Can you live longer in Thailand?

[Lefty]

(indianajones @ Jun. 16 2009,15:55) blah blah blah...

Ok I give up. You are the all seeing all knowing omnipotent one when it comes to all things Thailand. The rest of us are all so lucky to be blessed by your presence here and know only what you tell us.  

[Stogie]

Thank you for NOT quoting the whole post!

[Lefty]

Just wanted to save you the bother of reducing it for me. Monkey see monkey do.

[Master Bator]

(Lefty @ Jun. 17 2009,02:11)

(indianajones @ Jun. 16 2009,03:10)

But a good old moan over a few beers in a British pub with some bloke you have never met before is all part of the fun about living in a foreign country!

So, the various posts make more sense when I realize you are in stage C and Master Bator is in stage E.

Actually I feel we are both in D. Typical for this stage is that we still moan but no longer get angry about it and actually have a good laugh (but mostly at the expense of others....)

I'm getting close to E but still struggling with my financial losses ( in my case stock markets and not due to being "ripped off" by the Thais).

[Stogie]

Now for the stages:

A) You think everything is wonderful in Thailand

B) You start to realise that not all is as it seems in the Land Behind the Smiles

C) Everything is crap in Thailand! Complaining, whining,writing letters to the editor.

D) You learn to live with all that crap ( and to accept your financial losses...)

E) You actually start to enjoy life in Thailand again...

I skipped stages A and B...

Spent a couple of years in stage C

The next few years were in stage D...

After ten years I finally reached stage E.
Probably started about a year or so ago.

(What helped me graduate to the final stage was the shocking realization of how simply unbearable life is where I came from.)

[Master Bator]

(Stogie @ Jun. 17 2009,08:49) (What helped me graduate to the final stage was the shocking realization of how simply unbearable life is where I came from.)

Also realising that there is no way back I hope to reach that final stage of
enlightenment soon....

[manarak]

(pacman @ Jun. 17 2009,06:17)

(manarak @ Jun. 16 2009,06:48) Some ten years ago, a foreign colleague drove a swiss colleague to work and briefly stopped the car where is was not allowed to get out and buy cigarettes and the paper. when he came back, the swiss colleague had called the traffic police so that they could write a ticket...

I enjoyed your observations about Switzerland very much. As a sometime visitor, I always found it odd trying to match the reality of the place with the rhetoric, you know what I mean... Switzerland - the best place to live, where there is so little crime, the place is so clean, the villages & the mountains are so picturesque...  yet, I wouldn't live there for all the chocolate in Geneva. (hmmm, maybe I could be persuaded)

One visit, I had to pick up tickets for the opening night of the Bern Ballet (don't ask) & as there was nowhere to park near the Stadt Theatre, I parked in a safe spot out of harms way, opposite the stage door where I had to go. I left my father in the car to explain that I would only be a minute in case a parking inspector chanced along.

10 minutes later, I ran back to the car with the tickets. As I arrived 2, not 1, but 2 cars drove up to me so the driver could berate my choice of parking place. These fellows were visibly angry. I replied in English that I was sorry, they switched to English & carried on like pork chops. God knows what they would have done if I had been a terrorist.

I got in the car & saw the look on my father's face. "They haven't stopped" he said, "from the moment you left, they have been blowing their horn, shaking their fist, yelling at me to move." He was totally bemused by something that wouldn't warrant a second look at home.

Go to LOS manarak, you will be better off out of a place that has traded its humanity for such stifling obedience. They may make accurate clocks, they don't make good citizens. Unless your definition of a good citizen is some manic slave to orderliness.

yes, Pacman, your story doesn't surprise me.
I don't know how long you needed to pickup the tickets, but you probably just came in time, because I'm pretty positive that someone already called the local traffic cops. Those are on foot, so that need a little longer to come.


the favorite lines of the Swiss(-germans) are:

"Wenn das jeder machen würde" - if everybody did the same as you

"Sie sind hier in der Schweiz" - here you are in Switzerland (implicit meaning: not in the shithole country where you obviously came from)


combine your adventure with the fact that the stupid green city governments reduce parking spaces everywhere.
"to ease traffic" they say - the truth is they are car haters. The car parks have outrageous prices, not rarely more than a dollar per hour.
At the Airport, costs are 5 dollars per hour or 70 dollars for 3 days.
Their objective is to make the car so inconvenient, that everyone will take the mass transit...


All the Swiss-Germans speak a funny (and ugly) dialect, so even if you speak German perfectly but are from Germany or Austria, they will recognize you as a foreigner, and treat you with defiance and with a certain coldness from the first minute.
Speaking high-german (this is how accentless german language is called) is perceived as being arrogant...

This applies to city-dwellers and professionals. In ten years I managed to make 3 or 4 Swiss friends, 2 of which have at least one foreign parent.
Simple people (hairdressers, taxi drivers, handyworkers, etc. are more simple and more easy to get along with).

People in Zürich/Winterhur are the most stuck-up, which is also linked to the fact that these territories were strongly in the grip of christian-protestant integrists Luther and Zwingli. Catholic territories are a bit more relaxed.
The city and canton of Basle is also more relaxed, probably due to the immediate proximity of Germany and France.

In western Switzerland, people speak french, and in Lausanne/Geneva they even speak an almost clean french, with not so much accent, even if the tones are slightly different, as well as 70/80/90 numerals and some expressions.
There, I never have problems with coldness or defiance, but the Swiss germans have :-)
Western Switzerland is much friendlier than eastern Switzerland.

Go to LOS manarak, you will be better off out of a place that has traded its humanity for such stifling obedience.

I'm working on it...

To close the topic on Switzerland, I would sum the whole country up by saying:
"there are more free lunches in Finance than in Switzerland"

[manarak]

addendum:

as I am an avid golfer, here are some things golfers will encounter in Switzerland:

- Golf course car parking lots for which you have to pay

- People running into the clubhouse to tell the attendants that someone is using range balls on the chip&putt practice green

- "Biotopes": one of the rules of golf is to play the ball as it lies. You can do so everywhere on a course, even on a tree, in the water, inside the club house, on a roof, etc. as long as the area has not been ruled to be "out of bounds" by a local rule or white stakes. Traditionally, clubs only rule such areas out of bounds that do not belong to the course or that are dangerous to play to/on, such as roads.
The green party in Switzerland and Germany forces clubs to declare some zones as "biotopes", where players are not allowed to set foot, and must take one penalty stroke, as if they lost their ball in a lateral water hazard.

[pacman]

You make the Swiss sound like a nation of "tattle-tales". (i.e. children who get other children in trouble by telling on them)

Thanks for being so candid, it is rare to get a first hand blunt criticism of a Nation's character by a local.

I guess there is nowhere that lives up to the hype surrounding a place once you get a picture of what really goes on.

BTW, your car parking rates - don't complain, they sound like a dream compared to some places I have parked.

[manarak]

just to clarify: I think I do qualify as a "local", but I am not Swiss.
French and German are both mother tongues for me, but I don't speak any Swiss dialect (but after 10 years in Zürich, I understand the dialect fairly well).

About the parking: certainly you pay more in London or NY, but this is Switzerland... Zürich has maybe 600k people living here, and buildings taller than 4 storeys need special authorization which is seldom granted.

Plus, there is plenty of parking space in the streets, but it is forbidden to park cars there because of the laws made by the green government here...
*sigh*

[pacman]

The Greens...           Don't start me on that lot of single-minded twits whose idea of saving the world means placing higher importance on a colony of moths than a development that offers employment & income streams from royalties, taxation, balance of trade credits, R & D, etc.

As we have completely threadjacked this topic & if my memory serves me correct, aren't you working for a Swiss bank?

Would you care to offer any insights into a system that allows the good burghers of Switzerland the duplicity to deal with the devil while preaching moral certitude against perceived sins against them.

I would love to hear how they justify their position. Or don't they think there is a case to answer?

[manarak]

it is a very complicated topic on many levels.

Myself, I am more in favor of banking secrecy than in favor of totalitarian control of people's monies by greedy politicians.

I prepare a reply on this one, but I have to go now.
I'll post it later

[manarak]

So... let's see...

How the Swiss see it:

(1) Most of the Swiss think there is something wrong with high taxes.

(2) the right wing party SVP gets between 30 and 40% of votes. The socialists about 20-25% and the green about 15%. Green and socialists want to join the EU. There is a larger part of voters than the just the right-wingers who oppose this idea. People want to stay sovereign.
Switzerland has a process of referendum that is used frequently. A referendum is not about parties. It takes 100.000 Signatures to launch one, and then the voters have to answer yes or no to a question or to choose a proposal in a list.
Once the voters have decided, the government must comply.

(3) Most of the Swiss feel Switzerland is a sovereign country and should not give in to other countries demands, in the same way it already did for the US. If they decide to do something, it will be a Swiss decision.

(4) Most of the Swiss feel that the way how they tax foreign money is their business, and nobody else's.

(5) The Swiss feel that they don't have to play the role of tax inspectors for foreign countries by reporting the owners of foreign wealth to other governments.

(6) The Swiss feel that they are unjustly singled out by foreign governments on this matter because they are an easy target. In fact, Switzerland has much stronger laws and procedures against money laundering than many other countries, while the US, UK and EU all have own tax heavens (Delaware, Florida, Caribbean, Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Andorra, Luxembourg, Austria).
Tax evasion business in Delaware is huge, and the law permits to hide the name of any account holder - now how hypocritical is that from the US (or the UK)? It appears these countries just want to strengthen their own tax heavens and to damage Switzerland.

And finally... Wilhelm Tell.

One must not forget that the national hero of Switzerland was a man who, according to the legend, opposed the tax collector Gessler, envoy of the German Kaiser and made possible the revolt of the 3 original Swiss cantons which were sworn into an alliance which was to become Switzerland.


I'll write another post about real, objective reasons why Switzerland should not comply.

[pacman]

Bravo...           there may only be the two of us reading this thread but thank you, I am really enjoying getting an insiders look at a place that is an enigma in the Western world.

Manarak has something we too rarely see, an informative yet entertaining style of writing, damn good when you consider his first two languages are French & German. Plus he no doubt speaks that 16th century dialect the Swiss speak - the impenetrable Swisse-Deutsch.

I will see if I can get Boarhog to award you a prize & give the thread a boost in Boarhog's Guide to the LBF...      

(oh, that's right, he doesn't do intelligentsia...   )

[Guest]

I'm on the wrong thread.

My limited experience in my travels to Switzerland left me with some unique obervations.

The swiss have a place for everything. They compartmentalise everything. Prostitiutes go here. Cars only on this road hummers not allowed. They even tried to put all the junkies in one place giving them a whole park and free needles. This so tourist wouldn't see them in the CBD of Zurich. This would have worked too except for the international junkies going there to die or worse get sick and have to be taken care of by the Swiss.

I would see bicycles in the city with no locks. you could set your bag down without a worry. I enquired about this to a dutch friend who said: The swiss never steal" However many desperate foriegners (Turks especially) would come to Switz and steal without fear of getting caught, because life in a Swiss jail was better than living free in their country in most cases.

You order a cola and they give you glass with about 100 ml in it. You ask for ice and they put a cube in it. You order water and it comes with bubbles (gasser?) and they both cost a lot. The little Geramn you know doesn't help you one bit in Lugano or the West. One area had about 80,000 people who only speak Romanish.

Each town has its own annual party. Each town has its own beer.

Many swiss people I have met have said: The Swiss are lazy. However they also take great pride in not being as lazy as the Italians.

The swiss have bomb shelters and even build them to this day. If there isn't enough shelters already in your community and you're building a house, thenyou have to build a shelter. This from a country that has been nuetral for 100's of years.

You can see snow, then drive a few hours and be surrounded by palm trees.

Its a fascintating place. However its not LOS which are supposed to be talkin about. A very unique place. Those Swiss francs would go along way in LOS. Think thats why I hear this often. "She had/has Swiss boyfriend"