joekicker

Absolutely second that. Extension of a proper visa (or "non-visa" airport stamp) is simple, efficient and decidedly un-scary. You need a mug-shot (passport) photo and photocopies of the pages in your passport that have the passport info (the page with your pic on it) and the page(s) with your visa/stamp/arrival card.

Yeah, everybody go ahead and laugh. Fact is you cannot take a step without breaking the law. Everything is against the law. When funds are needed to help the policeman's daughter with her school fees, you will pay it, or you will pay three to 10 times as much NOT to pay it. Those are your choices. It is a Thailand fact of life.

It has nothing to do with vacations, it's students going home - Asian students in the US, American-Canadian students in Asia. When schools are out is when families move. Just the embassies alone in Thailand move hundreds of employees and thousands of people (families) - in each direction. $875 from LAX is a very good fare indeed at the moment.

The non-immigrant visa is reallyonly for working/staying, and is really only useful for working/staying permanently. You want a tourist visa. To answer your question directly, you can claim you have a lead on a job in Thailand and will be interviewed when you get there, but when they start asking for details you may be sorry you didn't just ask for a tourist one. They have the right to, and often do demand a letter from your (prospective) employer or the paperwork for your retirement.

Well, you can have your take on it and we can disagree. But frankly when I saw the following line, that's where I thought they were just way over the on her. Just for the record, I don't believe they could make that "no relations" rule stick in the Thai Labour Court, either - and for very good reasons IMHO. I'm sorry this story got into the book collection. I don't think it belongs. And this is why: Although we were both sure that Pon was having a relationship with this particular guest, which is a sackable offence, she was not conducting it at the hotel. Besides, she was leaving us shortly and we needed every pair of hands we could get.

Heh. A bar where the girls are dressed up in purple burqas and parkas. Now that *IS* an original idea for the fleshpot capital of Thailand. Am I missing something?

I have really enjoyed the Jasmine Mansion tales, and laughed my ass off several times. It's highly readable, and spot-on. But not now. I am frankly appalled you'd be so proud of being a busybody old lady. Your employee likes a customer. Totally and completely, she moves this into her private life, on her own time and does not affect your business or her working efficiency in any manner. You don't just go behind her back, you don't just gossip and giggle and yak over it with your wife, you claim no one can "get away with something". Then you brag about invading her privacy. You're not even slightly worried about her job performance, you want to know her private life. I think this particular tale, and its manner of telling, are quite disgusting. You should be glad Pon is simply leaving the job, and not dropping a few little items around to remind you about her for weeks or months later. If it were me, I sure would.

But then people from the small island off Europe would say you misspelled Arsed. You can't win. You also can't lose or quit of course.

This is still the most practical suggestion. From what I've seen, there's more money to be made there than in trying to keep your hands off the students in an English class for sure.

Let's just say that I have not served as the bag during muay thai lessons, ever. Seriously, I did take muay thai for quite some time, it's a hell of a .... um, sport. After you get into it for a while, you get to kick one of the boxers in the camp for five minutes on, one minute off for about 30 minutes. He does little but defend his vitals, the idea that you're working on your accuracy, and he's working on his callouses. It is a hell of a long time, but it's nothing to what happens when your 30 minutes are up, and he smiles and says, "My turn".

Heh. You are going to get into a fistfight with someone in Pattaya? Up on the balls of your feet, prepared to strike with your hands held outward, elbows bent? Let me assure you that between four and 27 young men will proceed to give you some basic self-defence lessons in muay thai and stick-wielding, using you as the example-opponent. The proper position to assume when you are about to get in a fight on the street in Pattaya, is: With your back turned towards the opponent, move your feet as fast as you can, assuming the gait of a stripe-assed ape as you (hopefully) disappear from your opponents' (plural, please believe me) view. Alternatively, if you speak Thai, you can probably talk your way out of it.

Because it's not the low season. It's the student season, which is VERY high. Low season is, oh, February to early May. (A lot of US schools are out in mid-May.)

This is the lower (not low) part of the midde-class scale. Six, maybe 10 years into a decent Bangkok job, a mid-middle-classer, semi- or real white collar, would probably average 50,000-to-55,000 a month. I'm just basing on acute observation, not on actual stats. As always, you can play with the numbers. As in the West, teaching salaries are a bad example, as teachers are under-paid compared with their counterparts in business and industry. Here's a possible rule of thumb. Buying a new pick-up (the cheapest four-wheel vehicle in Thailand) would take payments of about 13,000 to 15,000 a month, a standard four-door automobile would be a few thousand more. So they have to make enough to cover that basic cost.

Prices are up across the board. Whatever was cheaper last year is going to be more expensive this year. It's even worse going the other way, i.e. starting in Bangkok. My own 37,000 baht return ticket to middle America went to 53,000 last year and is currently "just over 61,000" my travel agent informs - PLUS the US dollar has tanked so in effect I've gone from about $800 to $1,600 in two years. That's not bargain hunting, but it is what's happening to fares to/from the US/Thailand and the Pacific. My daughter in the US informed me last week she will get a student-discount ticket to Bangkok and return for $810. The news is not good on US airfares.

Yes. TOT servers work on Soi 6, and they go down. Seriously, it happens. TOT crashes occasionally. So does True. There are many possibilities and there are many explanations if you ask them. Sometimes the USP doesn't kick in. Sometimes a disk crashes. Sometimes they put in new software wrong. There's no such thing as an ISP that doesn't crash AT ALL, and TOT sure isn't in the Top 10. The question is why one site continues to work when all others are, or certainly seem to be, victims of that crash. I don't believe the email report. It's not possible to know where a reciepient of an email is. There's another way to explain that email problem. Perhaps the sender sent half a dozen emails and the two addressed to people he knew were in Pattaya had some problem? That is not the same problem as "all email to Pattaya doesn't work" which simply can't occur.

NOBODY and I would stress that if I could find out how the phuoc you do huge letters in flashing red bold, NOBODY does ghost movies like the Thai moviemakers. Hollywood totally sucks, the Japanese pale by comparison, the Chinese aren't in the game and Hammer Studios was comedy-central compared to Thai ghost movies. If you get scared by movies, Thai ghost movies will have you seeking new laundries and installing new banks of bright lights.

Definitely some horrible DNS maintenance but that's more often some sites out, almost all OK, not the other way around.

Can't explain your weird one-site access (browser cache, maybe??). But from now to Wednesday there are LOT of storms in the area, and EMP is a bitch with wireless. Rain will put out the wired circuits as well, by playing with the satellites.

Well, that and your own large penis and hamsumness. And Tom Cruise really does go 300 mph on those motorcycles, as do the cameramen filming him. I saw it myself, there's no way they could fake that!

You don't have to speculate. You can simply read the English translation of the immigration laws, with all schedules and sub-rules. In English: It has been translated by Thailand's best known international law firm. http://www.tillekeandgibbins.co.th/Publica...ation_order.pdf aka http://tinyurl.com/v3yju

Thais do not buy "used houses". The exceptions are generally people who are far too poor to buy anything else and have to temporarily accept such a horrible thing. Most... well, many Thais are unable to wrap their minds around the concept of buying a home in which someone else has lived.

You write that like it's a bad thing.

Never seen such, and I've been around the torrents for a while. You don't see them anywhere online, really. I'm sure the thinking is that only Thais want them, and they cost 69 baht on CD in any mall. Same with the music. There is a tiny amount of Thai music in P2P, but table after table of karaoke and MP3s in the malls. My kids in the States always ask me for movies and especially the comedy shows.

Actually the black helicopters do the monitoring, the programs just beam the information up to them. Alcoa secretly makes a counter-attack, cleverly covertly marketed under the generic trade name "aluminum foil". Folded correctly, placed atop the vertical human body, it will stop the rays. Sigh. How do I debunk thee? Let me count the ways: 1. Torrentspy doesn't HAVE downloads, it only has links to torrents, which are tiny little text files and as illegal as dihydrogen oxide. 2. Clients don't have .... Oh to hell with it. Never mind. It leaves more downloading bandwidth for the rest of us.

"Got any ID?" asks the Alabama state trooper. Replies the redneck pick-up driver: "'bout what?"