MM

Thanks, danboy, that's the segment. As you can clearly see from the CCTV footage, these two thugs attacked a guy and beat on him while he was down. They were only stopped by the intervention of the staff and one customer interrupting the beating with a bottle over the (American's) head. The program tried to make a deal about the little guy who bottled the big "Bluto" thug, but he probably saved Eddie from some serious injury, and I'll buy him a drink whenever he wants. The other guy, reportedly from Newcastle, is the one Tony is saying was involved in the ruckus on LK Metro. You should have seen those two running out of the bar to Marine Plaza with 30 angry Thais and about a half dozen of those useless FTPVs chasing too. It was amazing that a film crew happened to be doing a documentary that night. Ah, those were the days

So, if the guy who was getting hit was the thug who sucker punched Eddie, and he's no small guy, then who was going after him?

Which bank? I had to produce company registration papers, work permit, salary stipulation, and tax payment receipts, and only got a 120K limit (combined between the two cards)...and it took a year! If you got one easy peasy, without any of that rigmarole, you were very fortunate.

You hang with the nicest people, Tony.

Okay, the only thing you got wrong then was that the English guy was not the one who was bottled. Both the American and English guy hit Eddie. The English guy sucker punched him, then Eddie fell down unconscious and the American sat on him hitting him in the head a half dozen times. It was at that point the American got bottled by a good samaritan. They were definitely out of order. Those two came hopping and skipping into the bar, started manhandling the girls who were dancing on the shooter bar, and started to climb on the shooter stage to get closer to them. Eddie told them not to get up and dance (they hadn't ordered a drink, even though Moulie kept at them to sit down and have a drink). Probably it would have been best to let Moulie handle them, since they reacted badly to another farang. The crease in the guy's head is from an altercation he had at Dollhouse where he was insulting, arguing and acting in a threatening, disrespectful manner to a service girl after he had left without paying his bin. The door guy picked up a (35 lb! ) bar stool from outside the bar and laid into his head with it. It cracked his head clean open, the door man left, and Howard the Tourist Policeman, had to come scrape him up and put him in a pickup to take to the hospital. I think he spent several weeks in there, now has epileptic seizures, and still he doesn't get it. This was a year before the incident at FLB. Dollhouse had to pay him 700K baht for his injuries. The doorman took a runner and was never seen again. What a piece of work.

She's very fit!

Since you know the guy, look at the youtube video at 11:15 and tell me if it was one of those guys. Either of the guys who hit Eddie, the American or the Englishman, were big fuckers and mercenaries working in Iraq. It's not passing my sniff test the way you tell it.

WKD?

Hold on...that's what I'm trying to find out, since (1) the guy who got bottled was an American, though his partner was English (not bottled) and (2) I didn't know this guy was a bar owner in town, and (3) I find a 4 year old pool game dispute as a very long time to wait for revenge. The more we know, the less sense it makes. I'm following this up because Tony brought FLB into this discussion, and so now I have a stake in what the facts of the matter are.

That's one main reason I prefer credit cards. My USA bank for the last decade has been sending me a DEBIT/ATM card, rather than an ATM (only) card, and for the first few times they did this, I had to go to the branch and request an ATM card rather than a DEBIT/ATM card. After about 5 years, they flat out told me they no longer have ATM (only) cards. Trying to get YOUR money back after fraudulent or incorrect charges can be a very frustrating and time-consuming activity. It's so much easier to dispute a credit card charge and have the merchant prove the charge is legitimate.

Would you describe the guy who attacked the old man as fit, big shoulders, big arms, over 6", light hair color, looking like a UFC fighter type, mid 30's? I can't find the picture (right now) of the guy who attacked Eddie at FLB and ended up with a bottle over his head. However, that guy was an American working in the middle east, not from Birmingham. In fact, he is shown on the series "Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand" in one of the episodes. Somehow this isn't making a bit of sense. I found the video preview of the episode showing the two mercenaries who attacked Eddie in FLB. They are shown around 11:15 into the video (previews for episode 2 which I can't find right now). The guy in the striped sweaty shirt (face blanked out) is the one who got bottled in Eddie's defense.

No, but it's kind of quirky. I click on the ADVANCED SEARCH and click the FORUMS radio button. Then, on the FROM DATE, type in a date, like 01/01/2002. If you then click on the calendar button, it brings up lists of years prior to 2002. It just defaults to 2005, but will change based on the value in the date field, if entered.

I still have several USA cards that I continue to keep. There are several monthly charges that are assigned to one card (the rental for this website/forum, for example), and I make regular monthly transfers to pay off the balance each month. It's as simple as going to my card's website and saying PAY NOW, where I have set up the card to take it out of my USA checking account. Recently, I've gotten lazy and just had it take the monthly payment automatically. It's no trouble to maintain the card(s) I have. I can't remember the last time I used a USA card in Thailand, but I do use it when I visit the states, and I used it in the Philippines since the hotel would take it. Getting a Thai bank credit card is difficult for many expats. It took me a year of submitting paperwork for my bank to finally send me one (I was surprised, since I had given up on them ever sending me one...and they sent me two!). I use the Thai VISA and MC for some transactions in Thailand, and the USA ones for outside Thailand. I can't see any reason personally for giving them up, but I can certainly see how you could live without them.

There is a very nice, well-stocked grocery store just next to the well-publicized Rose Apple. Get a massage and then pick up some snacks for the room. They have a good selection of imported foods. Continuing on the baht bus, just as it turns towards the beach, there is one gogo, open in the daytime, and a bar section enclosed in a kind of mall complex. You can't see many of the bars from the road. One in particular, Fantasy Bar, is reportedly good for a relaxing visit. Staying on the baht bus as it turns to run parallel to the beach, look for the small sois running inland. There are lots of restaurants and massage places in many of them. Get off at Soi 5 and check each one out. They are close together at that point, so it's not a lot of walking. Also, try to find Sam's Mexican behind the one and only gogo in town. It's a good restaurant!

Not sure about it being an old rule, but now being enforced. It must be very old then. I found a Thai immigration page back in 2004 that didn't mention it. This is from the Bangkok Immigration web site: I'm glad to know a utility bill works though, no matter where this additional requirement came from.

lovedog sort of addressed that with his visa story a couple of posts above this. The answer is no, you don't. If you have a week left, you need to extend your retirement visa, but still have to report 90 days after your last report or arrival in Thailand. They are two separate clocks running for different purposes.

You don't get any stamps when you report. You just a "Receipt of Notification" form stapled into your passport. It will be replaced when you next report or removed when you leave the country.

Yeah, I got bitten by that one this last year. My entry into the country on my prior year's visa was Oct 22, 2010. My new visa extension was something like Dec 16, 2010, so I thought (mistakenly) that I should report 90 days after the visa date, since at that time the system knew where I was anyway. On further investigation, I realized (after my 90 days from Oct 2010), that I was outside the reporting guidelines. Sweaty hands and a fear that my hard earned visa would be cancelled, I went to Immigration and found it was cleared up with a mere 2000 baht fine, even though I was about 6 weeks late. My new 90 day period started from the date of the last report too. I'm sure it makes perfect sense to a bureaucrat.

How convenient that they would post it on the door, which is when someone would first see this new requirement. It could take me hours to find my rental agreement....if I could find it at all. If they can add new requirements by posting them on the door at Immigration, I wonder when we'll see anything about this on an official site or a discussion on the internet (aside from this one)?

I've never had to provide anything other than the copy of my passport pages and the completed form TM-47 available here. I never provided any rental agreement or ownership papers and have never been asked for either.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say he actually saw this happening. This is based on his doing reviews of gogos in LK in the last week. Farfetched? Maybe!