jackcorbett

Cheshire Tom----Hey I think I remember you. You must be that German claiming he was a doctor to the Sky-Top girls hoping he could get out of paying his bill. You were hilarious man, running around the Sky-Top Internet cafe threatening the night girl, Nunn , that you would go to the police and that she would lose her job there. Noisy but still funnier than a ground hog taking a dump.

Cheshire Tom......Has everything to do with it. Explore in depth just about any locale and you will find skeletons in the closet with various incidents of violence scattered around. I used what you refer to as Hicksville, U.S.A. as my example 1. Because I am intimately familliar with it and 2. Because of its startling difference to a thriving city such as Pattaya. Using L.A. as my example wouldn't begin to get the point across. You would just toss it off as another violence filled city. One cannot argue much with my using a stolid farm community as my example. Your use of quotation marks around "high quality guests" shows you wish to poke fun at those staying at Skyslop (not Sky-Top) as the rest of us call this guest house. Do you mean to call me a low life, or my pals? Or are you refering to those who are not my pals or those I don't know? And your pointing out that the owner of Sky-Top nearly got into a serious altercation with the murderer as further ammunition for why you apparently do not like Sky-Top and seem to wish turning others against this guest house tells me that you would condemn any man who stands his ground against those threatening violence against him. Okay....I've gotten into several fights in my adult life. I tried to walk away from each one. And then I put the guys down. But according to your argument my home would be a very bad place for someone to visit simply because I got into some rather brutal altercations with those threatening violence against me. So come on, Cheshire Tom, the world awaits your answer over why you really seem to dislike Sky-Top so much. We won't tell anybody. Promise we won't. Did you stay at Sky-Top and not pay your rent thinking Pete wouldn't make you pay? P.S. One more thing. I do not advise you to go into U.S. rural areas calling people hicks. It will surprise you how short of a time you will remain on your feet.

The murderer did kill Jimmy who owned the corner bar a few doors down. Pete, however, had already kicked the killer out. In fact there had been an altercation between Pete and this Irishman. I can't remember the exact story but the Irishman had threatened Pete with a crazed look in his eyes while making a gesture with his hand across his throat signifying he would cut Pete's throat. But at this time of the night there is often a member of the tourist police sitting inside Skytop. So Pete put his hand in front of his face in such a way that his hand mimicked a revolver. And Pete gestured with his face while making a sound as if a gun was going off and someone was shooting the Irishman. Then Pete pointed at the police officer as if to warn the man: "Don't fuck with me. The police are my pals and they are right in my backyard." So the Irishman left in a hurry and it wasn't long afterwards that he knifed his partner in the bar a few doors down. Be assured that the tourist police are right next door from Skytop. I've found the guys in uniform to be nice fellows....just average everyday congenial sorts. Nice to have them around and a real plus insofar as the safety of the guests at Sky-Top but obviously their being so close to Jimmy's Bar did not dissuade one owner from killing the other. Obviously Pattaya is a mixed bag of people, both the Thais and the falang. There's a lot of excitement here and a certain amount of danger here no matter where you go, but let's put all this into perspective for a moment. For 23 years I lived on a farm here in the U.S. Five miles in one direction is Farmersville, IL with a population of 600. Eight miles in the opposite direction is Raymond, IL where I still do most of my banking. Population is 900. Because of the excellent black dirt of the farms here the people are relatively affluent. For the most part their values are high and the degree one places trust in one's fellow man here is pretty high. Nevertheless....just a few years ago two guys came off the highway and went into one of the service stations in Farmersville. When an attendant came up to them they shot him in the throat. When the manager on duty, Greg heard the shot, he came out of the office and was instantly shot in the head. Greg is the guy who used to change the oil in my car and was the brother of the wife of one of my best friends. In the same year in the opposite direction just three miles from Raymond the gas station attendant was shot in the head early in the morning. No one knows who killed him or why. A few years later, there was a ruckus in one of the Farmersville Taverns. Guys had come in from a nearby town spoiling for a fight. One of the guys had a large hunting knife on him. There was a big fight that migrated outdoors. The owner of the knife wound up very dead pickled with his own knife which ended up in the toilet. The bartender on duty who was very much involved in the fracas is one of the guys reponsible for working on our family's grain handling equipment and bins. When I first moved to the farm, I went to a party at my cousins' house in Raymond. I had a few with one of their best friends. ONe week later he was dead, shot by his own pistol. Somehow it came down as a suicide but my cousins swore he had been murdered. Somehow after he had supposedly shot himself in the head, he had taken his own gun apart. I don't know how they ever explained that. There had been several individuals in the house a t the time he had supposedly shot himself. My next door neighbor, Kermit, the father of my best friend wound up killing himself with a 12 gauge shotgun in a field my family owns because he had emphesema and didn't want to die in the hospital prefering instead of going out proud with his boots on. Thirty years before this, Kermit had cut down a man who had hung himself in our farm operations main grain facility. This man and his brother had been farming our family's ground. That's the kinds of things that have been going on in the sleepy agricultural community I farmed in for 23 years. Lesson to be learned from all of this is--life is terminal.

Clubman......I take it you would prefer a series of short time experiences to long time and that this is your modus operandi.

No problem, Emil. First time to Pattaya I was with a tour that stayed at Royal Twins Palace and the Grand President in Bangkok. Second trip to Thailand went it alone but wound up for a weekend in Phuket with a couple Thai girls and my pal. Most of these places were around 50 bucks a night but from its web site it looks like Royal Twins Palace is currently around 1300 baht. Never really looked for anything else between trips one and two when my buddy put in for us online with Sky-Top---after we arrived in Pattaya that is although I did find a few places online. Oh well, all places I mentioned had bathrooms downstairs that come in handy during untrendy toilet bowl rushes.

Sabaidii2---Thanks. Not covered well enough. Scatologically speaking the richness of this subject cannot be underestimated nor its great depth. We need a lot more opinions. For instance, what's the name of that go go bar upstairs off of Walking Street---"Heaven's Door"..well something like that. Place looks like white pillows inside. I never did see a bathroom in that place and couldn't help thinking how helpless I felt considering I"d eaten Thai food for breakfast, then again for dinner and then my date had just stuffed some Thai food off the street into my mouth. Sometimes the fuse leading to the bomb is far too short for comfort. i

Emil.....I could price shop and possibly get an even better deal than Sky-Top. I do get a fridge, a microwave, dishes, etc for my money and the room I get at 650 baht is more like a small apartment as I have a bedroom with a curtained off door with a separate living room. My friend who often stays at Sky-Top while I'm there is a real computer guru. We worked with the owner and managed to put a wireless link in his computer network in the Internet cafe downstairs, then worked out a financial arrangement where we both paid him a weekly flat fee. With this in place we were able to get online with our laptops right from our rooms. So imagine me sitting in my living room at Skytop with my laptop on a little table before me. I have a microphone headset plugged in/or out when I use the laptop's built in microphone and speakers. And I've got Skype downloaded on this laptop so that I can call other computers in the U.S. or telephones for just 2 cents a minute. And there I am chatting away with my U.S. friends and then I put this very cute Thai girl I've been seeing on with my pals. All pretty slick and the THai girl enjoyed laughing it up with my U.S. friends as she used the laptop as a telephone. Speaking of the owner, I have to say I really like Pete Long, the Australian who owns Skytop. Pete lent me one of his suitcases which I filled up with my stuff the night before I left Pattaya. After all, I was coming back in just three months so we both figured, "Why should I haul this stuff back to the U.S. only to haul it back to Pattaya, when I'll be living there full time in just three months." I cannot count the times that Pete and I have gone beer bar or go go bar hopping together. I've also taken professional quality pictures of several of my Thai girlfriends. I get 30 by 20 inch prints done by Kodak in the U.S. and have sent a couple to Pete at Skytop which he has then been good enough to hand deliver to the Thai girls I've taken them of. He's done this and many other personal favors for me. Not only is Pete a great guy, and a source for excellent advice, but he's also hilarious to be around.although some of my Thai girlfriends might not always agree with this last assessment due to the often merciless ribbing he often doles out to them. And through Pete I've also become good friends with Greg who owns Greg's kitchen a few doors down from Sky-Top. Greg's Kitchen along with his other restaurant Sunset Cafe have become two of my favorite eating spots in Pattaya whether for dinner or breakfast. I'm the guy by the way who shot the pictures for Greg that he is using for his outdoor menu. Anyway, I mentioned that I just bought a condo at Wongamat Residence. Before I put down my initial deposit, both Pete and Greg accompanied by his Thai wife, Som, were good enough to go with me to inspect the condo development and to meet the developers, two Germans, Helmut and Achim. This was on two separate days. Both men were very impressed by the condo development and the two German men and gave me big thumbs up---"Buy it. We Would". The advice I get from both men on women and a whole variety of other subjects I cannot even begin to put a price on. Not to mention Som's advice as well. So Emil---for me at least, this is no longer a money issue. I feel Sky-Top gives good value for the money. I haven't even seen the 450 baht rooms and that would probably work out to around 12,000 baht per month. The fact that I've become good friends with several very high quality people while staying there (one of my good friends I met in Sky-Top's Internet Cafe). is priceless.

One of our favorite subjects here is sex and love, which is as things should be, but what about something that is equally or even more important, which I have never seen discussed at length here, and that is the subject of toilets and what to do when the urge to defecate arises? I think this is a subject that needs to be discussed so that all of us can benefit from the accumulated acumen of this entire group. Once again I’ll be staying at the Sky- Top Guest House–this time from August through October. This is where I have already spent three months, the first from mid October through mid My November, and the last two months from March 6 through June 6th. Here my bathroom will be very small. The tiled floor very gently slopes or at least it does theoretically and there is a drain. There is a small box on the wall which is an on demand hot water heater. The shower head is removable and made of plastic which is attached to a flexible hose or tube. So to take a shower one turns on the tap and lets the water trickle all over one's bod. If I want to direct the water to my feet or whatever I can take the head and hose off the wall and stick it all right up to my foot. The water goes everywhere while collecting onto the floor in a small pool. Most of the excess goes down the drain but the floor is still wet so it will take two or three hours to dry off. Well...what do you expect for a 650 baht room? And that's the largest rooms at 16 bucks a night. The smaller ones are just 450 baht and my monthly rate will be about $416.00 with maid service, etc. I really love it at Sky-Top but we are talking here about shitty experiences, not good ones, so I need to get back to the subject of toilets. So the bad news continues. All the rooms at Sky-Top are like this, and I've seen some high dollar condo units in Jomtien with bathrooms like this. I used to think that the first Thai lady who ever experiences my room will think I'm a cheap low life, but no.....this is just typical for this country. One often has to spend around 50 bucks a night for a hotel room to get Western style showers and tubs. But for fifty bucks one can get a really nice hotel room in Bangkok downtown or something very similar here as well as at upscale resorts such as Phuket. Of course at Phuket one gets extras with the room such as the big wave experience that Hawaiians can only dream about as they venture out on their puny little surfboards. Well...the good news is that the condo I've bought over at Wongamat Residence has two bathrooms, neither of which has showers puddling onto the floor. It's all European stuff which is to be expected since the company I'm dealing with is German, not Thai. But the place won’t be completed until November. There is one particular Pattaya bathroom I want all my male friends to experience sooner or later. (I'm going to get them all next time they visit). There is a wonderful restaurant right on Beach Road with outdoor seating only--now this is the kind of ambience I like. I'm still not tired of it yet some of my friends only want Western style el crappo high priced restaurants that are air-conditioned inside with names such as El Pukko. Anyway, behind this restaurant there is a flight of steps I once wandered up only to find a Thai band playing with around four or five singers alternating that included two gals and with the rest being male. I was the only white person in the place and loved it. They even had these two young Thai guys who were excellent singers jumping all over this large stage as they sung with these modish style haircuts. I called them then and will continue to call them the Thai Beatles. And then comes the big bathroom experience. First I have to go down a flight of stairs and then I enter the bathroom. As I take a leak in the urinal one of the two male attendants inside asks me if I want a massage from him as I'm pissing. Then there's the Thai boxing ring area. Actually, there are three of them. But this one's my favorite. The main drag is Walking Street because there must be 30 go go bars and diskos on this street alone and it's only a few blocks long plus all the beer bars, restaurants, etc. Beach Road which is a one way heading South becomes Walking Street. This portion of Beach Road does not allow any cars or motorbikes on it after 7 p.m.--hence the name Walking Street. So here you are traveling in the pickup bed of the baht bus you just hailed down Beach Road with the ocean on your right. The baht bus and all other traffic comes to a large obstacle in the middle of the road. There the baht bus you are riding in must turn to the left at a 90 degree angle where it proceeds a single block to 2nd road, another one way street going the opposite direction to the north. All the baht buses make a circle and now go back North along 2nd road. Well, this is where you get off to go on foot up Walking Street with all the other white people who like you want to gawk at everyone else walking around. And just as you go past the obstacle stopping traffic from going up the street any further there is a large complex of bars to your immediate right. Inside there are more than a dozen very small bars with anywhere from four to eight girls working as bartenders in each one. This whole complex is completely open to the street being not much more than a large roof under which lots of people congregate as they watch the events unfolding in the ring from whatever watering hole has managed to latch onto them. Well....you walk into this complex and as you proceed through this open air mall of small bars there are lots of women calling out to you..."Come my bar." But you can see the ring from Beach Road--Walking Street. And in that ring is a continuous exhibition of Thai kick boxers beating the crap out of each other. Once in awhile they even have little boys whaling away at each other. There is no cover charge so the boxers, particularly whoever has just won his match, goes through the crowd to ask tips out of hapless white suckers like you who I will now refer to as Falang which is Thai for European, American, Aussie two legged creatures. But the real fun starts when you have to take a crap. In the back of this complex there are a couple of stalls. One has the hole in the floor you can shit into. There is a woman in front of these two stalls you purchase your toilet paper from for just 5 baht (around 10 cents) and that's just what you get, a supply amounting to the size of a large leaf. And they even have classes in Pattaya teaching how to get this leaf size supply of toilet paper to cover the whole butt. Well first time I was watching Thai boxing and I had to take a shit, I never saw the toilet paper girl working there. It was only when I was sitting solidly on the crapper that I noticed the bucket lying on the floor next to me with the hose next to it coming out of the wall. I suppose this is for the real professional crappers most likely the Thais who probably wipe with their hands which they then wash off with the hose or from the bucket. I am not sure what technique they use although apparently it does work. If you are like me and eating Thai food twice a day or more while refraining from eating Western style food that will plug you up, and here I mean Thai food that is hot, you will be shitting like a mongoose. So it is important to always be aware of the condition of your bowels whenever you go out. So if I go out to Walking Street I know I have a friendly zone in the Thai boxing area of bars whenever I feel the explosion to be imminent. I know for example that the toilet paper girl will be there and that the toilet facilities are just despicable enough so that there will not be too many using them plus I know that while I am taking my crap no one will suddenly come up behind me and start massaging my shoulders. Up the street about two or three blocks is 'Living Dolls Showcase" and there I know they have a decent toilet, plus I know exactly where it is and how many steps it is from my table just in case I'm really in a hurry. But two thirds of the way back to the Sky Top Guest House where I'm staying are Sois 7 and 8 where there are tons of bars and restaurants. One of my favorite girls works at Sexy A Go Go, so I"ve had the opportunity to use the toilet there fairly often. You go into the toilet and immediately notice that there is simply a row of four or five stalls and before you get to these there are a couple of wash basins for washing one's hands. The best thing about this place is the great social opportunities to meet lots of petty women working there right after taking your crap while you are washing your hands together. Now I don't know if you guys are like me, but i get a little embarrassed taking a crap with people of the opposite sex around and the reason is one never knows what kinds of sounds one is likely to be making. Such sounds can be embarrassing and certainly are not conducive to the mating ritual--for me anyway although they might be for some. The good thing about Sexy A Go Go is the music inside this club is so loud that Trendy Toilet sounds cannot possibly be overheard above the loud speakers in the club. Well, by now I've gotten very used to the main entertainment areas of Pattaya now. After all, in the past year I've spent 3.5 months here. So even now while I type I have a map indelibly etched into my mind of this main drag of say a quarter mile wide by 2 miles long and where my favorite shitter friendly toilets are in case I suddenly get the irretrievable urge. But that's for the most part to the South of Sky-Top. To the north is another matter. About 1/2 mile North along Second Road is the Big C Shopping Center. It has a very large and capable bathroom. Across the street there are six outdoor bars just above sidewalk level and just around the corner from them are two small bathrooms, one for ladies, the other for men. But the condo I just bought is around a mile and a half north of all this. And it is this mile and a half that I will call the unknown or danger zone. In fact, the first time I wanted to look over the condos before I actually bought one of them, I decided to take a long walk there instead of doing something smart like taking a taxi. After reaching the Big C Shopping Center I must have walked about two thirds of the way there when the defecatory urge started to hit me. I had passed lots of beer bars that were just starting to open that I had never been to and restaurants I had never experienced. It was then that I thought of the worse sort of things that could happen to me while experiencing an unknown toilet. For instance, just a hundred yards from the six bars I mentioned across from Big C there is a number of open air beer bars where there are a large percentage of lady boys working. These are guys dressed like girls, and some of them are so good at imitating women that you really can't tell the difference. Some go so far as to have their penises removed, have breast implants and take hormone shots. But most of them keep their penises and actually have regular girlfriends when they are not working. There just happens to be lots of Germans and other Europeans, not to mention a few Americans, Aussies, New Zealanders and even Japanese who prefer this sort of thing. So I can just see myself while squatting comfortably on an unknown toilet only to have a lady boy come in to say: "Want me to massage your penis while you shit? It really helps with constipation." So I turned back and never saw the condos that day, making it barely in time to the Big C complex and the zone friendly toilets there to unleash the contents of my last meal. So as time goes on I will have to explore the toilet facilities of this northern unknown zone. But to those reading this, there really is no escape. It really is not the water here because I've been drinking only bottled stuff. And I have noticed that most of my Thai lady friends are constantly rushing off to the toilet which leads me to conclude that it's all in the food. So I decided to experiment upon myself upon my return to the U.S. I started making Thai food for myself twice a day. I bought some fish sauce at an Asian food store over in St. Louis off of South Grand and a supply of hot peppers, the kind they use in Thailand, long skinny peppers that are red, green, and orange all mixed together. So guess what I found out? I found out that I could keep my bowels acting up here in the U.S. exactly the same way they do in Thailand. So I am thinking of making some money once I move into my new condo in Pattaya. I will produce and sell my own map of Pattaya and on this map I will list a sizeable number of establishments that have restrooms that I will call "friendly free fire zones". This is something every real tourist is going to want. As for those falang tourists who frequent the types of restaurants they find back in their home countries, I only have this to say, and that's "Don't bother. May your shit still accumulate in hard large balls." Any thoughts or experiences anyone wants to share on this most important subject?

Got them. 585 baht for a box of 30 to get me over the hump until I get back to the U.S. Girl at the guesthouse desk suggested "Beautiful Optical" on Central Road just a couple blocks from 2nd Road. There were a number of other places in this area. So I took a simple eye exam and got fitted out.

Somehow I just managed to lose a contact lense (daily wear) here in Pattaya. I could contact my eye doctor back in the U.S. to have another one sent to me but this has two disadvantages, the first being a delay caused by the time required for the lense to be shipped here. Since I am planning on moving to Pattaya permanently, hopefully starting around August 1, I might as well start with an eye doctor here in Pattaya. In the U.S. my eye doctor is relatively expensive. But when I tried getting cheaper lenses elsewhere I found that I could not see as well through the cheaper lenses and that they were much more difficult to handle while cleaning them which meant I spent more than twice as long either taking them out of putting them in. I later found out that my eye doctor was using three different basic types of soft lenses for his patients and that the ones I was getting were slightly thicker than the cheaper lenses I had tried elsewhere. On a recent walk down Pattaya Central Road I noticed several contact lenses outlets. There is also another place in the opposite direction at Big C. Are there any places or eye doctors any of you can recommend as viable substitutes for my U.S. source for contact lenses?

I think the bathrooms here at Skytop is a non issue. I for one have always considered losing weight on the thrown as a private moment to be shared with as few others as possible. During my marriage days my wife would often sit in the barthroom on the thrown with the door wide open whereas I'd close the door and lock it. Somehow breathing in the smells produced by one's sexual partner didn't exactly turn me on so I've always been a private person who did not enjoy making loud farting noises and the like while sitting on the toilet. I'd often keep a can of glade handy to freshen up the bathroom or I'd keep a book of matches handy. Lighting a match often helped to eliminate unwanted odors. But for me the situation here at Skytop is about the same as it is practically anywhere else. Hotel bathrooms are not heavily insulated sound proof rooms so I don't think it makes very much difference where one goes. So far I am not keeping a book of matches in the bathroom here at Skytop and I've not bought a can of glade yet. So I suppose I am no longer much worried about toilet etiquette one way or the other. Right now I am much more concerned about my getting around outdoors without getting soaking wet during this Water festival known as Sondkran (forgive any mispellings here, the point is whether to get wet or not to get wet)

Yes. Your timing couldn't have been better. I am presently (as I type) on Skype talking with Baron in the U.S. and as I am listening to him, thinking of the Doctor and whether I want the full oil massage or a foot massage from her this afternoon. Woke up stiff in the back, thinking of the chiropracter in the U.S. I have not seen for over a month. Good night's sleep for a change so i will want to hit lots of bars tonight and barfining someone new. But the fully nude oil massage from her might take the edge off and I want that edge.

The bathrooms at Skytop vary. The last time I was here--October 22nd-November 22nd, I bounced back and forth from one, with the small bathroom to a room with a much larger bathroom. I suppose my lady visitors are not that embarrassed since they are leaving behind their toothbrushes, earings and bracelets. There is one great advantage to the small bathrooms however. When you are in the shower with a lady you have just barfined you can get all kinds of leverage from the walls for various positions for both of you.

Skytop is a great bargain, both for its Internet cafe with broadband and for its rooms. I am using Skype, which is an excellent free program and my laptop computer to communicate with friends and key business contacts back in the U.S. Quality is superb when calling other computers. I also use it to call regular telephones in the U.S. including my credit card company and my bank. Cost runs around 2 cents a minute making calls to telephones in the U.S. and is free when calling other computers Using the Internet cafe here at Skytop runs just 1 baht per minute. For my needs it's hard to beat this place. It is a small guesthouse with just seven rooms. Rooms run 450 to 650 baht per night depending on the size. I am here for two months and am paying 16500 baht a month for a room that would normally run 650 baht a night. This is virtually a small apartment with its own bedroom curtained off from the living room. There's a tv, a refrigerator, microwave, a cabinet of dishes, silverware, pots and pans, etc. The owner is Pete Long, an Aussie, and a great guy who is a great source on getting along in Pattaya. Pete has an excellent staff of young Thai ladies to run the guest house and internet cafe for him and a separate crew to give massages. Skytop is difficult to locate at first because of its small size so you have to look for it It's less than two blocks South of Soi 6 on 2nd Road just next to the Tourist Police Station. Its location is excellent as it is only a ten minute walk from Soi 7 and 8, five minutes to Soi 6, just a few blocks from Big C and even closer to Topps on Central Road. You can visit its web site at http://www.skytoppattaya.com/

Some good points above about where we Americans hang out. Like Big Daddy I go down to the Blues Factory but not as often. Since I am staying at the Skytop Gueshouse for two months and stayed here for one month last October-November, I often get to Greg's cafe a few doors down or, the Sunshine Cafe, the restaurant Greg's wife runs, a half a block South of Skytop on Second Road. This can be for breakfast, lunch or dinner. If it's dinner i will often have a couple beers with Greg before heading out for whatever I want to do that evening. Both of Greg's establishments are excellent offering a number of Farang dishes, great breakfast's in the morning, and some very tasty Thai dishes. There is comfortable seating both outside and inside. Outside I'm almost believing I'm in a Parisien sidewalk cafe as I watch the world roll in front of me in the form of Second Road's traffic, except the style of the place seems more German. Much of the clientelle is British so I wind up talking more with Englismen than my fellow Americans. And those who do hang out here and get to know Greg will find he's an excellent mentor and source for good advice on a variety of subjects. The two restaurants are very similar in most respects. THis central area in North Pattaya is an excellent base of operations for me since Skytop is just a few blocks walk from Soi 7 and 8. Moreover Skytop has an excellent Internet cafe at just 1 baht per minute and its rooms are very reasonable running from around $12 to $18.00 a night. The owner stocks wine, liquor, beer and soft drinks so one can have a few in the Internet cafe or at the small bar just outside where Pete's massage girls hang out. So I will sometimes have a beer or two just outside the small guesthouse Pete operates. There is plenty of action in the vicinity of Soi 2 which is more or less across from Big C. and it's all available just a ten minute walk to the North from Skytop. Of course there's all the heavy action in the many bars on Soi Six just one and a half blocks away but I've tended to hang out in other areas. Near Soi two there's a few bars up a few steps all nestled together which is a nice area to hang out in. Over on Soi 8 I like a small beer bar called Foxy Lady but practically any of the bars here will do. Relatively undiscovered is a new beer bar complex just North of Soi 7. To get there from the North one goes to Central Road at Second Road just across the street from Topps. Now walk to the South side of Central Road and head towards Beach Road. You will pass some restaurants and a few beer bars. There girls will start calling out to you. Take the first left into a narrow street that heads towards Soi 7. Within half a block you will find a spacious area comprising around ten beer bars to your left. At the back of the open room is a large mirror. I prefer the second bar away from this mirror on the South t side and sometimes the one next to it. Mamasan at this bar is an attractive and extremely gracious Thai woman who is married to an Englishman named Paul. Both are a prone to ringing the bell at their own bar which means free drinks for everyone and if Mamasan or Paul takes a liking to you and you are a steady customer of her bar they will often offer you a drink. Like Big Daddy I also hang out at Living Dolls Showcase. There's a spunky little waitress here who gives me good back massages so I will often buy her a drink or give her a nice tip no matter what woman I've brought in with me. Pete, owner of Skytop, is Australian whereas Greg, who owns the two restaurants I just mentioned is an Englishman. Pete's a lot of fun to go out on the town with because of his mischievous sense of humor that seems to focus on what kinds of humorous situations he can help get his friends into. Like Pete, Greg, is an excellent source of good advice, but he's been here longer (20 years now) and has a Thai wife. I'm American and also good friends of Big Daddy's who I hang out a lot with in the U.S. and while he's here in Pattaya. Which is pretty much one of the points raised above. Here I am friends with several Americans who visit Pattaya regularly, an Australian and an Englishman, thus pointing out that many of us Americans don't hang out with each other because we want to hang out with our fellow Americans. We want to hang out with good people wherever they are from but tend to gravitate to those who speak good Engiish for reasons that are very obvious.

Laffnliv---------YOu are living right where I will be once again in 24 days. Will be staying at Skytop for a long while so I can scout the area for a more permanent spot late in the summer. I think your location is first rate. That's the reason I'm heading back to the same spot after staying there for a month in October and November. Apparently you are close to the beach and not far from the center of action in Central Pattaya with plenty of your own around Soi 2. Big C is a spot I sent to pretty often if for a paperback, a magazine, CD's, getting mobil telephone service, etc. Apparently you love it there but at the same time I note some apprehension on your part that it can all be yanked from beneath you pretty fast for a variety of reasons including your being a farang but that you have wisely not overextended yourself so you cannot get hurt financially. No doubt I walked past your place many times as I often walked from 2nd Road to the Sois North of Soi 6 down to Beach Road, then down to Central Pattaya and back. Sometimes I was looking for spots to consider for a long stay and looked over a couple but I must have missed your place. I am toying with looking over Jomtien but I have already found a comfort zone in your area. EVer go to Greg's restaurant on 2nd Road for breakfast or dinner? I would often sit there or in his wife's place, The Sunset Cafe and envision how this area is going to look in 5 to 10 years. I expect it will be very much one of the best places to be and priced accordingly. Like to know more about your building.

Kit...What did you find? And you can hear the waves from bed? Anyone know anything about the sailing around Jomtien Beach? When I was in Pattaya several months ago I don't remember seeing any sailboats at all and I was wondering what the reason is for this.

Great points about the medical care. I was paying $248 a month for a crappy U.S. policy with a $5000 deductible. It suddenly went up--again.....to $300 a month. I found out by looking at my bank statement. Last year I incurred including premiums $4500 medical expenses. While flying out of Bangkok back to the U.S. I ran into a man 68 years old from Phoenix who suffered complications from his prostate problems while in Thailand. He spent four days in the hospital and raved about the care he got which was much lower priced than in the U.S. A good friend of mine got sick with the flu in Pattaya and walked to the hospital. He went through a whole series of tests for under $48.00. Going to the emergency room in a U.S. hospital would have cost him $1000 One of the main problems with the U.S. Health Care System is the lawyers have utterly ruined it as they have practically everything else here. I have recently read that a doctor in the state of Illinois where I am from must pay between $60,000 and $150,000 a year in malpractice insurance. Because of such huge costs many hospitals have gone out of business and there is getting to be fewer qualified men and women being attracted to the medical profession. For this reason alone I would want to move to Pattaya. Not only will I be saving huge amounts of money over the next few years, I would also be depriving undeserving lawyers from making a big profit from indirectly extorting money from me. And I would be withdrawing my support from all these people suing health care providers for far more money than their lives are worth in terms of what they can legitimately make. Please tell me more about the Jomtien area. I did head down there to look into a condo. The complex was very appealing. I do want to mention that I'm into bicycling, running, walking and other forms of exercise. I am also wondering how the sailing is in the Jomtien area. I remember being in Ambergis Key in Belize and taking lessons in a small hobie cat sailboat one man could handle. I loved it. Then my nephew caught the bug. These were small double hulled vessels perhaps only 13 feet long. but large enough for possibly three people.

That is an interesting thought. First, that a Thai girl now living in Pattaya would want to move far away, and now you mention that you would yourself provided you met the right TG. This reminds me of the dissimilar thoughts of two men I became well acquainted with who live in Pattaya. One is a restaurant owner. He is British with a Thai wife. If it were not for the restaurant he would prefer moving out to quieter places such as out in the islands. (I am not sure what islands he was refering to except they were not terrifly far from Pattaya). The second man is Australian. He enjoys the night life of Pattaya with the many opportunities with the ladies. The islands would not suit him--at least not yet. He would become bored. As for myself, I believe I would find learning the Thai language to be very difficult. I can see the points made that if one were to meet a great gal worth staying with and provided she felt the same way that there are other spots well worth living in besides Pattaya. One could for instance make Thailand a jumping off point for vacationing to other interesting places such as Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and so on. Airfare for one thing would be a great deal cheaper than from the U.S. And of course if one bought a condo in Pattaya it might be hard to unload it quickly without financial loss if one should change his mind about what in fact constituted Paradise.

In 29 days I will be once again visiting Pattaya, this time for two months, but after that there is better than a 50-50 chance I will be making yet another trip, this time permanently around August. In general apartments provide the maximum flexibility at the lowest risk. This is what I have now in the U.S. A great place with around 1100 square feet and I can move whenever I like. Meanwhile there are no headaches brought on by the stove, furnace, hot water heater, etc going out. Management takes care of it and I have no unexpected expenses. However, I am concerned about the American dollar going down which would increase my cost whether I rent in Pattya or buy later. Inflation is also a concern. Also, isn't it true that the population of Pattaya has about doubled in the past six or seven years? If it doubles again, I would think there is a very good chance that both rents and condo purchase prices will skyrocker, particularly along the beach. But I have also been advised that buying a condo in Thailand is an extremely risky proposition. It can be risky in the U.S. but in Thailand the foreigner is not accorded equal rights under Thai law as Thai citizens. As just one example of this, my understanding is that if a farang's car is rear ended by a vehicle driven by a Thai, even though the Thai is clearly at fault, it is the farang who will end up paying. Those offering the advice urge renting and never buying in Thailand while keeping all of one's investments in one's home country or at least the Western World and never put at risk in Thailand whether for a home or business. Nevertheless, my own personal feelings are that the cost of housing will continue to climb in Pattaya which is a very sound argument for buying over renting. What are everyone's ideas on the subject, and if you feel it is best to rent, what would you suggest for relatively long term--for at least a year in nice surroundings?

Skytrooper...I am quite aware that we were fighting both North Vietnamese regulars and the V.C. or Viet Cong. I used the term Viet Minh loosely as I am well aware that it is the Viet Minh who fought the French in the 1950's. At that time there wasn't a partitioned Vietnam so the Vietminh could be looked upon as a military force representing the entire country who were fighting the French. So rather than state we Americans were fighting against both the V.C. and the North Vietnamese I used the term loosely meaning we were in fact fighting against the nationalists or descendents of the Vietminh. We are essentially talking about a name change here. Both Ho Chi Minh and General Giap led the Vietminh and the Viet Cong. As for my History, among other things I did take a course specifically on the Vietnam War. At the time I was married and my wife and I and only one or two others received A's. Mine was the highest grade in the class....but that is irrelevent to this thread. I did not want to mention this and until now I did not want to mention the fact I have a Masters Degree because that once again is irrelevant to what I hoped would become a rational exchange of ideas but when I am rudely attacked by someone who purports to be my teacher, I will have out such credentials. And once again you have evaded the issue. Totally disregarded it in fact in order to puff out your chest while attempting to chastise me for "not knowing my History" and others here for being Brits or Aussies. As far as the meaning of words, I can make them mean whatever I like. Vietminh or insurgents or whatever I choose to call the Vietnamese opposing American forces. And if I want to refer to you as fighting in the trenches again I use the term loosely. You see, Skytrooper, last year I wrote for five magazines, and trust me, I got away with using words any way I liked and am still getting away with it because the magazines and readers still want my stuff. By the way, do you know the meaning of the word, Pissant? Anyway, I'm done with this pissing contest.

Good...Now we are getting somewhere here, Skytrooper. You have raised some specific examples here of places in the world where genocide took place and you said that had those peoples been armed these nations would not have had to suffer genocide. Would you please take the next step of explaining how you felt each situation would have developed had those peoples been armed thus averting genocide. I do believe you might make some very compelling cases here. And leave out the beer drinking please. Although I do my share, bringing this up while you make a case would suredly get your otherwise sound arguments thrown out of court for being completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. Now......as to Vietnam---don't get so prickly about it. Although our combat units on the line did not get their butts kicked out "We" did as a nation and it is that pronoun I used, not you nor did I refer to our combat troops. There was dissension on the home front. It is the people at home who let you guys down and who led to your being pulled out. As I remember correctly Americans did not lose a single major battle in Vietnam and I don't remember their losing a small one either. However our politicians who brought us into this war took us into battle against the wrong side. We should have fought with Ho Chi Minh, not against him. This little error was similar to the one where a surgeon takes off the wrong leg by mistake. Number two, this war was impossible to win short of killing just about everyone in the entire country because of the deep nationalistic commitment of the other side to unify the country so it would no longer be victimized by imperalistic nations such as the French and later the Japanese. The Viet Minh had the hearts and souls of the people. We didn't. And certainly the very corrupt South Vietnamese regime didn't have the hearts and souls of the people behind it. Furthermore, the more we bombed the more politically unaligned people we killed. Well.....we certainly got them aligned after that didn't we, lined right with the other side and against us. So the more fire power we applied the more enemy soldiers we created. This war was a tragedy. Those in our government who should have done their homework believed the North Vietnamese were the puppets of the Communist Chinese. Clearly this was not the case. Our belief then was in the domino theory.....that if we let the North Vietnamese have Vietnam, China would have ruled Vietnam, and with Russia controlling China the dominos would be falling all over the world with Europe soon to fall to the conquering Red hordes. No, you guys, the ones in the trenches didn't lose the war---we did as a nation because of our insufferable arrogance and stupidity.

I did not try to portray myself as an expert on either the Pol Pot regime or Cambodia. But whether I am perceived at portraying myself as an expert or not is not the issue here. What is the issue or what I would like for all of us to focus in on as the issue is "Whether or not arming a country's populace by allowing it to acquire guns, does in fact avert genocide. There have been other countries where genocide has been practiced. Much of this I will admit complete ignorance to so I am asking those who are more knowledgeable in this forum to bring these examples up. Again, we are off subject here. Whether or not the U.S. could have stopped the Cambodian genocide in its tracks is again not the issue. What I am driving at are purely internal factors---arming the Cambodian citizenry is internal whereas the role of the U.S. or lack of a role is external and completely irrelevant to the fundamental question of does allowing a nation's citizenry to have firearms avert genocide or not? An interesting case can be made of Nazi Germany. Certainly widespread violence in Germany's streets in the 1920's particularly between Communists and elements of the Freikorps is one of the main factors leading to Hitler's being able to take power and the consolidation of power by the Nazi party. Certainly the role of firearms in these street battles made it easier for the Nazis to rise to power since they seemed to offer a stop to the violence. But how about the Jews, who were disarmed? Six million of them were murdered. Would Hitler and his henchmen have dared to start closing down Jewish shops to start with, disallowed marriages between "Aryans" and Jews, etc as the first stages of his anti semitic program if these people had the power of the gun to start with? I would really like to get to the heart of this issue rather than to make this whole thread a showcase for petty comments. As to the possible pursuit of oil by the U.S. as a reason for going to war is completely irrelevant to the Pol Pot question I had raised in the first place. We had just gotten our butts kicked out of Vietnam and could hardly be expected to go back into this region for humanitarian reasons.

No problem Johnny K. Okay guys, let's take this one step further. Skytropper contends that genocide has befallen in those regions of the world in which the population was disarmed. Let's take this one by one. I raise my first example--Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime. Nobody knows exactly how many Cambodians were executed and/or tortured in the later half of the 1970's. Many estimates put it at 2 million however. Most of the executioners were the very young who had fallen victim to the propaganda of the Khmer Rouge. Had the local population been armed rather than just those Pol Pot felt should have weaons would this genocide been averted? I am merely bringing up this example because my friends and I spent several days in Cambodia 8 months ago and we did see a number of the old torture chambers as well as the Killing Fields.

Johnny K....I was wondering if you have ever been advised that using capital letters on the web was a sign of rudeness equivalent to shouting at someone in a one on one situation? jackcorbett, Where you live, or how keen a collector you are, or your childhood and history books and hobbies while growing up in America have ZERO to do with Thai law or gun regulations. It's another country. You did capitalize the word zero, didn't you? Since I was very obviously responding to Babepecker's sincere question of why I wished to bring a handful of guns into Thailand, and since you are an obviously intelligent guy I have to assume that you understood just like everyone else here that I was merely stating why I would like to bring them there. I certainly would never have brought the subject up in this forum if I was going to bring them into the country without being 100 percent sure I had the permission of the authorities to do so because that would be tipping my hand--something no criminal in his right mind would do. So your having to tell me that my growing up in America has ZERO to do with Thai law troubles me since I 1. Don't go around breaking U.S. laws that I disagree with because I don't want to suffer the consequences, and I certainly would not knowingly take a chance of breaking laws in Thailand for fear of having my Visa being revoked, being thrown out of the country, and of having my guns confiscated. So I'm worried about you, old boy because you might be shouting at people close to you (a son, daughter, wife, girlfriend, etc) or someone you need on your side in the business world. Such people aren't going to take kindly to your treating them in such manner and make it tough on you. I won't. They will.