jackcorbett

Will look forward to show you around when you get here. Will be in the U.S. from July 29-August 7th. Other than that I should be here in August for sure.

Checked out the sales office and used my digital camera to get a couple of pictures from the brochure I got. The first picture.... has a list of prices for phase 4. My second image, might possibly indicate what this project is going to look like as you view it from the beach. The first pool is in place and operational already. Behind it is the new building they are constructing whereas the building in the background is the one undergoing renovation from hotel to condos. It's pricey to be sure. However, as shown in the picture, it's smack right on the beach. I'm 200 meters from this beach and the guys who paid for a great view to the West of the ocean might well have someone build right in front of them. In your case this cannot possibly happen. If construction is of prime quality the place should be primo. Definitely worth a look for you. The sales girl said people will be moving in during February, possibly in March. Will that happen? I'd say it's doable. As far as being convenient in terms of transportation---well no, not really. However, the motorbike makes a huge difference and once you get used to the area you might just not want to leave it all that often. Sure there are getting to be more and more baht taxis flying through here but these are all geared up for tourist pricing. That is they are used to all the tourists such as the Koreans and Russians staying at the nearby Long Beach Hotel who are clueless as to what they really should pay. To get on the regular baht bus line where you spend 10 baht (falang price) you need to head up to Naklua Road which is about a kilometer or so East of you. Otherwise you are in for using a baht bus as a taxi at taxi prices, normally 100 baht, except the tourists pay 150 baht so you have to do a little fast talking to get them to recognize your reality. Practically every condo resident here at Wongamat Residence has a motorbike, however and if they don't they have a car. I view my motorbike as absolutely essential. The area in general is Little Germany meaning there's lots of bars that have Germans as their main clientèle. But the German restaurants here are on the whole most definitely lower priced than most restaurants in Central Pattaya. Example in point, my girlfriend and I just rode up on the bike to Naklua Road to try a new spot I had checked out on one of my many walks. 75 baht for the American breakfast and that included orange juice and coffee. Free shuttle from the condos. Well there sure as hell isn't a free shuttle now. As to the future, you would just have to see. Travel time on a bike to Big C? On a good day I can do it in five minutes, but figure on ten at the most. But when they have the new shopping complex and hotel just up the street from you if it is what we think it will be, that will be your Big C. And I can swim from Ayanya to there in just twenty minutes. Figure about 2 years for that to become a reality. And although at first Wongamat Beach might seem a bit remote I can get to a Soi 7 or 8 bar in much less time than someone staying in Jomtien. Hope this helps.

Tell you what.....I"ll go down there right now. This place is just 100 meters from my condo. Actually it's right on Wongamat Beach and I love the area although others might not. They had a gorgeous swimming pool right on the beach. Was a hotel but I think it didn't do any business. I have heard the owner of the building did not like the roof so they've been busy over there taking it down and should soon start putting on a new one. There is a second building they have started and the first building has been undergoing very extensive renovation in the conversion from hotel to condominium development. I think you will find that this area is as they claim the most prestigious in the entire Pattaya Area. Already started about one half mile away is a new hotel--shopping complex that will be similar to Big C and other places. And of course there are the Northpoint condos which will be very high dollar but it seems to me Northpoint is off to a very slow start. Not so, the hotel shopping center complex. So if all works out with the condos you are interested in I figure in about two years you will be able to really enjoy the new shopping hotel complex which I've heard will even include movie theaters. More later. Should take me just five minutes to get to their sales office.

There are lots of reasons for my moving here, many of them already cited. But the number one reason is this. Health care costs in the U.S. and really shitty service. I was paying $3600 a year for insurance and couldn't even use it until I would have paid the $5000 deductible for the year. That was two years ago and it was going up 25 % each year. So I figured, why stick around and be a sucker? Give you one for instance. Back in the U.S. I suddenly developed lower back problems. I'd be on my couch watching t.v. and I had a set of crutches close by that I had kept around since having a foot injury several years previously. I"d have to take a piss and the bathroom was about fifteen feet away and I'd ask myself, "Just how badly do I need to take that piss?" So I"d go and hang on those crutches while taking a piss and before I had finished it got excruciating. Finally I went off to an emergency clinic. Had to hire a cab because I was in too much pain to drive myself. Went into the clinic and had to wait a half hour to see the doctor. Finally I got to see her...for less than five minutes. She prescribed some medication then asked me if I wanted a different medication. I said I wanted Tylenol 3 because it had codeine in it. She looked at me like I was a drug addict, then scornfully told me she'd never prescribe that. So I then had the cabbie take me to a drug store to get my prescription filled. Well....they wouldn't fill it right away so I had the cabbie take me home. A couple hours later I drove myself in my pickup truck. It was less than 2 miles to the pharmacy. Painful as hell driving there and back but I had to do it and that was that. Well........I got a six day supply of that prescription and it cost me around $70.00. And it didn't work at all...not one bit. Between the doctor's visit and the pharmacy all of that cost me over $300.00. So I started seeing a chiropractor (they are viewed as witch doctors by the regular medical establishment in the U.S. Cost me just $600 for a year. And from the first visit on I got instant results. Now....I still have back pain but I'm in Thailand. The Thai massages and oil massages keep the back pain in check. And for just five bucks for one hour....Hey....I'm in paradise.

Owen.......If you sign on with Bupa after you are sixty you will be covered until you are seventy. However, if you sign on before you turn sixty and you continue to pay your premiums you will be covered for life. This should give you an idea of costs. I have only hospital inpatient coverage. I have 5 million with the Platinum Plan and my premium right now at 60 is 54700 baht. Up to age 65 I would be paying 64779 baht. Compare this to in the U.S. where I was paying $3600 annually with a $5000 deductible several years ago (which I'm sure is higher now). With Bupa I get a 10 percent discount if I do not use my benefits for the year. I have now had my premium discounted twice. Hey.....Look at it this way. If one has to die in a hospital I sure as hell don't want to die in a U.S. hospital. Pattaya Bangkok is the way to go. It might be high priced (for here) but they have all sorts of cute chicks running around the place. There's a cheerful atmosphere inside. Maybe I can have someone here run massage girls into my hospital room to give me Thai massages, oil massages, etc. Tell you how bad the U.S. health care system actually is. I have a letter right in front of me from Bupa. It states that if I have an accident in the U.S. I have coverage but ONLY FOR ACCIDENT. Bupa will cover me for illness in every country in the world except the U.S. What this means is BUPA considers health care to be affordable in every country in the world except the U.S.

First off, here's what happened to me in the U.S. The company that's most widely known and perhaps most respected for health insurance is Blue Cross Blue Shield. However, many companies, some of them pretty large companies offered similar policies with similar pricing and some of these heath plans were a bit cheaper. I went with one company that offered a good program, but after a couple of years it got out of the health insurance business. Then I signed on with Mutual of Omaha which is a huge insurance company and was with them for a few years. However. Mutual of Omaha decided to get out of the health insurance business while keeping its other insurance lines intact. In the U.S. insurance laws provide that when a company gets out of the medical insurance business another company must offer all of the first company's insureds a similar plan to what they had before. So with Mutual of Omaha getting out of the health insurance business I was invited to sign on with a company called John Alden. The problem was that after I was with this new company for a couple of years I found out that I could have a similar policy with Blue Cross--Blue Shield that would cost me substantially less money. But by that time because of a DWI charge against me that occurred ten years previously I could not get on with Blue Cross--Blue Shield. What all that amounted to is that Illinois residents in the U.S. who are found guilty of driving while intoxicated are required to take so many hours of counseling as part of their penalty. So the fact that I had to undergo this state mandated counseling 10 years earlier meant that I was permanently labeled as a man with an alcohol problem so whenever I'd fill out a health insurance application while seeking new coverage there would always be a question pertaining to counseling sessions for alcohol and drug related problems and you'd have to say yes to it------"I did undergo counseling." And of course if you are rejected for health insurance by any company you have to admit to it while providing the reason. So I waited two years and went online to fill out another Blue Cross application. Went like this. "Yes, I was rejected by your company two years ago and it was on account of that DWI ten years ago. However two years ago I quit drinking." Once again I was rejected and the reason went something like this..."You are rejected because you quit drinking 2 years ago." Whatever the hell that means. So okay.....here I'm in Thailand now. And I just turned sixty. Two years ago I got on with BUPA which is pretty high dollar for Thailand (but cheap compared to American insurance companies). One of the biggest reasons for going with BUPA is I felt it was the least likely out of all the companies I know of ever getting out of the health care insurance business. I viewed rightly or wrongly BUPA as being the international equivalent of Blue Cross Blue Shield. I was very concerned I'd sign on with an insurance company here in Thailand only to have it decide to terminate its health insurance lines after which it would send a letter out to all its customers saying: "Sorry but we have to leave you now. Hope you can find another company. Bye Bye." And that happens after I'm sixty or sixty-five? What to do next? Also on reading my BUPA policy, I noted that so long as I pay my premiums on time I'll be continually covered even after I turn 70.

My friend is 62 and he lives in Los Angeles. The way I went is I got my retirement visa at the Chicago Thai Consulate and after that I have renewed it with Pattaya Immigration twice now. With no problems. In fact, if one is American you go to the American Embassy in Bangkok where you get a letter attesting you have income of 60,000 baht per month or more. In the U.S. I had to get proof from my U.S. bank I had over 800,000 baht in the bank, there was a police report giving me a clean bill of health, there was the doctor's report and that was about it. Upon renewal with Pattaya Immigration I had to show my Thai bank book, a letter from my Thai bank, the same doctor's form filled out this time by a doctor here in Pattaya, a form procured from Immigration proving my residency here in Pattaya, and the letter from the American Embassy attesting to my monthly net income. In fact I could use the same letter and can continue to do so until my passport expires. My question is can my friend use the normal 30 day Visa or a 2 month visa, come to Pattaya, get his form from Immigration showing his residency, get the doctor's report, letter from bank and letter from the American Embassy attesting to his monthly income in the U.S. and get his retirement visa the first time around? For one thing....there is the matter of the police report. Or does he have to initially get his retirement visa in the U.S. from the L.A. Thai Consulate? Perhaps he procures his police report in the U.S., then comes here and sets up a Thai bank account, goes to the American Embassy for his letter proving his monthly income, gets his doctor's report here in Pattaya gets his residency paper at Immigration and his letter from his Thai bank and he's all set to go. How shall I advise him?

Not sure Emil, which girlfriend. There was Spicy. She's the girl I was with when you first met me. Since then you might have met Ying. Spicy was with me for nine months, but we had a serious problem, so I met Ying soon afterwards. Ying's been with me for 14 months now. Incidentally, Ying made Carbonara for us tonight after picking up an Italian food cookbook at Carefour and grocery shopping for all the cheeses and noodles and other ingredients today.

Sure Emil......Have a great kitchen in this place. I had my girlfriend go out to the Naklua Market to get some Spring Rolls for twenty baht. These are the kind that are not deep friend. Then tonight she cooked two Thai dishes for us. Her fried chicken is the best I've ever tasted anywhere. But we still go to restaurants as well.

He did. Greg sold the Sunset Cafe which is about one block South of Greg's cafe. But he held onto Greg's Cafe. What happened is he bought Sunset Cafe for his wife to manage while he was taking care of Greg's Cafe. But what happened is people who would have gone to Sunset Cafe would go to Greg's instead so there was a lot of extra work contending with two restaurants. Someday down the road hordes of people might be flooding this entire area but so far this has not materialized. So the two restaurants wound up competing with one another.

Denny---call me as soon as you get back here. Meat pie's on me. Beer's on you.

Denny. I will agree with you that Greg has his prices a little high. But what irks me is when people come in here and suggest that his portions are not ample. Man, when I eat there, I know I'm going to be so full that I'll have very little room left over for beer. Also....on my birthday, I chose Greg's to celebrate it with my gf and one of my best friends here. I chose it for two reasons. 1. I like Greg and 2. I find certain dishes of his to be superb. So superb in fact that every so often I've get a craving for a particular dish and then it's just a matter of time before I make a pilgrimage down to 2nd road from Little Germany up here in Naklua. Last time at Greg's I had the Hungarian Goulash. Anyone who can't get filled up by the Goulash has got to be as large as an elephant. But as good as it was when I had finished I asked myself, "Now why didn't I get one of his meat pie dishes?" Get one of those and you get an entire plate full of food. You get a choice between around 10 different kinds of potatoes for one thing, some of which is awfully good. Then when the food arrives you will find the vegetables are done to perfection and the pie itself is succulent. My mouth is watering now after finishing this post. For the Meat Pie dinners. On second thought, I just have to edit my post as I feel that Greg's Cafe has been unjustly criticized here (not by you but by some others) and consider myself to know one helluva lot about the place. For one thing, as you well know, I lived just several doors down from Greg's Cafe for 11 months while staying at Skytop. Those large outdoor menus just in front of Greg's? I shot all those pictures for Greg with my Nikon D-1 X pictures. Greg wasn't satisfied with having those pictures shot with just any camera. The Nikon D-1 X was Nikon's top of the line fully professional camera costing several times more than Nikon's second best SLR and when it comes to top of the line cameras you do get what you pay for. Here's how we did it. Greg would have several dishes specially prepared that I had not shot before and I'd rush over from Skytop. He'd usually use a dark blue table cloth put beneath the dish because he felt it contrasted nicely with his white dishes. I'd shoot two pictures of the dish and then one of his staff would take the dish away and replace it with the next one. I'd have to work fast because Greg did not want the dishes to get cold. Sometimes Greg would rush over to Skytop to tell me a customer had ordered a dish I had not shot before. It took a couple of weeks for me to shoot all of his dishes. But towards the end of this period of time, he'd be left with dishes none of his customers had ordered (while I was around) so a couple of my friends and I would be invited over to his cafe so that there would be plenty of mouths available to eat these dishes as customers had not ordered them. Throughout this two week period Greg was a total perfectionist. Yep, I have a lot to say about Greg's cafe. I know that Greg considers himself to be an Englishman, who had been a top London chef for example. But he's more like a Prussian autocrat as he's in a state of perpetual motion fretting about every little thing that he's dissatisfied with. "Too many of his waitresses are just outside my front entrance" he tells me and "there's not enough of them inside the restaurant's itself to give good service to my customers." He's an absolute perfectionist and this shows even when you look at his rest rooms. When members of his staff slip up in even the slightest way, it exasperates Greg to no end. I even redid one of Greg's advertisements for him for one of the local entertainment booklets. The whole thing that is, from its wording, taking the pictures, and the graphical arts work on the computer, and once again, working with Greg is working with a perfectionist. Nope, sorry guys. I'm just not going to buy into some of the comments about Greg's serving mediocre food, providing bad service, or offering small portions. Not every dish at any restaurant is going to be top shelf, and on any given day you might get the wrong waitress at the wrong time. But I can assure you that Greg is on the top of his game and that he seeks to provide the best and has the qualifications and work ethic to do this.

Just had the 100 baht "American breakfast" at the Piccolo on Naklua Road. This included a couple of refills on the coffee and Orange Juice. They had a "smaller breakfast for around 65 baht as I remember. Will try that next. How can someone make money selling breakfast for 65 baht? Easy. You can use the breakfast as a loss leader for one thing. Not everyone is going to choose the breakfast. In a group of two or more, someone's going to often get something other than the breakfast at a higher profit margin and also once customers start coming in for the breakfast they will often come back for other dishes at other times of the day. There is a Thai place right up the street from me that my girlfriend and I call "No Name". American breakfast is just 60 baht. The Thai dishes are half the price of most restaurants on 2nd road and I guarantee they make money here. The Thais come here often and they keep coming back. So do a lot of the Western expats because the service is good, the Thai women running the place are pleasant, they always get the check bin straight (by not overcharging you), prices are very low, and the food is excellent. Now, if you live here permanently such as I do, you had damn well better be value conscious unless you are richer than God. Most guys who stay here all the time, at least in my neck of the woods, have steady live in Thai girlfriends. The following type of analysis can be applied to any type of meal at any restaurant Many restaurants in Central Pattaya charge 160 baht for a large American or British breakfast. Say a man and his girlfriend eat out once a day. They can eat at 60 baht per person (the breakfast being merely an example) at restaurant A for 160 baht or they can eat at restaurant B for 60 baht each. If they eat at restaurant B they are saving 200 baht a day. Since they are together 30 days a month, every month, this kind of decision making will save them 6000 baht a month. At today's miserable exchange rates that's around $185.00 a month, every month. .

I think a lot of these places are highly overrated. They are for the tourists----that is for people who don't know any better or what many expats call the two week millionaires who throw their money around like there's no tomorrow. And why not? In two weeks, why should they care if they spend too much for food and for girls. In general I feel that the Naklua area has much more reasonably priced food than Central Pattaya. And part of the reason is this area is like Little Germany and I feel that in general Germans are much more frugal than most Americans and English. They expect reasonably priced beer and food and are not ashamed to admit it--even if they have a fair amount of money. Let me give you some examples....."Plamona" a German restaurant just up Soi 16 from me here at Wongamat Beach. Many hearty dishes go for 120 baht. Wienerschnitzel goes for 140 baht and this includes a large salad and two huge chunks of veal (in fact they put so much meat on my plate on night that I broke out laughing). There's Anton's at Soi 18 and Naklua Road where you get an all you can eat German food buffet for 175 baht low season and 195 baht during High season which puts Queen Victoria's buffet to shame which will set you back for 320 baht. In fact, the entire area is swarming with good German restaurants which will also typically serve up low priced Thai meals. And if you get an American or English breakfast and you spend more than 100 baht you have spent too much. The place is run by a bunch of Thais and it's right on the beach just one hundred meters South of the Long Beach Hotel but you can drink your beer there for 55 baht a bottle and get a decent club sandwich for just 80 baht----and the ambience is outstanding with the Gulf of Thailand just a few meters in front of you as you gaze out from underneath a large thatched roofed area. And there's a lot more to eat here than just club sandwiches. Just up the street from my condo is an excellent restaurant a lot of Thais go to, and a few of we Westerners who appreciate good food at outstanding prices. We call this place, "No Name Restaurant" because it really doesn't have a name. Here I can get an American breakfast for 60 baht, a Thai omelet for sixty, and most Thai dishes in this price range with some even lower. Today my girlfriend and I had total bill of just 70 baht and usually we don't go over 105 baht or so. As I've said, many of the places mentioned here are just for tourists. I feel like a real fool paying tourist prices because I know I can do one helluva lot better.

Both my girlfriend and I think the best Thai food we've had in Pattaya is at Stardice. This place is on Beach Road just North of Central Pattaya Road. The atmosphere is quite good. Service is impeccable and the food is a notch above everywhere else we've eaten at. There's one dish in particular that's a fruit salad. The apples in it are quite spicy. There is at least one other dish that employs apples in this manner.

I'm the guy who posted about the litter and ladyboys. Now you gotta get this picture. Around a month ago I went to Koh Chang with some friends and I stayed on White Sands Beach. There are no islands to break up the monotony of the straight Coastline. But the water's pretty clean. Contrast this picture to the one at Wongamat Beach with Koh Larn and other islands to add interest to your view, nearly breathtaking rock outcroppings along the shoreline and the way this shoreline twists and meanders. There's huge potential here. But here's the present reality. Just as I started this post, my girlfriend sitting next to me got me to pay attention to what was being shown on t.v. Just moments ago I was looking at the green slimy waters of Wongamat Beach less than 1 kilometer from my condo. The water shown on the news broadcast looked like a green slimy cesspool. Nearly every day I walk this beach, often walking past Buddha Hill, then walking back to my condo at Wongamat. The degree of litter is disgusting. In places there's lots of broken glass to cut yourself on if you go barefoot. Once in awhile I will encounter rivulets of water draining into the sea which my Thai girlfriend points out to me while exclaiming, "See why I won't swim off the beach here!" It's the smell of shit we are smelling. And three of her Thai girlfriends won't swim in this water either. Back to the litter, they clean up the litter a lot more often on the Central Pattaya than they do on this one. THere are areas here that resemble a garbage pit. But it gets better---I mean worse. When I get around 1.2 kilometers South of the Long Beach Hotel on my walks I encounter an area overgrown with cactus. There is a narrow path winding through all this cactus. But hanging all over the cactus, caught in all its sharp needles is all sorts of paper, plastic objects and other litter. Now once I get through the cactus there's a bunch of large boulders a hundred meters ahead of me. There's a gap between these boulders one normally walks through. But nearly every time I do these walks a scantily clad lady boy positions himself close to this gap. He has a little hovel in the bushes just a few yards away, and nearly every time I go through he calls out to me. This has been going on for many months. I will often have a buddy with me while I'm walking South but on the return trip I'm usually alone since my companion has usually terminated his walk at South Pattaya Road. Several weeks ago this ladyboy had been joined by several of his buddies. One of them called out, "Do you have any money?" Then, several days ago as I passed through the gap with him standing only a few feet away from me he said to me, "Do you want me to suck you? I suck real good." Now just imagine this picture. He's got what appears to be a thatched roof of sorts where he puts on his makeup and no doubt sleeps. So if a man takes him up on it he literally crawls through these bushes to have sex with the ladyboy in this hovel. Now do keep in mind he knows I'm not interested and that I'm obviously out there exercising. Not once have I ever encountered a single policeman on this stretch of the beach. I digress.......on the television they just showed a quick flash to this area of the beach once again, the water a green slime with dead fish washed up onto the shore. But later on during my walks I go into the Hills near Buddha Hill and including Buddha Hill. They have crews of workers cleaning up the area. The foliage is magnificent. So obviously the powers that be over this area are most concerned about this piece of beautiful scenery. But I understand the Queen has a house here, so perhaps that's the reason. Obviously, the authorities don't give a rat's ass about Wongamat Beach. Or the tourists or the expats who live here or might live here in the future. Meanwhile work has started on the Northpoint condos close to me with starting prices something like 100,000 baht per square meter. View Talay Six is nearing completion. There is a large hotel-entertainment complex going up on Soi Wongamat just South of Northpoint. Now don't get me wrong, I really like my condo here and I really like the area, but think about it. What do you really think the level of craftsmanship is going to be like underneath the brightly painted exterior of some of these new condos? How about the rendering just beneath the paint which is that thin layer of concrete like material they trowel onto the exterior walls? Take a look at all the cracks are appearing due to the hollow sections where the rendering didn't take. As for my own building, I really don't think it would have ever been completed had it not been for one German guy heading the construction project. The guy just wouldn't ever give up no matter what problems he was having with the construction company he had contracted with that was actually doing the work. The day I was supposed to move in, this large septic tank burst open. I was to be the first resident to actually move in. A small emergency tank was put in so the delay caused by the septic tank rupture was in my case only one week. What had happened is the German had warned the Thai contractor that the septic tank needed a proper foundation and that it needed to be supported--otherwise I would likely move around under the ground. But the Thais knew everything and assured him this wouldn't happen. It did, and when it did they had already poured the concrete parking lot over the septic tank. It took weeks for them to tear out all the concrete, dig around this 30 foot long septic tank, take it out, find suitable replacement tanks (they couldn't get one the same size) and install it. Of course, an American or German or other European company would have done all that work in four or five days. But this is Thailand. You will notice that the crews at View Talay Six moved pretty quickly and got a lot done real fast until only several months ago. Now look at how many workers are actually working versus the number of workers who are watching or starting out into outer space. Same thing happened with our condo building. If work was progressing at 100 work units per day, it went down to 50, then to 25, and I started to wonder when it would go to 10, then zero and the building would never be finished. About the price of the 48 square meter View Talay Six units being 3.5 million baht. My condo is 126 square meters and I paid exactly that. That's roughly three times the space for the same price and this was just two years ago. With the baht being so high right now and the rapid escalation of prices I've seen in just the past two years, and the other problems I've just mentioned, it's a crap shoot alright. It's nice to own your own place but renting seems to be by far the safer bet.

Got it-----the five year driver's licence and it took just a bit over 1 hour from my time of arrival to get it done. They didn't like the copy of the stamped in expiration date of my Visa which showed August 3, 2007. I had renewed my Visa the day before and bought a single re-entry permit so the new expiration date was August 3, 2008. So during the process of getting the driver's license I had to go downstairs and across the street to get this copied again. Otherwise the whole thing would have been completed in under one hour. However--we got up early so we were in line by 8:30 a.m. when the place opens. I do want to mention that last year getting the one year license it took a lot longer and that one of the reasons was when the license was completed and they called out my name to pick it up they called out "Jon Frederick" which is my first and middle name---not my first and last name. So I didn't go up to the counter right away. Well.....this time it was helpful having my Thai girlfriend along to help keep me on track. However, once again my name was called out as "Jon Frederick". My girlfriend did not think I should go to the counter but I did anyway after remembering the screwup the last time I had come here. So......there is at least one employee there who does not know the difference between a Westerner's first and last name.

I received my Padi Open Diver's certification in Missouri back in the U.S. Towards the end of the course we did our dives in a quarry. Got the job done. So you can get it done in Pattaya as well. However......Went diving twice in Pattaya but that was a little more than two years ago. It sucked compared to several places I've been to in Mexico and it really sucked compared to Belize. Then, a few months ago I did some snorkeling from a dive boat in Ko Phi Phi. Remember the movie, "The Beach"? That's where my girlfriend and I went snorkeling and it was gorgeous. Went with Scuba Addicts which is based in Krabi. Great outfit and this is a great area to explore underwater. Then, a little over one month ago a small group of us went to Koh Chang, with two of us guys taking our girlfriends snorkeling. I thought....."Ah...Koh Chang. Up and coming resort area but not really all that well known for its diving or snorkeling." Well....That water was this gorgeous greenish color and so clear you would have thought you found it on another planet. visibility was 50 to 60 feet underwater. Getting a little long winded now so to sum this all up I'd rather snorkel off the Phi Phi Islands or Koh Chang than go scuba diving around Pattaya.

Thanks Alan. I just got my medical certificate the day before yesterday as early next week I plan on going to Immigration to get the certificate of Residence while renewing my retirement visa. I asked my doctor for two letters, one for the Visa, the other for the driver's license. Like you, I had seen this new requirement somewhere, perhaps it was on the Expats Club web site.

On renewing the one year license for the five year, can one come in anytime close to the expiration period of the one year license, show up the day before it expires, show up the day it expires or does any of this make any difference? Also...when does the office open in the morning?

For what it is worth here's my experience here at Wongamat Residence. All 60 units have Internet access. It costs us 150 baht per month for the Internet connection and 130 baht a month for telephone. Download speed is 1024 kilobytes per second. Which is one helluva deal. However, the line is shared between several or more different condos or other businesses before our signal is even split off between the condos in this building. Well...we do get 1024 Kps--on a good day, at the right time of the day, and for perhaps five minutes at a time achieving this reliability at such speeds about as often as One is going to get snow in May in St. Louis. However, until two months ago the reliability of this connection was so poor that I could not ftp ten picture files (jpeg) in a row without my connection timing out. The speed of the connection was all over the place. Most of the time it was well below 100 Kps. If you'd watch the speeds while watching the ftp program download a file for several seconds it would be 30 Kps, and then it would hit 200, then several seconds later down to 70, then 20, then zero. This has not been the case with the new connection I got dealing directly with TTNT. I'm paying around 1200 baht per month. The company promises to start up a new line as soon as the one I'm on has 10 customers on it. I contracted for a 128 kps upload with a 256 download speed. And when I use my ftp program to upload or download picture files for the first second or two it starts at a low speed from which it constantly accelerates before leveling out at around 128 upload or 256 kps download. With the setup all of us are getting through the condo which we pay 150 baht a month for we'd oftentimes be without internet service for two or three days at a time. Now, through the direct deal with TTNT I've had three outages in over two months and never done without internet access for more than several hours at a time. After testing this connection against the old over a ten day period of time I'd say in real world terms I'm 4 times faster on average in spite of the old connection being billed as a 1024 kps download system.

Index over on Sukamvit Road has a large selection of furniture, kitchens, lamps, and even coffee pots, clothes washers, etc. Their stuff is very stylish. In fact, you could just about furnish an entire condo from this store alone down to your towels, plates, and silverware. Index has a selection of Lazy Boy recliners and couches, Lazy Boy being in my opinion number one in recliners. I have also bought one bed, a custom built desk to my specifications, a chest of drawers, and a very stylish Vietnamese style floor lamp at Decorum which is on South Pattaya Road next to Friendship. You can get any wood there you like as long as it's Teak. Their stuff is decidedly more expensive but the quality is up a notch above all the rest I've found. There is another store worth taking a look at. Can't remember the name but it's on North Pattaya Road on the North side within a block of third road. There were some very nice teak tables there, a nice assortment of office chairs, and a massive desk that I believe was made of Oak. For kitchens and bathrooms Home Pro at Carre Four most definitely needs to be looked into. But for couches, dressers, wardrobes, beds, etc. I'd go with Index or Decorum

My friend, David, assures me it's quite good. Also, I took Bupa health insurance out from its office at Sukamvit and North Pattaya Rds. The office manager is from Sri Racha. Her policy has lower limits than mine so Pattaya Bangkok which is quite close is out of her range. I asked her where she's going if she ever needs to use her Bupa policy and she told me, Sri Racha. Well, she should know since she's heading the local BUPA office.

True, Nova Mirage is virtually sold out but this only applies to the first building. There are two new buildings in the Nova Mirage project, both well along. They are finishing the roof and I can see the work going on from my balcony. As of two weeks ago, one can get a small first floor condo at one of them for 1,200,000 baht. For anyone who might be interested, just go to the restaurant in the first building at ground level and talk to Tommy. He's an Israeli from Eilat. His coffee is terrific and so are his American breakfast's for 100 baht. After I take my girlfriend to her English class I'm headed over there for the breakfast and coffee.

Such as older people who need to be absolutely sure their retirement funds are there. Hey, let's just put them in some high yielding stocks with a P/E ratio of around 30 to 1 and put some excitement into their lives.