Thanks to all who replied to my Report, either in the above posts or by Private Messages.

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Chris, I think that doing 3 or 6 months each year, you will still not feel you belong. Thats my thoughts. You either have to make the committment full time, or you don't and just view this place as a long term holiday destination.

Thanks John, I may have overstated the feeling of 'belonging' and I'm sure other expats would agree with you. I think my wording reflected a shift in my thoughts about wanting to immerse myself in the life of Thailand, rather than just viewing it as a passing holiday. I certainly have no right to expect to be regarded as a part of the community if I'm not there for most of the time. Thanks for that reminder.

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The Jomtien area is a bit quieter than Pattaya city itself.  Although I've never stayed at View Talay 1 or 2, I understand they are clean and quiet, and baht buses run by the front gate constantly, and motorcycle taxis are there, too.

Thanks bkkgwm, but even View Talay in Jomtien was noisy when I tried it for a month last year (see my first report), thanks to renovations all around me within the condo block. I think the suggestion from a PM, which endorses my thinking; of renting a house in a village is the best bet when I'm able to stay there 6 months or more continuously.

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I've watched you approach your decision making taking a very patient and methodical approach which has always impressed me.

Thanks Dodger, I reckon I'm a 'belt and braces' type of guy. It slows me down a lot, but I'm happier doing things that way. Of course, it probably means I'll inevitably settle for the compromise.

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Chris.. If you want use your miles to "Upgrade" to Economy Deluxe.. do it IMMEDIATELY after purchasing your economy tickets. You can do this by phone .. just call EVA Customer service.  There is no reason to wait until the day of the flight and take the chance no seats will be available.  I've ALWAYS been able to upgrade using this method.

Thanks one2go, I agree that is possible when booking through EVA, but I use Airline Network to book my tickets, because it's a lot cheaper to do so. Reading EVA's Rules, I can only get an upgrade in advance if the ticket is booked through them.

Thanks again,
Chris.

Nice report Chris  
I know it takes a lot of time to write this stuff and upload the pictures.
I enjoyed both very much. Thanks.

Chris UK, I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of posting an excerpt from this article to the header of the   Old Board . Google still seems to think that board is more important than this one, so I'm doing everything I can to use that board primarily to redirect people here for now, and a well written contextual article is good for that.


ChrisUK and IwanUK (are you guys related?   ):

Speaking of pictures on your reports, feel free to upload them to this site if you want to save some bandwidth. To show the images in a post, you would have to upload them to a blog because album images won't link. There's a blog tutorial in Posting guidelines that explains how. I suppose if you do that, you might as well copy the articles there, too. Then I could link your name in the byline of the article on the old board to your blog here, as I have linked the photo credit for BenCH to his album here.

Chris,

I'm not sure I agree with your statement...

Quote:

I certainly have no right to expect to be regarded as a part of the community if I'm not there for most of the time. Thanks for that reminder.

I travel for a living and the only community I call home is Pattaya Thailand, and when I take off the work gloves and return to Pattaya...I'm coming home.  Regardless of the length of my stays, or the sad fact that I have to return to the U.S. twice a year to work for a living, I feel as much a part of the Pattaya community as anyone.

When I see you, which I do very frequently during my stays, I view you as part of the community as well.  You've taken the initiative to explore Pattaya with a keen sense of learning and have cultivated a lot of good friends in the process.

I know many farangs who have resided in LOS on a full-time basis for many years.  Some of them are part of the community and some are not.  It's not the duration of a stay that counts, it's the person's abilities to communicate, and want to communicate, with others, both Thai and farang...and you're a great communicator.

mai pen rai

Elephantspike,

I don't mind you using excerpts to lead to my report.

As far as I know, IwanUK is not related to me, other than living in the same country.

Thanks for the tip for saving bandwidth. It will also probably please others on slow dial-up connections (like myself) to have clickable thumbnails rather than the large original photos inserted. I'm trying to get my head around the image uploading, blog and album sections. In the meantime, I've added my favourite view to my signature (I hope!).

Even if I do put the reports in a Blog, I still feel that the best resting place for this concluding report on a potentially life-changing experiment is in the Resource Forum, alongside the previous reports covering the first and second stages.

Sure. I'll put it in the Resource Forum. Eventually, I'm going to make the best of the resource forum into categorized articles on the portal, too.

Re; Thumbnails; just click the "image upload" button, browse your pc and select and submit. It automatically remote-hosts it and posts a thumbnail here that links to the full-size image on the remote host. That's the easiest of the 4 methods for showing images here. The albums also automatically thumbnails, and uploads the image to this domain, but you cant put up links on the board to album images, because they are php variable pages rather than the actual file name of the image. Blog photos don't thumbnail, but they upload to this domain and can be linked to using the bbcode for the image.