Bump,

I'm considering taking a 2-4 week vacation to Thailand sometime in Sept/Oct to check it out and see if I'd like to potentially move there sometime next year for a bit.

I'm searching through the thread, but what are some good web sites that rent furnished apartments in Bangkok by the week/month for reasonable rates? I am willing to pay for something nice though. Thinking a 1 bedroom in a modern building with modern furnishings and high-speed internet for $500-$1,000 per month.

TheMetetron,
I'm in a similar situation. I'm moving to Bangkok in under two weeks and plan on finding an apartment when I get there. I'm willing to commit for 3 months max because I haven't decided if I want to stay in Thailand, continue on my travels, or travel for a few months and come back in the winter.

An option you might want to consider is staying in a decent hotel and working out a special rate for the two weeks or month you'll be here. As an example, the place we stayed in when we first came to Phuket was 500 baht/night but we were offered a rate of 4500 baht/month. This was a smaller place run by one guy and his family, so I don't think you would get a deal quite this good in bkk. You should get significant savings though, especially if you can get a Thai person to work out the deal for you.

Anything you find on the internet in English is going to be at an inflated price. That's not to say it will be a total ripoff, but you'll be paying more than you could. This is probably fine for what you're planning, but not ok if you wanted to stay long-term. $500-$1000 will get you a lot. Let me know if you find anything useful on the web.

JESUS, i was looking at the net and everything was around 5k US a month AT THE MINIMUM. It was phenominal.

Is my best bet to find a thai speaking person to make the connection with a thai real estate agent or something?

Check out "Sukhamvit" Rd from Soi 7ish-25ish is a very nice area. the lower Sois (small roads) are "Nana" which is all hookers. Theres a really good apt finder at www.thaivisa.com

I've been living in Thailand (in the south mainly) for 6 months. Feel free to ask any other questions

Best answer is no. These folks will very likely just conspire to get more from you and chop it up. Involve as few people as possible in the process.

KJS

maybe you guys wanna split this 7 ways?
on craigs list: http://bangkok.craigslist.org/rfs/327581240.html



asking about USD $280,000; if approached with cash, could prolly get it down to 250k. would come to about 35k per unit.

you guys should start a new thread this one is ummanagable. KKF earlier yous aid "talking to people on this message board makes mew ant to jump in front of a bus", well just seeing you stupid name, yes you know what stupid name i mean i mean "fish2plus" makes me want to vomit my huge brains out.

how is all of your thai coming along for residents, do you take classes in thailand? let's say someone was going to be there for amonth is it worth taking classes? i don't know many thai people outside of thailand, unlike other languages, spanish, chinese, russian, french, etc. also thai as far as i know doesn't have as many other applications, like liteature etc.

AUA does classes in Chiang Mai. I did not take them but heard that they were worthwhile. I did books + tapes before I moved there. It was helpful to a degree. The grammar in Thai is quite easy so you can learn quickly by memorizing a lot of vocabulary. But comprehension was a b*tch for me. It is hard for Western ears to pick up the subtleties of the tones. Once I lived there I found a tutor who came to my house weekly for lessons. Do make an effort and you will be rewarded. I knew people who lived there for years and I could speak way better than them. You will get a lot of smiles and respect from people for trying even if you are not perfect. And if you have any aspirations to socialize outside of the farang zones, you should learn it.

Learn stuff that has an application. I focused heavily on food. By the end I could read any menu, order anything I wanted how I wanted it. I could go to any town and know "that is a noodle stall, that is a rice shop, that place specializes in x." It was very rewarding.

I also had a Thai friend who spoke some English but he was pretty insistent that I spoke Thai with him. So I learned a lot of language surrounding making plans (time stuff, directions, etc). Combine this and the food stuff and i figured I could go anywhere and do anything and never feel lost if no one around me could speak English. But it is a another leap altogether to where you can speak abstractly about things. I never got there.

Just noticed you said only staying a month. In that case, just learn how to be polite and maybe how to ask for directions. I wouldn't bother with a class.

KJS

jesus why is this thread so loooooooooooooooong

thanks KJS... with spanish i studied it for a long time in junior high, high school and then travelled a bit and was clueless. the sounds were such a big thing, for example in spanish "kayatey" is how to say shut up, and that's how i would have spelled it a few years ago but now just by sounds i can put the right letters down "callete" the command of the verb callar, stop talking with Te directed at the other person. extremely satisfying, when i hear a song or someone talking and there is a word i don't know there is still only a 1/5 chance (or less) i can spell it correctly but it's getting better and feels great. takes time for the ear to get used to the sounds

No you can't. It is "cállate" when using tú or "callate" when using vos. "callete" doesn't exist.

The verb is "callarse" not "callar". The "te" isn't there because it is directed at someone it is there because it reflexive. It translates to "shut yourself up". Your spanish isn't as good as you think.

Also, I am used to hearing kah-SHA-te in Argentina whereas in Mexico it would be KAH-yah-te. I may have screwed the phoentics up because I'm not very good at phonetically spelling things.

metetron what a negative nancy, please note my improvement

Aren't there many many bigger problems in the world to worry about than how to pronounce "callete?"

You people are trying to put me on Spanish tilt by repeated writing a word that doesn't exist aren't you?

okay i was thinking you were a jerk for your first response to me, but with this one i concede

This is borderline dumb. Tickets from BA to Bangkok are $2,000. Anyone got better suggestions? Best I can do is take a roundtrip to Sydney, spend a week or two in Austrlia, then take a roundtrip from Sydney to Bangkok and travel around Thailand for a few weeks. Total is $2,600 for this option or $2,000 for the direct roundtrip from BsAs. I think the extra $600 is worth some time in Australia as much as I hate to take time off from work, but I'd really prefer some cheaper option out there somewhere.

Any help?

Can you get a decent price on a ticket to LA/San Fran/Vegas? From there you can go round trip to BKK for $6-700. Check out seemythailand.com for cheap flight info.

I was just watching BBC World and right as they started running a story about Thaksin, the channel went off the air because of "technical problems." Wow.

I'm still in Vientiane. I think I'm going to stay another week or so in Laos. I really like the city--it's like some weird alternate universe Paris where the student demonstrations of '68 were successful in overthrowing the government and the ensuing communist government destroyed the economy. Everything is ludicrously cheap even by Thailand standards. I've had some kind of stomach bug the last few days and feel like crap. I'm going to have a full physical when I get to bkk to make sure I don't have parasites or anything. I'll post a trip report and pics at some point.

Any more crazy chicks show up wanting to cut my dick off?

If by chicks you mean Katoeys, then yes. If by chicks you mean womens, then no. :P

Hello everyone,

I'm leaving for Thailand in about a month, and I'll be staying for a few days in Bangkok then heading down south stopping in Krabi then going to Koh Samui and Koh Tao. Gonna be there 6 weeks all in all. Anyways, I'm budgeting about $1600 for the stay, so I'll be staying in some pos hotels with what I'm assuming to be nonexistent security. So, how should I take care of my stuff (especially my passport and money). I'm planning on just carrying my backpack around, but if I want to swim or party that's probly not going to work. What do you guys suggest?

we just left these things in our rooms for the most part and didn't have any trouble, but i think that most places have safes or somewhere where they can put them away for you.

edit: can i suggest skipping koh samui and just going to ko phangan instead.

Yep I picked Samui at random. But if Koh Phangan is better I'll definitely go there. Why do you think it is better? Also, how's Koh Phangan on the backpacker budget (compared to koh samui and koh tao)?

edit: skier, did you go to Chiang Mai? worth the trip?

Koh Pga Ngan = WAY cheaper and mroe backpackery then Samui. Koh Tao is mostly backpackers but somehow is about the same price as Samui, maybe because it is such a small island and is a bit farther away from the mainland.

Chang Mai is definitely worth the trip IMO. The Jungle treks are cool. The girls in the north are just about all hott. The shopping is REAL cheap (go to the weekend market if you can, mostly locals and same stuff as night bazaar but way cheaper).

samui is way mroe developed and resortish and just had a weird feel to it. it didn't have that much of a local feel to it. more commercialized i guess. There was nothing that stood out about the island either.

ko phangan has the full moon party and is much smaller and really awesome imo.

chang mai was pretty awesome, but you gotta keep busy or it can get boring. Like ski said, the market is really cheap and the jungle treks are cool. Whatever you do, do the trek the first few days you are there and then you can hang out with the people you meet for the rest of the time or whatever.

ed,

I'm sure there are lots of places that you can stay in bangkok and perhaps some of the people with more experience will chime in. We just did the backpacker thing so we ended up on kho san road our first night and ended up staying at the D&D Inn which had A/c, hot showers, a pool on top for like 750 baht i think. I don't know if it's best, but it was reasonable and I would recommend it from the night or two that we stayed there.