radioman

Get two, one for them, one for you, sharing is fun!

'taking the micky"??? Gotta teach my Thai girl that little saying

Both my kids, one boy, one girl, at Thai school get very different treatment. Were any teacher to try the same as you seem to imagine might happen I would indeed get the message, and the teacher would too, from me, no question! p.s. I thought Thai script here was generally, well, if not frowned upon, then at least deprecated. Maybe that doesn't apply to user names?

There are now almost no roundabouts (traffic circles) left in Doha. Once it became clear that only a mere fraction of the driving population either understood how they worked or cared about them it became obvious that getting rid of them was the only sensible option to reducing the carnage. So now there are a lot of traffic lights.

Yes, there is no wrong side of the road, just the right side and the correct side.

Having driven on 5 continents and numerous countries I honestly have no difficulty driving in Bangkok, or Thailand in general. Far worse than some places maybe but by no means the worst and at times better than a lot. I'm currently working in Qatar, a mix of dumb as a box of monkeys sub continent types driving anything that will roll and arrogant as heck Arabic types driving the mechanical equivalent of a camel. The horn blowing and jostling for position that accompanies every change of lights makes a drive through Bangkok almost serene.

One of I'm sure, but the statement about attacking this at the street level rather than taking out the higher level protection mechanism suggests some 'names' might escape. Had the statement made it clear that any and all at each and every level would face the full sanction of the law without exception then it might be more appropriate, then again...

Since I'm swapping countries, and cars, at the same time it wouldn't seem to be.

Leaving the big shots in place and untouched?

I swap driving sides every couple of weeks, have done for years, never a problem provided you possess the level of alertness that anyone driving should have.

With all strange topics being posted recently I had to look twice to see if the OP was Bangkok Missy Definitely agree with Mr C, sponsors forum. You'll be helping the board traffic, quite a bit maybe!

Cows on the way?

Coud have been written by Mao Mark

Not wanting to derail this in anyway but was that statement really made by CNN? It's unreadable!

Hey, Flash started it

And Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlQHXkOUjeI

To add to the discussion on weight gain/loss and the various us/them conspiracy theories (or not) I can do little more than to recommend a BBC documentary 3 part series "The Men Who Made Us Fat". It seems it's available on You Tube here: Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6nGlLUBkOQ Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owekbSp7wU0 3 hours in total but I would suggest well worth anyone's time and a good evenings education at the least.

That's just plain funny, right there

Just says so much about the sort of people charged with running the country.

A lot available online now, which rather completes the circle so far as human rights for education and internet access is concerned. Plenty of universities offering courses for free as well as they experiment with what works and what doesn't. You get to be a guinea pig and study for a qualification at the same time.

Maximum vehicle width?

When I was at school, also a long time ago, the regime was also somewhat strict in many respects than might be said today of similar western schools, with one particular exception, a teacher who engaged with his students and never to my knowledge ever had a need to discipline any pupil. His exam results were startlingly better than any other teachers, even for the same subject, wonder why. Of course if all you seek is obedience then it's as easy with a rod as anything. If results are more your thing then approach and vision can be far more productive though they require more effort and understanding. Whilst there might be exceptions in every class, I'm sure there are, I think most pupils can achieve more as a result of engagement and interest than through threat and intimidation.

It's all about obedience, look around, the uniforms reinforcing uniformity, the uniformity of behaviour. The expectations of uniformity from the administration, past and most certainly present. Shut up and obey, follow this set of rules, act in this way. The troika of nation, monarchy and religion defines, but more particularly controls, dressed up as respect, all of what Thai people are.

Certainly once upon a time it might have been hard to prosecute someone in UK for a similar accident. Driving without due care and attention would have been about it, which carried back in the day a fairly lenient sentence structure. Today it might more likely be Causing a death by dangerous driving that I think has a mandatory prison term, suspension unlikely unless hugely mitigating circumstances, or rich!