vediovis

Hi Pattaya parents

Our daughter is 13 months and we think she should start to meet friends and other children.

Every time we go to the beach or in a crowded place, she is very interested in other babies or young children.

If I was in Europe or in the US, I would try to put her 1 or 2 afternoons per week in a creche or a nursery to help her to start socialising a little bit.

Here in Pattaya I absolutely don't know if these kind of places exist, and if I can trust them: I don't wish to discover problems and horrible stories afterward, if you see what I mean.

So this is my question: you who have young children, how do you manage this kind of things? Where do you go with your babies to help them to make (good) friends?

There as well another solution: if there are parents looking for other parents to spend time together during week ends, you can contact me: we will try to have our babies spending time together a little bit.

Thanks!

Stef

I'm looking for an health for my baby.

She is 9.5 months old, and she has Thai and French nationality.

I need an insurance accepted in Memorial Hospital, Bangkok Hospital and in any governmental hospitals. If anything happens to her, I want her to be covered.

After a few days of investigation, I'm completely lost. For example Muang Thai company never tells us the same thing, and nobody has the same price.

I found this web page: http://www.onlypacka...om/?page_id=757

But the best advice I could have would be from people sharing their own experiences.

So guys, if you have a little one with health insurance, can you please tell me:

1 - Which one you use
2 - How much you pay
3 - How it was when you used it:  Did you have to advance the money, was it easy, and was the coverage enough?

Thank you very much for sharing, I need to find one this week

Cheers

Stef

Hi Guys

Everything is in the title.

We are located in Nongprue and there's poor water for 2 weeks now. It's going worst since yesterday as there's no water at all anymore.

My wife regularly calls the water company to have news but she rarely has the same story. And we never saw a technician.

It seems they have 2 problems:
    - one with the global pump near the water reserve, they said this low pressure problem concerns everyone in Pattaya and they try to fill a water tower to use natural pressure.
    - They said this morning the North Nongrpue water pipe was broken too so that's why there's no water at all in our house.

As I cannot do anything about it, I want to know if anybody else has the same problem and if it is really global in Pattaya and around. It will help me to prepare my tactic to try to find a solution.

I rent the house so I cannot decide on my own to put a water tank and 2 pumps, and my landlord doesn't seem very concerned. It's quite bad we don't have one, because at least you can order water to somebody and have showers and toilets. It's a problem for the baby as well, our daughter is 7 months, I let you imagine the conditions for her showers and food preparation/washing. Nothing to do, impossible to know how long it's going to be....

Anybody else in this situation, or is it only for us ?.......

@++

Stef

I recently moved in a nice house in Nongprue and unfortunately, I started to have big problems with my TOT web connection here. It's difficult to have phone and Internet at the same time, and the Adsl connection can crash very often, and sometimes during long hours. It was quite a big surprise as the previous connection I had in Soi Bongkot was very good. I called technicians a lot of time and they told me they have problems with the big cable in this area. I asked the previous technician who took care f me before and he confirmed me TOT still tries to fix a lot of things in the Nongprue area.

Bad luck, I didn't know that before moving here, and I need the web. I use Skype to call my family in Europe (!!!) and I have some professional contacts there as well. I have some servers in the U.S. (!!!) to take care and I need to access them sometimes. Internet is a must have for me, mostly outside of Thailand (!!!).

So after reading some post on ThaiVisa, I decided to give SOPHON Cable a chance. Here is the report:

My wife gave them a call a Thursday at 5pm to ask of we can use their services in our place. It was no problem, they will send technicians the day after at 11am. Only point, we have to pay all the package in advance. I chose a 8Mb for 6 months, it was around 7,500Baht to pay to the technicians the day after when they come to install their cable. And here we go.

The staff is very friendly and good technicians. They are so good willing that they come I advance. Imagine you make appointment at 11am and see them coming at 10am when you just woke up and still had no shower : it is a lot of fun for you and your wife...... Anyway they are quite good, and installed the cable in a few minutes. They have excellent communication skills and work very professionally. For that part, it is a real pleasure. They took the money, 7,500 Baht and left 20 minutes after coming.

Then the troubles began: impossible to access youtube and facebook. We complained on the phone, where people certified us they block no websites and no services. Technicians came back 20 minutes after the call, to be sure I could access these websites. It was very nice from them. A that point, I could access facebook and youtube. Hmmm, part of it. I still can't play MafiaWars and some Facebook urls still seem to be inaccessible. Difficult to tell them It was very slow, they just plugged the cable and it seems it was necessary to wait for a while for everything to be OK.

So I decided to wait for a few days, as maybe it took time to finish the installation in their system. But it is more than 10 days now.  And here is the situation:

When it works, TOT is cheaper then Sophon and work very much better than them in my place. Sophon became my second and emergency connection but is quite impossible to use for anything.  To throw 7,500 Baht by the window would have been the same for me.

- I cant access several websites. For example, the domain name ThaiVisa is impossible to reach from my Sophon connection. Unhappy people from Sophon don't complain on the ThaiVisa forum for the simple reason they cannot access it. I use my TOT connection to read the classifieds, the forums and to post his message. It's very funny to see http://speedtest.thaivisa.com/ working fine on TOT and crashing with Sophon. Not only the domain name is unreachable, but the applet is refused as well

- Facebook and its applications are working.... like with an old style RTC Modem. Hmmm, no. Facebook is not working. I switched to Sophon 4 hours ago today and I still can't read my facebook page or access any game [Google Chrome error message: Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error.]

- I certainly have 8Mb for websites located inside of Thailand. If my wife tries to surf on sanook , she has no problem. But we cannot do anything else with it. When I make some speed test with http://speedtest.adslthailand.com/ , I can see I have very poor connection with the rest of the world. I have 0.1Mb with the U.S. and not a lot of more with the UK. The good days, I can reach 0.280Mb in UK but I never had better than this result. The test crashes all the time at the upload part as I cannot upload anything anywhere.

- So, I an confirm I have NO upload capacity. The other day I needed to upload by ftp a 6Ko file to one of my website. Filezilla is still trying to do it. I had to wait for my TOT connection to come back to upload the file. I had the same problem to upload a picture in a website to update my profile: my pic never reached the concerned websites. I had to do it with my other connection.  Even web forms are difficult to submit. Same for emails. My Thunderbird regularly refuses to send anything during hours, my wife has the same problem with her outlook. There's no upload capacity with my Sophon connection. I cannot send anything anywhere.

- In these conditions, Skype is useless. Impossible to call my grand mother or anybody else on my Skype. I can chat by Skype with people, but I cannot call them. This is very disappointing for me.

- For a reason I ignore, I can't have MSN from Pidgin using the Sophon connection. This is very strange for me. There's no problem to use the Messenger protocol from a Windows 7 machine and the official messenger, but MSN with Pidgin under my Linux Ubuntu is a no no with Sophon. This is more than strange.

It is ifficult to blame the technicians who came in my place, or the lady on the phone. They are wonderful professionals. But there's obviously a problem with everything international with the Sophon packages, and I'm quite an international Internet user.

So, this is the situation today. In the Nongprue Area, TOT has big problems with their backbone or whatever and they have to regularly reset ports. The technicians came twice and said everything was OK in my house but the problem was on their infrastructures. So the Internet connection is very unstable with them. When it works, it works very well, but these moments are quite rare. Just now, when I write this message, my router has only one light of three switched on, it means it cannot reach ADSL and Internet even if I reset it and reboot it. This is for more than 2 days now. The day before, their connection worked only during 1h even with 4 phone calls to the support during the day.  I don't use filter anymore as I renounced to have phone to privilege the ADSL connection. The internet cable is direct to the socket but it changes nothing.

At the same time, Sophon  cable cost me 7,500Baht to try it, and it is impossible to do anything with it. It's totally useless for me. The money is totally lost and was paid for nothing.

I don't know what to do at this stage: try another provider? Buy a third Internet connection? But i's impossible to test before trying, nobody can guaranty a minimum bandwidth and once you start something you have to stay for month or years.

Hi

I'm looking for musicians interested in playing during week ends here in Pattaya. We can find a special place and rehearsal is totally allowed if we do it private.

We're not dead yet and I know some of us need to play with people to feel better.

Metallica Judas Priest or Loso, it can be good fun to switch on the Marshall and to crash the Paiste and Symbians.

Any drummer, bassman or singers, there?

Cheers

Stef