Svenn

Are there any records of attacks/bombings on the route from Narathiwat airport to the Malay border?  I'm trying to get  a sense of how dangerous it really is...  we don't have the time or money to fly to Kuala Lumpur then another flight to Bharu.  Should I (white farang) wear an islamic cap and my gf wear a headscarf or something to avoid being killed?  Should we take a taxi or minivan between the airport and border?

I just bought an Ipod Nano for m'lady in Thailand, am sending it in the mail to her tomorrow for x-mas and would really appreciate if anyone knows of a website online that would have ipod nano instructions in Thai i could print out for her (obviously the one I bought from walmart here is all in english, but i did change the nano itself into thai format).  

Related, her laptop is old, and our house in Ubon has slowish internet.... do you think she'll be able to find an internet cafe in Ubon where someone could download songs/videos for her?

thanks

I have never seen a Thai curry recipe for Westerners where you get the authentic Thai curry appearance of a thin layer of coconut oil on top of the coconut milk... how does one do that?  All the thai curries I make just end up with a whitish, uniform color, but I followed the recipe to the letter.  I found this excerpt:

Coconut milk is the base of most Thai curries. Contrary to western ideas of working with cream, to make the curry sauce, coconut cream is first reduced over fairly high heat to break down the cream and allow the oil to separate. The curry paste is then added and fried in the coconut oil  until all the herb and spice flavors are released and blended before  the rest of the coconut milk is added to make the sauce. Finished Thai  curries will have a thin layer of oil floating on top of the sauce.  This oil picks up the color of the curries – bright red for red curry, glistening green for green curry,  and so on – giving them a lovely appearance rather than a dull, whitish  sameness. The color serves as a reminder of their true nature – spicy  hot from red and green chillies and not creamy and bland.

I'm not sure what this all means, but it seems to be what I'm talking about.  Any help?

Interested in increasing the water pressure in my house, I'm sure it's been discussed millions of times here but the only search results I could get on this forum were 'foot massage for less than 200 baht' or some other irrelevant crap.  I've just arrived in our 10 month old house to find the faucets and shower basically drip out water with less pressure than I can muster myself in the urinal ... we went to Lotus today and they had pumps for about 5000 baht, but apparently one needs to buy a large storage tank with them as well?  which Lotus didn't have of course.  If anyone remembers any threads discussing this, please point me to them.

I assume then every modern thai house has a pump?  because without one, this situation is comically ridiculous... what's the point of paying for plumbing and fixtures if they don't even work?   When the school nearby opens, apparently there's not hardly any water at all here.  

anyway, thanks for any help

Wondering if any of you living in the eastern Isaan area have any particular areas you go to when you want to have the swimming/seafood/beach activities type trip? I'll be in Ubon, with a car, for several weeks and was wondering where we could go for a few days... the Rayong/Chantaburi/Trat coast?  Swimming holes in Laos near Pakse? Mekong mud beaches? on a map the Vietnamese coast is closer to Ubon than southeast Thailand's?  I've been to Koh Chang and Koh Samet, but don't really see the point of spending the extra money and time to go to those islands just for the sake of being on an island with a bunch of tourists, and because I don't remember any decent snorkeling there (and the rain of course).   I guess I'm trying to conform to a more Thai vacation, which would consist of staying on the mainland and eating crab and doing jetskis,  I had fun doing that in Prachuap Kiri Khan, but the water was cold.     My gf tells me the waters of the Mun River used to be clear when she was a kid and one could swim among the fish... are there still places in Isaan like that?