joekicker

The toilet fairy doesn't clean the toilets. Toilets cost money. Five baht for a public toilet serving many bars is pretty good value really. Whether the toilets ARE clean is a separate matter. Any given toilet's cleanliness depends on various things. Some are kept up (hotel lobbies, generally) some aren't (the bar-beer complexes generally). As always, exceptions both ways. .

But actually it does. It helps to read the thread, keeps you up. .

Not what I wrote, and not what the law is. The law doesn't say you (at FLB) have to provide free toilet use. It says you have to allow the public to use your toilets - that is, any tom, dick or somchai can walk into the bar, use the toilet and walk out. Free access. Of course you can charge for any service your bar offers. If you charge your customers 100 baht to use the toilet, then tom, dick and somchai will have to fork over 100 baht too. If you charge nothing, you can't charge them. And so on. This is a very common law, that "just is" in Thailand, all Thais are raised with this, and there's never a dispute when Thais are involved. It's very ingrained and I don't even think that most Thais realise it's an actual law - it's just the way things are done. But there is a law. Heh. It you're really bored some day, make a big deal about it, call the cops, etc. Could be fun. .

Nah. By law, all public businesses must allow all the public to use their toilets - definitely including bars and hotel-lobby toilets. I don't doubt a couple of farang managers might try to get shirty about it, but they have no choice if you simply insist - and the entire Thai staff knows that and most certainly will never make a fuss so long as you don't actually escalate any dispute. .

Stacey begins her trip in Phuket, where she stays as a tourist before swapping roles and becoming a hotel worker. She works as a chambermaid and struggles with the hard work and incredibly high standards, having to clean 14 rooms a day for just four pounds. She also discovers what it's like to live on such low wages and the sacrifices that some hotel workers have to make. Many live in slum conditions or in hotel dormitories, separated from their children for months at a time. But this is nonsense. Stacey is stepping way, way, WAY down in her life to be a hotel maid. She has NO IDEA, literally not one single solitary tiny clue what it is like to step UP in life and get a respectable job working as a hotel maid, with good chances for advancement, experience and moving UP to something else. The typical hotel maid has never made such a high wage, and is making no sacrifices at all - merely making career and life choices like we all do. Hundreds of thousands of, well, let's say Brits (or any nationality, really) are separated from their children for months at a time for any number of reasons and choices that they made. Stacey hates cleaning one hotel room every 40 minutes. Boo-hoo let's all shed a tear for Stacey, who doesn't have to do that any more. .

Okay, THAT was worth the click. Very nicely intro'd LTGTR, and the pic got a guffaw from me as well. .

Other boring stuff: Mozart, Westminster Cathedral, 1066, Winston Churchill and George Washington. The problem is that if you didn't have all that boring stuff, you also wouldn't have Amy Whineabout. .

NOT Central Plaza, which is Lardprao and also closed for renovations. The passport branch office convenient to Pattaya is at Central Bang Na, which is near the top of the Bangna-Trad road, taken by the Bangkok-Pattaya buses. Going FROM Pattaya, ask the bus to stop at Central Bang Na - you'll have to cross the highway on a footbridge. Or take a taxi to Central Bangna. There are dozens of signs at the entrance of the mall and at elevators on where to go. If you get lost, you won't be able to fill out the passport form anyhow, so give up. The passport office here keeps government hours, not mall hours - closed weekends and holidays and so on. It's fast, efficient and at least as good as the main consular office you ended up at, Bazle. .

They are, in the main, but I still use them. Main use is throw 200-300 songs on one, play it in the car, which has an MP3 player that doesn't take DVDs. .

Definitely, as I and others stated up ^^^ there already. Not only the "organisation" of the trash in your photo but the type of trash. Almost nothing in your picture was thrown onto the sand by anyone sitting in those chairs. Anyone who's ever walked a Pattaya-area beach has seen that very little of the trash comes DOWN the beach, it almost all comes UP the beach. Now Ivan and Pradeep could be hauling their trash offshore and dumping it and the tide-wind brings it in of course. The Indians and Russians have always been close on various plots to ruin the world. But seriously folks, you can see in this photo of yours that the trash is not newly generated by people in the chairs and their vendors. Excellent summary. Thais live in filth... well, revel in filth, really. .

Not true. It is intangible, but there is money and good publicity, both - the money comes from the publicity that they keep the beaches clean. .

Great point. I think this applies to other sports, too. There are a lot of matches and a lot of different titles/Cups. It seems to be hard -- and I can understand this -- it seems quite difficult for players to be "up" for every match in every category. For example: "In the old days" derby matches were front page news. Now, at least half the time or more, players are phoning in the matches. I don't really blame them. Sure, they're getting huge wages, but while you can show up and make the body perform, you can't always be mentally sharp. These guys now play 11 months a year including foreign tours, and train 12 months, and you just can't keep mentally "up" like that. In North America these days, pro basketball and hockey are 100 games in six months. One of the big issues in the gridiron football strike is whether to add another two games, and another two weeks to the schedule that already has 24 weeks if you win (or lose) the Super Bowl. You can't stay entirely on top of your game for all those matches, some matches will inevitably be approached with that "autopilot" on. .

Play but won't record sounds like a damaged laser. If so, an external definitely will work fine. .

You're probably using that outdated, old video site, YouTube.com ("the Internet Explorer of video sites"). There's a vast improvement on that you should switch to that will update your multimedia experience - YouPorn.com .

Yeah, well, jacko had a sort-of explanation. The thing is that if you push trash to the water, you, er, haven't pushed it anywhere, it comes right back. jacko thinks they all work on their own patches, and effectively push the trash to the next-door neighbour, which I can kinda buy except if you do that to the left, wouldn't the guy to the right be doing it to you? If I had to guess, which I don't since you say this, but if I had to guess, I'd guess the pics show them pushing the trash down the beach to one big pile at the water line where it is picked up OR taken out and dunked offshore. Because just pushing it six inches into the water - even if it's on the patch of the guy to the left instead of your patch - seems nonsensical and utterly useless. And why work to have a useless result? It's not so much I don't believe it, as I can't grasp it. It doesn't make my "Thai logic" scale, not this one. .

From your description so far, it would. It is *almost* impossible it's the disks themselves - not 100 per cent failure. And your software sounds okay too. It's almost certainly your CD/DVD unit inside the computer as you describe this. But -- can you PLAY a movie or music in that unit okay? .

Definitely. You got a picture of them doing that? It's so hard to believe from the pics that show them pushing trash in a line towards the waterline. Even Somchai Doofus would surely realise that pushing the trash into the ocean is, er, NOT pushing the trash into the ocean?? Maybe not, but surely the photo taker stuck around another minute or two to verify that? .

Pretty standard up-country el-cheapo look thung (folk music) show. .

Refresh my mind, please. What was the argument, the disagreement about? I don't recall a phrase that you (or I) *could* correct, let alone that you did so. But I'm curious. If you're so bored, why do you keep reading, diving in and actively participating? .

PHUOCKING Butler! How many brackets have they broken in a year? Jeeze. Cincy doing it to Uconn in the first six minutes. This could be ... COULD be interesting. .

My smart money is on Duke, my passion money is on Uconn -- I really don't think anyone can beat Uconn right now, they really have some momentum. If someone beats Duke for them, Connecticutt will take it, surely. Whoops forgot FF. Three of them, I see Ohio State, Kansas, Pitt. Between Duke and Uconn, I really waver, I think I have to take Uconn, just on momentum. .

Nah. Joe is SUGGESTING that if you want something in this life AND you can have it, then take it. If I saw a great jeezly lobster at exactly the moment I was thinking, Wow, it'd be great to have lobster tonight, glad I have 4,000 baht in my pocket, then that lobster would be mine, yum-yum. Not only on holiday, but especially on holiday. The OP stipulated he had the money. He's not an animal rights guy. He hankered after that lobster, and days later he was still thinking about it. He was afraid that maybe perhaps he could get a better deal. And then he didn't go to get a better deal. Joe suggests that he considers that a bit crazy. Have the darn lobster! .

Way back in the dimly remembered days of the mid aughts, Pattaya itself and Jomtien had a small army of beach rakers. They did quite an excellent job, the beaches were clean when Ivan and Pradeep showed up to strew their garbage yet again. I *seem* to remember this was daily but it might have been less often - but anyhow, it occurred. I guess it still does happen from time to time or the beaches would be simply garbage dumps, but it seems less clean these days. .

You heard wrong. The men have it. It's mainly because of the skin colour, as explained several times in this thread already. The scar on the shoulder is vaccination. Anywhere else, it could be anything, and now that you mention it, it does seem I see fewer of those "cry for help" suicide wrist marks. There is no real "branding" movement in Thailand; you can pretty well rule out branding for anything you see a lot of. Even little tattoos, good girls have them. Branding is very western, hasn't really penetrated here in any general way at all. .

I've seen sadder sights than that in Pattaya. I once saw a German tourist trying to explain to a baht bus driver how to get somewhere or other, using an all-English map. .