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06/22/2003 Archived Entry: "A LITTLE BIT ABOUT LIFE IN PATTAYA THAILAND"

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT LIFE IN PATTAYA THAILAND

I received a forward from the son of a long-time school board friend of mine. He retired to Thailand 1 ½ years ago and just loves it. He lives at Pattaya 90 miles south of Bangkok on the seashore. It has 1,000,000 tourists a year, beautiful scenery, wonderful food, and cheap prices. Every kind of restaurant……..you can even feed the elephants from a sidewalk café.

He owns and manages a small resort hotel. Lots of farangs (Westerners) live there. He has a car and driver/houseman who does everything for him. There are excellent, inexpensive hospitals with American-trained doctors where you just walk in and are treated immediately. He likes the Thai people and enjoys people from different countries who he has met. It seems that almost every kind of service is available immediately……telephone installation, computer repair, etc. That sounds good to me! Here is part of his letter:

"It's Sunday night here, and raining now, but I'm blessed to have hotel guests -- many walk-ins and same day reservations. I just sent Suchart(houseman) out to deliver 2 guests from Vienna to see the nightlife at 10:30 PM. I have one guest from Nepal who is a freelance travel writer that has many articles published in the most popular magazine in Thailand for our niche market -- I'm comping him, since he is writing a story for the August issue of the magazine.

"Nobody in Thailand likes for anyone to raise their voice and threaten anyone. The only worse taboo here is to say anything bad about the royalty, not take off your sandals when entering a house, temple, or small business -- not to mention pointing your feet at a Thai person. Craig Wolfe found that out the hard way when he had a temper tantrum and kicked in the sides of my car -- the Thais dealt with him because of his yelling and screaming. Not nice in the "Land of Smiles" when you are a guest here, as I am. And the Thai's" have much less tolerance for illegal immigrants, tourists who overstay their visas, or any foreigner who is arrested for whatever reason. They have blacklists preventing reentry into the kingdom after you spend jail time, and daily fines for overstaying your visa or not reporting your address every 90 days. An effective policy that the US could well use. And no free welfare, schooling, medical care, or other benefits for foreigners as in US...."