Now this is a story that I am going to be a bit on the fence about because I know from personal experience that there are a lot of condo owners and house owners in this country that view foreigners as someone that is never going to receive their deposit back no matter what they do. I don't want to paint anyone with the same brush or anything like that but this is an evil world that we live in, and there are some people out there that will "take you to the cleaners" if they know that you have no legal recourse against them.

It was many years ago and I was just sitting in the yard of my friend's house and using my poker chip set that I had brought over from my home country. We were playing Blackjack for small stakes money and I was the dealer with 8 decks of cards. We were not playing for anything big and I wouldn't allow anyone to bet anything higher than 100 baht per hand (this is about $3).

I read an article recently about how the number of Chinese tourists visiting Thailand in a day dropped from 15 to 20 thousand down to just over 5,000. Many that are involved in the tourism industry have called this drop "catastrophic" and a "crisis."

It was roughly two months ago when I finally decided to cut the cord as far as Microsoft is concerned. I started to get a bit concerned when it seemed like every couple of days my Windows 10 machine was rebooting itself in the middle of the night and installing things onto my OS without even asking me if I wanted it. It seemed like twice a week I ended up with some crap on my desktop that I didn't ask for, didn't need, and these things would hijack what I was doing to throw something like an advertisement at me. I also started getting certain links opened accidentally, that would open in Edge browser, which I never use, and the results would be provided by Bing, which I also never use.

Thailand is a strange place as far as their constant "get over here! now go away!" attitude towards foreigners is concerned. On the one side, their entire GDP is heavily dependent upon tourism and outside visitors, but at the same time they seem to have this objective to periodically purge the people that decide to stay here long-term, which is a lot of people.

Thailand's roads are relatively peaceful, well, if you can accept the fact that you are always in danger of dying on them. As the country that routinely ranks 1st or 2nd in road deaths in the world, this is a situation that the government tries to prevent the world from seeing when they are advertising it for tourism purposes but you only need to operate a vehicle here for a little while before you start to realize the lawlessness of the roads here.