The best and the worse

Have been thinking about my January visit and how best to write about it so have taken the lazy way out.

Top 10

1. Thanks to all the bar owners of all sorts who daily live through all the hassle of rules, regulations, pay offs, police etc etc so that we can have a good time when on holiday.
2. Thanks to the Thai boys we meet who give us a good time in many different ways.
3. The ATM maintenance engineers and bankers who keep these clever little machines full of money each day.
4. Villa supermarket for ignoring the stupid rules about when you can buy alcohol.
5. Family Marts and 7/11's for always being open for emergency purchases and for letting you pay utility bills.
6. The numerous places where you can buy a nice breakfast for under 100 baht.
7. Au Bon Coin, my favourite upmarket restaurant.
8. Cuisine Au Beurre, the best mid range restaurant.
9. Salt and Pepper, the best budget restauarant.
10. Little Mango, the nicest Thai restauarant in the Sunee area, with the cutest cats
11. Russian youth and their liking for small swimming costumes
12. Tuc Com for selling the latest series of Boston Legal, illegal of course, but who cares, for just a few hundred baht.
13. Thais in general for putting up with mostly unintentionally rude farangs, usually with a smile.


and the booby prizes.

1. Polluters of all sorts, responsible for the haze that stopped a clear view of the horizon (could hardly see Koh Larn all month), and strew the beaches with all sorts of crap.
2. Car park attendants at Royal garden who minutely examine underneath with mirrors but never want to see inside the trunk.
3. MotorBike owners who see nothing wrong in scratching cars.
4. The architects who thought it was a good idea to make the Villa/Avenue complex completely off limits for disabled people.
5. Slow moving convoys of trucks who advertise with loud sound systems, blocking traffic and disturbing everyone.
6. Road engineers responsible for the tragedy called the Pattaya to Jomtien road.
7.Traffic police who do not do their job and a government who pays them so little that they have to resort to corruption and unofficial fines.
8. The sickly sweet smell that wafts into bars from food carts that sell insects.
9. That annoying farang on skis.
10. Condo adverts that never tell you where the condo is.
11. Lotus and Big C, splendid in many ways but absurdly not allowing farangs to buy beer in the afternoon.
12. Thais who dither in front of ATM's, trying several different cards, finally discovering what they knew all along, that they have no money.
13. Christmas decorations still up at the end of January.
14. Late night and early morning noise makers of all sorts.

11. Lotus and Big C, splendid in many ways but absurdly not allowing farangs to buy beer in the afternoon.I assume that in your own country tourists are exempt from obeying the law?

Homintern slightly misses the point. It is perfectly legal for me to attempt to buy or buy alcohol at any time in Thailand. More to the point, it is illegal for a Thai to sell it to me during certain times. So it actually boils down to whether I expect Thais to obey their own laws rather than whether I obey them.
To explain more about what I meant, you can go into any privately owned Thai shop (you know the sort, they are in every soi, not part of a chain, and have few things apart from one or two shelves and a fridge) and they will sell you beer at any time. You can do the same in 7/11's and Family Marts. At the other end of the food chain, in Villa supermarkets, you can do the same.
At Big C and Tesco you will find the law, supposedly for every shop owner, actually supported. This law itself was set up for a variety of reasons connected to making alcohol hard to get for those who are vulnerable, some of which hold water, others being nonsense. I guess Big C and Tesco are too big to be seen to disobey the law, and not powerful enough to want to.
All of this makes me seem like an alcoholic desperate for an afternoon fix of Singha which I assure you is not true!!!!

AWWWW........come on Lester.....I bet you stocked that bar fridge real good when you realised there was a problem at certain times of day. I bloody well made sure I had ample supplies in the hotel fridge just incase there was a 'matinee' performance!