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A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand

yinyang

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Thai police websites hacked

c1_816576_620x413.jpg


Hacktivists took over four police websites, including the metropolitan police, on Monday night, with messages demanding justice.

The hacked websites showed a black page with the image of a white mask with blanked-out eyes and the words, “Blink Hacker Group, Failed Law, We want Justice and Greetz Myanmar Black Hats”, according to Facebook page Polamuang tortan Single Gateway: Thailand Internet Firewall.

The affected websites were the Metropolitan Police http://metro.police.go.th; the Pichit Police Office http://phichit.police.go.th; the Police Clearance Certificate Centre http://www.pcscenter.sb.police.go.th; and Office of Communication and Communication Technology of the Royal Thai Police http://ictgeneral.police.go.th.

The last two websites were still inaccessible around 1pm Tuesday.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/816576/thai-police-websites-hacked
 

Froggy

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

In Bangkok one will never go hungry as food is at every corner even in the smallest soi.



Chicken rice seller


Duck noodle seller


A hot bowl of duck beehoon
 

yinyang

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Time to get that Prada or LV? :p Not in my league, I can only afford Catuchak's fakes :o

TOURISM
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A fruit vendor pushes his cart past a luxury mall near the Erawan shrine. (EPA photo)

Luxury imports set for duty cut
Move aims to attract big-spending tourists

  • Bangkok Post Published: 6/01/2016 at 05:30 AM
The Customs Department is poised to cut the 30% import duty on luxury items in an effort to boost tourists' spending, its chief says.

The department will convene a meeting with the private sector this month to arrange the tariff reduction before forwarding it to finance permanent secretary Somchai Sujjapongse for deliberation, director-general Kulit Sombatsiri said.

The new duty level must not hurt domestic manufacturers, he said without elaborating. The move follows frequent requests by the private sector to promote Thailand as a tourist shopping paradise while encouraging Thai consumers to shop at home instead of abroad.

The government is stimulating domestic consumption and tourist spending in a bid to boost economic momentum because public and private investment take longer to deliver results.

It offered tax breaks worth up to 15,000 baht per individual in the final seven days of last year with the aim of triggering a shopping spree. The Finance Ministry recently estimated the festive tax breaks would add 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points to GDP this year. That estimate assumes half the 3 million taxpayers would use the tax break, generating an extra 150 billion baht in spending. This could boost GDP growth to 3% this year from an earlier forecast of 2.8%.

Amid weak exports, delays in public investment and anaemic consumption, the tourism industry was the bright spot for the economy in 2015. Foreign tourist arrivals are expected to reach almost 30 million for 2015, exceeding the official target of 28.8 million despite the deadly Erawan Shrine bombing on Aug 17.

Mr Kulit said his department might allow an increase in the number of duty-free shops and collection centres to facilitate tourists.
The 10 collection centres for duty-free items are thought to be insufficient to provide services for both Thai and foreign tourists.
Yuthasak Supasorn, governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), said cutting the import tariff on luxury products would help to promote tourism and turn the country into a shopping paradise for foreigners.

The main groups to benefit would be from short-haul markets such as China, Hong Kong and Singapore, while European tourists would not be very interested in buying brand-name products here. The tariff reduction is in line with the TAT's major policy of generating more tourism revenue by increasing tourists' length of stay and spending.
"We hope this measure will help to lift tourist spending on shopping by 15-20%," Mr Yuthasak added.

Jariya Chirathivat, president of the Thai Retailers Association, said foreign tourists spent 1,208 baht a day on average on shopping, two times lower than in Singapore and four times lower than in Hong Kong.
Phaibul Kanokvatanawan, chief executive of The Mall Group, said before reducing the import tariff on luxury products, the government should compare free-on-board prices to prices at sales counters in Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong.

This would help the government to know what price Thailand should set for luxury products if it wanted to attract foreign tourists to shop here and compete with the two other major tourist destinations.
"If our import tax on luxury products in Thailand is not different from Hong Kong and Singapore, Thailand will become a shopping paradise and our tourism will take the lead since the cost of living is lower while hospitality and hotel facilities are superb," Mr Phaibul said.

Prasong Poontaneat, director-general of the Revenue Department, hopes to increase the number of foreign tourists claiming value-added tax refunds to 100,000 a year from 7,000 now.
 
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Froggy

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Too this video last week of prata man in Bangkok.

Video shows a man from Myanmar making prata. In Bangkok most of prata men or women are from Myanmar and looks like Bangla. If you have a chance to talk to them ask them if they are Bangla and they will tell you they are.

Towards the end of the video you see prataman pour generously sweet condensed milk and white sugar, yes its very sweet. Thais take roti prata as a snack unlike us as a meal.

[video=youtube;8qowXursZN8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qowXursZN8[/video]
 

yinyang

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PRCs making (money) foot print in LOS :p

Blacklist aims to curb Chinese gangs
Tourists are overstaying visasand setting up as scammers,writes Wassayos Ngamkham

Officers from the Crime Suppression Division (CSD) and Immigration Police are turning their attention to Chinese gangs operating in this country.

These gang members tend to enter the kingdom as tourists but overstay their visas while operating call centre scams and credit card and passport fraud from rented condominiums or houses.

Police have been alerted to at least three such illegal operations in the past year. In response, any tourists caught overstaying will soon face being blacklisted, effectively banning them from re-entering Thailand for a certain period of time.
CSD deputy chief Pol Col Phanthana Nutchanat pointed to the arrest of members of a credit card and passport fraud gang on Jan 1 as a case in point.
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Police last year busted this gang that had set up a call centre in Don Muang district, from where they allegedly swindled victims in China out of 225 million baht. (Photo by Patipat Janthong)

The gang had five members, four males -- Zu Jian, 42, Cui Yuanchang, 31, Tan Guoping, 40, and Liu Shijin, 42 -- and one female, Zhu Chupoing, 53. Police estimated their activities had caused financial damage worth some 3 million baht.
Up to 182 fake credit cards, card readers and equipment used to make credit cards were among items seized by the officers during the operation.

This type of crime is growing as the number of Chinese people using credit cards has increased over the past three years, Pol Col Phanthana said.

Previously, Europeans and Malaysians were the usual suspects, and it is believed they taught some Chinese people how to make fake credit cards so they could tap into the growing Chinese market, he said.
These people hack online accounts and steal details from credit card transaction records at shops in China. They then enter the information into fake cards which are used to buy high-value items in Thailand such as gold, said Pongsit Chaichutpornsuk, Siam Commercial Bank's executive vice-president for cyber crime prevention.

The gang also makes fake passports which are used together with the fake credit cards to purchase valuables in Thailand.
Another case that came up on the police's radar was more sophisticated -- the call centre scam.

Twenty-seven Chinese and Taiwanese nationals allegedly colluded to lure victims in China into transferring money to them. The plots varied from pretending to be bank officials checking credit information to tax officials offering rebates. They conned victims into either sending money in the form of "admin fees" or supplying their bank details.

Police arrested 20 men and seven women at a house in Prachaniwet housing estate in Chatuchak district on Dec 24. As with the fake credit card gang, these suspects chose Thailand as their new criminal base following tougher crackdowns by Chinese police. Their call centre scam caused damages valued at more than 100 million baht, according to police estimates.
Pol Col Phanthana said these criminal suspects are crafty as they manage to evade the police both here and in their own country and, at the same time, go to great lengths to make their operations appear legitimate.

"These [call centre] suspects have developed their skills to a high level. They have been trained to speak convincingly and memorise banking jargon," he said.
Also, they do not always need many collaborators in their secret plots. Only a few persons can swindle millions of baht from victims.

Another case that hit media headlines followed the arrest of Jiang Sulian and He Ying, both 30, on Sept 9.
The pair disguised themselves as visitors at a jewellery fair at Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thani, Nonthaburi.
They asked for a closer look at a 10-million-baht diamond and returned a fake one to a sales representative. Ms Jiang had swallowed the real diamond, which was later retrieved by doctors.

This crime prompted stepped up efforts to monitor tourists from the southern Chinese province of Hunan, as many jewel thieves are believed to come from this region, Pol Col Phanthana said.

In addition to these three major crimes, there have also been reported cases of Chinese people using fake identity cards to pretend they are Thais so they can work and carry out monetary transactions.

One way to prevent these crimes from recurring is to act against tourists who overstay their visas, Immigration Bureau chief Pol Lt Gen Natthon Phrosunthon said.

Pol Lt Gen Natthon said the Interior Minister will issue a law, which will take effect on March 20, that will blacklist violators and ban them from entering Thailand for between one and 10 years, depending on how long they have overstayed.
 

Froggy

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This is funny. At Sun Plaza (Sembawang) this morning waiting for a friend, went into the mall for a coffee at Starbucks ended up having tea in Tuk Tuk Cha instead. This is the first time I see this joint, was attracted by the smell of old style red tea and also the decoration.





Two staff both Thais greeted me and it was a pleasant surprise.



Ordered the Thai traditional tea and also toast with Thai kaya



Have to to admit its very original Thai but then our kaya is still better in my opinion but then this is very authentic Thai so can try.

The menu



They've already got 4 outlets

 

yinyang

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Thai tourism can move up a gear. Here’s how

TheNation January 12, 2016 1:00 am

What did Thailand do to attract nearly 30 million visitor arrivals in 2015?

That figure is a record high.

The year before, tourist revenue contributed Bt1.04 trillion, or 8.6 per cent of gross domestic product, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). Add the ripple effect to other sectors and the total contribution came to Bt2.3 trillion, or 19.3 per cent of GDP. The tourist industry also employed 2.21 million workers in 2014 - 5.8 per cent of workforce.

According to
Bank of Thailand statistics, visitor arrivals have been steadily rising, from 7.2 million in 1997 to 24.8 million in 2014 (though that was down 6 per cent from the 26.5 million recorded in 2013).

Throughout 2015, tourism was the only engine driving an economy facing headwinds from public spending, domestic consumption and exports.

This year, the outlook is brighter. The WTTC forecasts that the tourism's contribution to GDP will rise 6.4 per cent per year, to hit Bt4.497 trillion in 2025. The number of jobs in the industry is also expected to rise in that time, by 4.6 per cent per year, to 3.476 million - a whopping 8.6 per cent of the total workforce.

Based on these forecasts, Thailand is in the global top 20 in terms of long-term growth - ranked 15th among 184 countries.

So what exactly does Thai tourism have to offer?

Two decades ago, it was "sun, sea and sand". Most tourists knew Thailand for beach resorts like
Pattaya and Phuket. As visitors searched for new destinations, the appeal slowly spread to province near Pattaya and Phuket.

Promotions that focused on cultural attractions then drew
Chiang Mai into the spotlight for its famous Lanna-style festivals. Despite annual smog, the Rose of the North remains a favourite with tourists who arrive for Songkran. Ayutthaya soon came into picture, along with other provinces that boast heritage sites.

Backing this up is hospitality and food that's famous the world over.

So what's the next selling point that the
Tourism Authority of Thailand can draw on in its bid to attract more than 30 million visitors this year?

The
TAT has revealed little about its plans to meet that target. The suspicion is that it came up with the ambitious projection based on figures from its overseas offices. The TAT is endowed with an annual budget of Bt1.5 billion for overseas marketing, but to maintain Thailand's international status as an attractive destination requires more assistance from other government units.

Among them is the Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration, which has been tasked with creating "alternative" destinations with a focus on culture and eco-friendliness. Ban Rai Gong Khing in
Chiang Mai is one such destination. It earned a nod in the Pacific Asia Travel Association's inaugural Tourism InSPIRE Awards 2015 for a healthy local lifestyle that has been attracting visitors.

The award, bestowed only a few years after the community opened its doors to outsiders, has inspired other villages in
Chiang Mai to replicate the lucrative success.

Among them is the San Lom Joy community, just 3km from the city, which plans to unveil a nature trail and its unique hilltribe culture.

Needless to say, the community needs a lot of help in achieving its vision. The TMB Bank offered its aid in constructing the walking trail, but the village needs more help in selling its hilltribe culture.

The village chief is now proud to show visitors how they brew the local firewater, made from maize and rice. The flavour is good, but promoting this local tipple will be difficult amid a strong anti-drinking sentiment. The hilltribe village itself is small, offering visitors the chance to observe locals drying chillies on their doorsteps and making souvenirs, all amid the lingering but not pungent smell of pig dung.

While this village will have to struggle for fame, other tourist destinations in
Chiang Mai are attracting surprising attention through word of mouth.

In Nam Phrae, foreign and local visitors flock to witness the "Grand Canyon of
Chiang Mai". The attraction is an old open pit mine, where the digging has left towering columns of earth. The pit gradually filled with water, creating a magical scene. Visitors can now be seen swimming, sunbathing and diving in the artificial lake. On a busy day, the place welcomes about 4,000 visitors, generating about Bt200,000 from an entry fee of Bt50 per adult.

A worrying feature is the lack of lifeguards. Who is responsible if visitors meet with accidents? And could a serious accident tarnish Thailand's tourism image?

Concerns about the safety of Thai tourist attractions are underscored by frequent reports of incidents. Just last week a Chinese tourist visiting a snake farm was bitten on the nose by a python, which left a wound that required eight stitches. Police then stepped in, vowing to step up safety and security at all animal shows in the province.

Thailand remains easy to sell to international visitors. But we need better management of those selling points if we want to remain an attractive destination in our global village.
 
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yinyang

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Critical dig at locals retrieving vehicles after drunk driving offences. Only thb3000, with a big smile (and wai?) :cool:
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On the road to nowhere
Drink-drivers caught over the festive season lost their motorcycles and cars for a few days, but learned very little.


It was like a celebration of sorts; the kind befitting New Year. Did you see the faces of the young men who went to retrieve their motorbikes? They were all over the Thai media last Tuesday, the first day they could get their vehicles after being nabbed for drink driving over the holiday break.

Some arrived on the backs of motorcycles driven by friends, laughing and jostling each other. They grinned and mugged for the cameras. Some gave high-fives, others gave the thumbs-up.

One arrived in the back of a pickup truck along with another six friends. While there were no liquor bottles in sight, it was clear the guys had been up to something for a couple of hours that morning that made them red-faced, invigorated and loud.
One young man sauntered into the station then sauntered out a few minutes later only to have a brief conversation with his friends. They all chipped in some money, and the man sauntered back inside with his wad of cash. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Afterwards, once the bikes were retrieved, a couple of victory signs were flashed at the media, though victory for what remains an important question. One man kissed the petrol tank of his motorbike. That evoked a lot of laughter. Another posed for the cameras flashing a peace sign and a grin, while his mother and father stood not far away, smiling too as their offspring became the centre of media attention, albeit briefly and probably for the first time in his life. He’d be the toast of his village, for sure, for making it onto TV.

It is a little difficult to fathom the logical progression of an arrest for driving under the influence, then the carnival-like ensuing scene outside police stations across the country where formerly drunken motorcyclists were reunited with their weapons of choice.

Speaking of logical progressions, what is going on with the Thailand road toll? Figures are flying in the face of logic, for reasons way beyond my mental capacities. That leaves me feeling a little on edge and twitchy, not a good look in these early days of 2016. Thailand’s escalating death toll has been a regular topic in this column. Perhaps it is because I’ve worked closely with one prominent Thai journalist, Krissana Lalai, who is a tireless champion of drink-driving laws. He is Thailand’s watchdog for accessibility, or “universal design” as he calls it, meaning the ability for a wheelchair and the disabled to go everywhere people on two fully functioning legs can go.

His other case is drink-driving. Krissana sits in a wheelchair, the result of a freak road accident 15 years ago at the height of his journalistic fame, which resulted in an agonising six-month stay in hospital as he came to terms with his new life as a paraplegic.

Road toll statistics are as high as they are sketchy in this country, but as recently as October last year the World Health Organisation was claiming Thailand had the second-deadliest roads in the world, with a little under 40 people on average dying on Thai roads per day. The 2015 Global Status Report Of Road Safety placed Thailand just under Libya. Another world survey put us at No 2, just under Namibia. Either country doesn’t make us look good.
Krissana and I have discussed this before, but we both pinpoint a general shift in perception towards the road toll some five to seven years ago. It was then Thai authorities started to make inroads towards curbing it.

One can be cynical and say the shift was a result of the realisation that more revenue could be obtained from tighter road rule enforcement. Even if this is true, you will get no protest from me. If the police can fill their coffers from fines resulting from speeding tickets and roadside breath tests, then good for them. May they get rich on it — anything to stop 40 people dying per day and an army of severely maimed.

New measures to curb the road toll over the past five years have been impressive or, at worst, a good start. There were restrictions on alcohol sales. Roadside breathalysers were enforced. There were stepped-up media campaigns to educate drivers that drinking and driving did not mix. Billboards went up featuring pictures of forlorn children asking where their daddy was (dead, thanks to an accident) and the most common of all, a picture of a gift of a liquor bottle with the now-popular saying: “Giving alcohol is akin to cursing somebody.”

The biggest change came before this New Year period, dubbed “The Seven Days of Death” by the government, since it publicly tracks on a daily basis how many people die and get maimed in how many accidents. For the first time, the prime minister used his sinister Section 44 rule (which gives him the power to do absolutely anything short of turning you into a frog) to allow any drunk driver to have his vehicle confiscated by the police on the spot.

This led to a total of 4,672 seizures, the majority being motorcycles belonging to men under the age of 20. (There were a couple of notable exceptions; in Udon Thani a drunken ice-cream vendor had his ice-cream truck seized. One wonders if he had any rum and raisin in his stash?)

In total, more than 28,000 motorcyclists and 10,000 car drivers were arrested for drink driving over the 11 days from Christmas Day until Jan 4. That’s a lot, right?

Awareness campaigns … alcohol sale restrictions … roadside breathalysers … seizing vehicles … mass arrests … what effect has it all had on the Thai road toll?

With the exception of one freak year, the death toll has steadily increased over the past five years. This year alone, the road toll rose 11% when compared with last year with 380 dead and 3,505 injured. Where is the logical progression in that?

There was absolutely no good news when the figures were released last Tuesday, other than a mildly congratulatory paragraph for the four provinces (Trang, Phrae, Ranong and Sukhothai) where nobody died on the roads. Congratulatory? Look at it the other way around — 73 out of 77 provinces suffered road fatalities.

Despite how I may sound in this column from time to time, I am a man who takes great comfort in logical progressions. Clampdowns on alcohol sales, random breathalysers and strict measures such as seizing vehicles must mean the road toll should go down. But it didn’t. It went up. Dramatically.
So the more we crack down, the worse the road toll gets?

Perhaps the answer could be found last Tuesday in the media footage of the young men who fronted up to police stations around the country, 3,000 baht in hand, to collect their vehicles.

I don’t know about you, but if I had to go collect my car after being nabbed for drink-driving, I’d do it wearing a heavy jacket, dark glasses and a wig. There would be no victory walk for me. And yet that’s what all those men were doing, flashing peace signs and victory signs as they did the alleged walk of shame. It was sanook.

Nobody was hurting, and indeed we are in a bizarre situation where the people who need to hurt the most have lost nothing — other than 3,000 baht. If anything, they have gained valuable information, such as which roads not to traverse the next time they get off their faces. And why shouldn’t there be a next time?
 

Jah_rastafar_I

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mainmand.jpg


Mr Desmond Lim. -- PHOTO: Shintaro Tay
Judith Tan
The New Paper
11 January 2016

The HORROR
He was run over by a truck twice and left to die for over six hours on a road about an hour’s drive from Bangkok.
What followed the six-hour torture was even more trauma - almost 15 months of surgery, treatment and rehabilitation in hospitals in Thailand and Singapore.
His injuries were horrendous. He had a crushed right pelvis, fractured left leg and spine.
Former air steward Desmond Lim, 39, was on a road trip heading to Bangkok when a truck hit his motorcycle and ran over his body twice before speeding off.
AGONY
"I lay there, my bones crushed, my wounds open and bleeding, for more than six hours - fully conscious and in excruciating pain - before an ambulance finally came," he said.
He does not know who called for an ambulance. Mr Lim and two friends were on a month-long road trip to Myanmar, Laos and Thailand in January 2013 and were on their return journey when the accident occurred.
"My friends and I were taking different routes and were meeting in Bangkok when I got run over.
They only found out about my accident in Bangkok," he said.
Mr Lim, who now works in business development with a company dealing with orthopaedic equipment, said he was taken to a nearby hospital that appeared "old and rundown".
"No one there could speak English. I was in pain and I turned hysterical.
"It took a couple more hours before a doctor, who spoke a little English, came. I said I wanted to be transferred to Bangkok," he said.
Mr Lim was in a hospital in the Thai capital for three weeks before he was flown back to Singapore and warded at the Singapore General Hospital for the next 10 months.
"I don't even remember which hospital I was in in Bangkok. They kept me pumped with so much pain medication that those three weeks were a blur.
"I don't remember the plane ride. All I remembered was being warded at the hospital and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in SGH," he said.
Mr Lim said he was not operated on immediately "because I was having a fever and the doctors said if they did open me up, an infection from surgery would probably kill me".
By then, he said, his organs "had shifted" and his pelvis was tilting. "The orthopaedic surgeons could not put metal plates to fix my broken bones.
They told me that I had to make alternative plans as I would never walk again," he said.
SURGERY
The only surgery Mr Lim had was urethroplasty to repair some veins and his urethra, which snapped during the accident.
He went into depression and would not speak to anyone "unless they could help me walk again". He even drove his girlfriend of seven years away.
"I was depressed and angry and I kept telling her to go. We eventually broke up, but we remain friends till today," he said.
Mr Lim's sliver of hope came through Associate Professor Peter Lim. Prof Lim, who was the former head of rehabilitation medicine at SGH, visited him regularly for the 10 months he was hospitalised.
"Each time, he would come by, he would hold my hand and say 'you will walk again'.
"He gave me hope when there was none and I'll forever be thankful to him," he said.
When contacted, Prof Lim declined to comment.
The REHAB
Things started looking up when Mr Lim was moved to Bright Vision Hospital (BVH) for rehabilitation in late 2013.
"Despite my grumpiness, the nurses helped me get out of this rut. The nurse who cleaned my pressure wound was meticulous. It was a terrible job, but she never once flinched.
"They kept my spirits up. Even my physiotherapist Firdaus was very patient, going through the paces and putting up with my impatience to push myself," he said.
Mr Lim was there for four months before he was discharged. BVH Staff Nurse Jose Domingo Casiano said: "As nurses, we understand that his attitude is due to his condition. Everything is new to him, so we shifted our focus to a positive one.
"It was challenging at first. He was already set in his ways, but eventually he became open and he learnt that he would benefit from treatment."
Said physiotherapist Muhammad Firdaus Mohamed Zin: "On days when Desmond was more impatient and curt, I would talk less and focus more on the exercises.
"As Desmond wanted to focus on the present and didn't want to think of the future, I worked on what he was capable of at that point and compared his progress to the previous sessions and the past instead.
"As he saw how he improved, his mood got better and he was more willing to try more challenging things."
INDEPENDENCE
​ At home, Mr Lim refused to let his mother and two older sisters "baby" him.
"I wanted to be independent, wanted to walk and exercise so I would walk down the stairs from my 11th-storey flat. It took me 1½ hours to reach the ground floor and another three hours walking back up," he said.
He did it daily, despite concern from his loved ones because his pelvic bone remained tilted at an angle, making one leg 4cm shorter than the other.
"To ensure that my gait is steady, one shoe has a 4cm thick sole," he said.
By September 2014, although he needed a walking stick to get around, Mr Lim was ready to challenge himself.
So in January last year, he went on a three-week road trip in New Zealand alone.
"I wanted to prove to myself and others that I could take care of myself despite what happened. I rented a camper van and drove all around South Island before taking the ferry to North Island. I went trekking, fishing and glacier watching.
While other people took 15 minutes to walk on the glacier, I made sure I took my own time, just to be safe," he said.
Mr Lim is determined to help others who went through trauma and is working with the staff at SGH to set up a trauma support group.
"Through my own story, I believe I will be able to help others overcome their injuries and lead normal lives," he said.
The HEALING
He has survived trauma and is still dealing with his own healing process, but Mr Desmond Lim, 39, wants to help others cope with their ordeal.
He said: "Often, victims of trauma and bad accidents hear bad news from doctors.
"As someone who went through the injuries and is still suffering from PTSD, I know only too well how much support is needed at this difficult time," he told The New Paper.
PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is a mental condition that follows from the experience of traumatic events such as natural disasters, accidents or sexual assault.
People with PTSD will have stress reactions that do not go away on their own, or may even get worse over time.
NOT ALONE
"These people need to know they are not alone, that there are others, who went through trauma and are coping or willing themselves to get better," Mr Lim said.
He said it always helps to hear directly from people who went through trauma.
"I was asked to speak to two guys who were badly hurt in motorcycle accidents recently," he said.
"One asked if he could go back to riding and I told him if I could walk again, I am sure he will ride again. He became happier."
Mr Lim is working with doctors and nurses from the Singapore General Hospital who specialise in trauma medicine, rehabilitation and psychiatry to set up the trauma support group.
A spokesman from the hospital said the support group is being set up and there are no details to share yet.
 

yinyang

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Lost tourist pair found near Khao Yai waterfall

30276746-01_big.jpg


A FINNISH man and a Polish woman were found yesterday after having been lost in Khao Yai National Park for three days. The exhausted tourists were located four kilometres from the park office, in Nakhon Ratchasima province.

The pair - Henri Jalantor, 26, and Justyna Katarzyna, 25, both nature researchers - told reporters later they survived by digging up bamboo shoots to eat and drinking creek water while wandering through the park.

Katarzyna recalled that they went into the jungle without telling park officials on the afternoon of January 9. On the first night, they were unable to get a phone signal to call for help so they slept by a creek. They spent the second night in the woods, laying near a hill and the third night in a cave. She said they ate bamboo shoots and drank creek water to survive. "I'm very happy to get out of the forest," she added.

After receiving distress calls from the pair at 10pm on Monday, some 100 park officials - divided into 11 teams on foot and one team on a helicopter - began their search early yesterday morning. The national park straddles Prachin Buri, Nakhon Nayok, Nakhon Ratchasima and Saraburi provinces. The park office also called on phone operator AIS to help triangulate the pair's last phone signals - and that showed they were in the Haew Suwat Waterfall area. Rangers finally located them at 1pm yesterday on a trekking route, 100 metres away from the waterfall.

Assistant park chief Pokkrong Thongneukhaeng said the spot where the pair was found was 4km from the park office, and normally this spot is inaccessible to tourists unless they are accompanied by officials because wild animals often pass through the area. It was fortunate they were safe, he said, because officials noticed many footprints of animals in the area.

Park officials urged visitors to inform them before entering the jungle, so they can get a guide and won't get lost.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Lost-tourist-pair-found-near-Khao-Yai-waterfall-30276746.html
 

yinyang

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Sinkie fatality on board Tiger en-route from CNX. RIP

Tiger Air Singapore plane made an emergency landing at Suvarnabhumi airport yesterday after one Singaporean passenger died while on the flight from Chiang Mai to Singapore.

The 58-year-old Singaporean man was taking his family of five back home from Chiang Mai with his Thai wife on Flight PR 2177.

His Thai wife told airport officials at Suvarnabhumi airport that her husband has personal chronic sickness.
While on the plane, her husband succumbed to his chronic sickness, forcing the pilot to seek emergency landing at Suvarnabhumi airport for medical help.

But he died on the plane.

His body was later taken out for autopsy at the Police General Hospital.

http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/tiger-air-singapore-seeks-emergency-landing-at-suvarnabhumi-airport
 

Froggy

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Early start, afternoon delight

 

freedom

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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Hello everyone, this is my first post in this thread....may I ask if there are many Singaporeans here who are retired in Thailand? How do you guys do it?
 

Onitsuka

Alfrescian
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Re: A Singaporean's guide to living in Thailand ? Feasible?

Hello everyone, this is my first post in this thread....may I ask if there are many Singaporeans here who are retired in Thailand? How do you guys do it?

They all started from a MP in Ratchada.
 
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