Thai Life
Thailand guides, travel tips, cultural insights, and essential local information—discover everything you need to know about living, visiting, and experiencing the Land of Smiles. Get the latest from The Thaiger, your trusted source for Thailand guides.
-
Sponsored Limited-time deal: Save 20% on Cigna's expat health plans forever
Starting a new life abroad is exciting—new culture, new lifestyle, and new chances to grow. But living far from home also means taking steps to protect your health in unfamiliar surroundings. Without the right coverage, even small health issues can...
-
Phuket Property: Natural Selection
PHUKET: Kamala is an area full of designer condos and luxurious sprawling villas. To really find any privacy and escape the construction in a part of Phuket that’s being built every hour of every day is no easy task. Kamala Waterside will be a tropical oasis situated on one rai of land in one of the most sought after addresses…
-
Phuket Diving: Just take a deep breath
PHUKET: Nobody wants to be the “heavy breather” – especially when you’re diving in Phuket’s waters. Unfortunately, they are out there, and for sometime I was one. My breathing was the limiting factor on any dive and not my decompression limit. Most instructors, dive masters and dive buddies are nice about it, but prematurely coming to the surface can hurt…
-
Phuket Gazette: Book and film review
PHUKET: Oliver Stone’s new movie is Savages, a thriller about the drug trade in Laguna Beach, California. Starring a roll call of Hollywood A-listers – Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta – the film is based on a crime novel by Don Winslow. A former Private Investigator in real life, Winslow has written 15 novels and is…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: Mermaids do exist
PHUKET: We all know the power of a beautiful woman. It isn’t the power of brute strength – they have a much subtler influence. Sirens can confuse even the cleverest among men. In Homer’s The Odyssey, sirens sang an enchanted song to Odysseus and his crew. The song caused them to steer off course towards jagged cliffs – nearly colliding…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: Paying it forward with a gift that keeps on giving
PHUKET: A student from Phuket who was forced to turn to charity to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor has graduated as one of this year’s top honors graduates from Prince of Songkhla University in Nakhon Pathom. Thirawat Jewpakanon won first class honors, was named as a top-ten student in a class of 190, led his 30-member intern rankings…
-
Phuket student wins national English-language speech award
PHUKET: Phuket Wittayalai School student Tevin Thiplueporn was among the winners in a national English-language speech competition organized by the Ministry of Education earlier this month. Winner of the Matthayom 4-6 category in the National Speech Contest 2012, Tevin impressed the judges with his off-the-cuff speech on the topic:”How to Encourage People to Enhance English Ability”. “Among tips of effective…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: The big zipper
PHUKET: Keeping with the idea that people and modern primates were once related by a distant cousin, I’d like to make a comparison. Humans are social like primates, we use tools like they do and we have the same urge to swing recklessly through the tops of trees for sheer amusement. Such amusement is available in our back yard (a…
-
Discovering Phuket’s “must have’ fashions
PHUKET: Trends in fashion can be bewildering from one generation to another, but they help us to recognize significant periods and events in time. This is true for Europe and other Western cultures, but it doesn’t seem to work like that for people living here in Asia. Spotting what will become a trend is something designers can do with ease.…
-
Phuket Diving: PADI centers clean up Phuket
PHUKET: After coming face to face with shattered coral reef systems all over the world and confronting messes of plastic bags and tangled fishing nets, which are not-so-slowly strangling one of the world’s most important ecosystems, divers understand the importance of reef cleanups. There is of course that feeling of only delaying the inevitable, but isn’t that why we try…
-
Phuket Property: Resort-property sales lag behind tourism
PHUKET: The hotel business in Phuket is booming as tourists flood the island, but sales of resort properties have failed to benefit, according to CBRE Research’s Phuket Property Report.“Despite healthy increases in tourism arrivals, [for now we are not] seeing a proportional increase in sales in the resort property market. Rising tourism numbers are mainly from Asia, whose tourists have…
-
Phuket Culture: Getting ready for the rains retreat
PHUKET: This weekend’s full moon heralds the official start of the rainy season in Thailand, marked by back-to-back Buddhist Holidays, Asaha Bucha and Khao Pansa. For non-Buddhists, the long “dry” weekend to welcome the “wet” season is a good opportunity to relax, if nothing else. For most devout Buddhists, however, there is much deeper meaning and purpose to the holy…
-
Phuket Diving: Gear and skills part the waters
PHUKET: When was the last time something truly fresh hit the dive market? Yes, every year we get niftier regulators, more swanky dive watches and new fin designs that we can’t resist at least window-shopping for. But, when was the last time something was put on the market for recreational divers that really parted the waters – changed the way…
-
Phuket Books: Present at the creation
PHUKET: Carole King is a 70-year-old grandmother with four adult children from two of her four husbands. At age 48, she took up with a 27-year-old actor and kept him for six years before swapping him for another younger man for another seven. She did this because she could. She is Carole King. For the 25 million people who bought…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: Raise up your glasses (and your expectations)
PHUKET: Recently, the owner of the Wine Lovers wine shop in Chalong asked me to assist at a wine tasting with a different twist. Instead of comparing the merits of the wines, we were to compare the various merits of the wine glasses themselves – a “glass” tasting. Now, I am aware of the almost mystical properties that some glassware…
-
Phuket People: From Yala to “la la la’
PHUKET: Warunee ‘Gig’ Suwannurak is no ordinary singer. The Phuket-based diva, and recent ‘Thailand’s Got Talent’ sensation tells her story to the Phuket Gazette. Her powerful delivery of Pink’s (rendition of) What’s Up in the first round of Thailand’s Got Talent competition received a rapturous applause from the spellbound audience. One of the three judges proclaimed: “This woman will go…
-
Phuket Health: Doctor’s orders – eat dark chocolate
PHUKET: Scientists have known for a long time about the protective effects of this “magic food” on atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). I call it “magic food” because the full official name of the main component in dark chocolate is Theobroma Cocoa or “Food of God” – from the Greek words theo (God) and broma (drink). Supposedly, cocoa has been…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: APEC launches photo contest
PHUKET: THE Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Secretariat has extended an invitation to the region’s photographers to submit pictures that best capture the organization’s priorities. The photos should be inspired by four themes: trade and investment liberalization regional economic integration strengthening food security establishing reliable supply chains intensive cooperation to foster innovative growth These themes reflect the policy priorities that APEC…
-
Phuket Gardening – Cavalcade of Cassias
PHUKET: With the tennis season in full swing, sports addicts are hitting the covers off yellow balls, or watching day-glo missiles hurtle over the net on TV. Yellow is, apparently, more visible than the conventional white of my tennis-playing days. Yet this most vibrant of colors has plenty of negative associations. Yellow has traditionally been the color of cowardice, a…
-
Phuket Fashion – From dawn till dusk
PHUKET: Everyone has days that are scheduled to the max – overbooked and jam-packed with meetings, lunches, get-togethers and parties. For many women, the challenge is how to make one outfit work for everything that a busy schedule demands. Maintaining great style throughout the day doesn’t come easy, but with a little planning, flexibility and resourcefulness, you’ll find a way…
-
Phuket Diving: Knowledge trumps beauty of ignorance: sea snakes edition
PHUKET: Not every dive in Phuket’s waters, but often enough, a diver comes across a critter that they become inexplicably and completely fascinated with. The vast majority of dive instructors and masters seem to have their own sea-animal fetishes – from blue dragons to mantis shrimps. They’re usually obscure choices that lean away from charismatic mega-fauna like sharks and mantas…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: A head start ahead of the rest
PHUKET: Saturday is usually a fun day for everyone. It’s the beginning of the weekend and most people are looking forward to spending time doing what they want to do, and being with the ones they love. Saturday, June 30 was an especially happy day for students of the HeadStart International School (HSIS). It wasn’t just a regular Saturday but…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: Art Dinners designed to expose local artists
PHUKET: Michael Earle is an architect and local magazine publisher with a mission to expose and support Phuket’s local artists. “I moved to the island three years ago after working as an architect in Spain for many years. I immediately noticed a great number of interesting art galleries operated mainly by local Thai artists in Phuket Town. They were not…
-
Phuket Diving: Rhythm of the night
PHUKET: Watching the sun set behind Koh Doc Mai from the top deck of Sea Bees Excalibur II, an adventurous thrill creeps through me – I’m going on a night dive, and it’s been ages. When was the last time you went night diving? For most of us it was probably part of our advance diver training, and maybe we…
-
Thai Gallery – Patima Khunpromkessara
PHUKET: Troubles in the southern provinces of Thailand are real and constant. Political unrest results in a spate of bombings, taking the lives of many and the problems look set to continue. Born and raised in Yala, Patima Khunpromkessara remembers just the opposite. “It was a neat little town. Do you know that we have a town plan similar to…
-
Phuket Entertainment: Impaling history
PHUKET: Film-makers love revising history to suit a story. Some, such as Oliver Stone, weave their fabrications so subtly into the weft and warp of historical accuracy that they can become instant conspirators. Others, such as Quentin Tarantino, strip history down to its underpants and strap a silly hat on its head, before shooting it, blowing it up and, just…
-
Looking Back: A brief history of Thai-US relations
PHUKET: Diplomatic relations between Thailand and the United States date back to the early 19th century. The United States was founded only a few decades earlier, when thirteen of Great Britain’s colonies in the Americas declared their independence on July 2, 1776. The USA was a young nation, more concerned with preserving its new found freedom than becoming a great…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: The mighty Mekong – ‘Mother of Water’
PHUKET: Tourists visiting Thailand for the first time might be forgiven for thinking that “Mekong” is nothing more than a cheap local whiskey. But mention the word to almost any Thai national and you’ll proudly be informed that it is a mighty river. He or she might go on to say that its name means “Mother of Water”. In a…
-
Phuket Gardening: Mellow yellow
PHUKET: Few other yellow flowers can compete with the golden opulence of a sunflower, chalice vine or allamanda in full bloom. But that does not lessen the value of less spectacular garden inhabitants. Take the galphimia or “shower of gold”, which is sometimes referred to as thryallis in books on gardening. To give it a human epithet, this small, compact…
-
Phuket Lifestyle: The “Dean’ of Thai Silk
PHUKET: Fashion can seem like an enigma, its true meaning obscured by smoke and mirrors; a touch of sparkle here, a well established line there, and you’ve made the dress of the season – though no one quite knows how. What is trendy today is later passé and might be the trend again someday – 30 years down the road.…
-
Phuket Life: Young scribes come of age
PHUKET: Koji Maehara is a rare gem. Born in Tokyo on December 26, 2000 to parents who are both Japanese and non-native English speakers, he was taught to speak English before he learned Japanese.Although his mum does speak English as a second language, he usually speaks Japanese with her at home, but always English with his brother.His proficiency in English…
Don't forget to check out some other things to do in Thailand - get help starting a business or finding a job in Thailand, buy Thailand property, rent a yacht or book a medical procedure worldwide.