogo bars, then stay somewhere around Chang Phuak area or around the gay Lotus Hotel. If you want to be able to walk to Soho or the old mall (Kad Suan Gaew), then stay at PJ's or the Chiangmai Orchid. If you like the Sunday walking street (night market) or want to be by Taepae Gate, then the Montri would be fine. It just depends on what you like, if you like to walk around, etc.
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Well, you certainly made my day! Lovely.