If you are a foreigner living in Thailand and thinking of driving to travel Thailand, you’ll firstly need to get a Thai driving licence.

You can only legally do this when all of your other paperwork for living in Thailand is up together. Some people say that you can drive on international licences and even with your home country’s driving licence, however, the rules are extremely sketchy on this, so to be totally sure it pays to get a Thai driving licence.

To get a licence, you need to go to the nearest licencing depot. If you can speak Thai you can choose any you like, but if you cannot speak Thai it is probably best to go to a depot in a tourist area or near Silom.

I’m not sure about other countries, but if you have a UK licence you only need to take a sight and reactions test, rather than the driven test and written test.

In Thailand they place a lot of emphasis on whether or not your vision is up to scratch or not. If you are colour blind, the bad news is that it will be difficult to get a licence in Thailand. The reactions test usually involves stepping on a fake accelerator pedal when the light turns red. The sight test seems to vary, but usually involves a coloured dot test and a periferral vision test where you have to say which colours are popping up.

The Thai driving rules are based on the UK’s driving system, but as you’ll find out, the driving is quite different.

You will initially be given a one year licence, although you can apply for a 5 year licence when the 1 year licence is due to expire. After the 5 year licence expires you will have to take the sight test again to make sure your vision is up to scratch.

One thing to bare in mind is that when you flash your lights in Thailand it means ‘Stop, I’m coming through!’ and not that you are giving way. I made the mistake of stopping and flashing a car which in turn made him stop and in the end resulted in him screeching off in a mood.

People rarely stop at a zebra crossing and the feeling is that the bigger the vehicle, the more right it has to come through. Pedestrians having the ultimate right of way does not exist in reality whilst driving in Thailand. Cross a zebra croosing on foot whilst expecting traffic to stop is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette. So to travel Thailand by car it is best to be fully aware as if you are on an English driving test with the examiner about to slap a book on the dashboard for an emergency stop.

If you happen to break down or drain your battery by leaving your lights on, or even have a puncture, you’ll be surprised at how Thai people will try to help you. Thai people in general are very kind and will often help you if they can.

If you hit a motorbike it’s your fault full stop usually. This can be frustrating as motorbikes will often come at you from the wrong direction.

Your night vision should be good, as at least fifty percent of motorbikes have had the back light taken out. If anyone knows the reason for this please leave a comment. I still cannot fathom the reasons behind this one, through Western logic anyway.

As for buying a car, you’ll find that second hand cars are quite expensive. This is partly because cars don’t rust very fast because of the heat and hold their value more.

At the time of writing this blog, car tax is about 1,600 baht per year. They have come up with a great idea that you’ll find at some Department of Transport depots . . . drive through car tax points. You just queue up and it takes about 3 minutes to pay for your car tax and receive your documents, as if you were ordering a burger!

New cars are again quite expensive, especially imported cars not assembled in Thailand. Cars that have plants in Thailand seem to be less hammered with tax, such as Honda or Toyota for example.

You can overtake on the inside or outside on a motorway and be prepared for some intense veering by other cars.

In Bangkok the stress of driving is often intense, but when you drive outside of Bangkok it is more of a pleasant experience.

One plus point is that traffic speed is slower in general compared to the West.

There are many beautiful places to visit in Thailand and with a car you can skip taxis and tours etc.

It takes a few months to settle into driving and recognising the unique hazards in Thailand, such as stray dogs and motorbikes coming at you from the opposite direction. However, once you’ve been around the learning curve and dealt with the initial culture shock, your reward is more comfort and freedom. Thailand is full of beauty just waiting to be explored with a set of wheels. The most convenient way to travel Thailand.

The game of pool/billiards and billiards games originates from games playing on grass similar to croquet.
Around the 15th century,in Northern Europe, someone had the bright idea to make a version of the croquet for indoors, most probably to avoid the rain. This involved a wooden table and a green table cloth to represent indoor grass. Edging was placed around the sides of the tables to stop balls flying off onto the floor and balls were shoved instead of being shot around the table. The wooden sticks that were used for this indoor version of croquet were called ‘maces’. The word billiards is thought to have originated from the French word ‘billart’ and France is thought to be the most likliest place that billiards games originate from.
Most accounts of the earliest games of pool come from accounts of games played by royalty and nobles. However, this game was familiar enough to all types of people that even Shakespeare mentioned the game in ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’

In the 1600s the cue stick came along because the ‘mace’ could not get at the balls easily that were frozen on the rail due to it’s large croquet like head. Although players of this game would reverse the mace and use the handle instead to get over this inconvenience. The handle of the mace was called a ‘queue’ which translates to ‘tail’. No doubt the added challenge of using the ‘queue’ instead of the head end of the mace turned this game into something quite different.

The rails on the table as we have said before was soley for keeping balls on the table, however players started to use these rails in strategic play. The rails resembled river banks which is where they got the name ‘banks’ as in ‘bank shots’.

Then from the 1800s came the addition of chalk to add friction, vulcanised rubber from Goodyear, the two-piece cues and the leather cue tips.

English visitors to America explained how to put side on the ball, which is why it is called ‘English’ in America. Although now as you know, America has taken billiards games and added a lot to it and has now become part of American culture, producing many world class players to boot.

English billiards was the most popular game before billiards as we know it today which involved 3 balls and the standard 6 pockets. Then, the arrival of American Fifteen Ball Pool marked a new era in the game of pool.

Why is the game now known as ‘pool’? Well, it comes from a pool of players making a bet as a group. Hence the word ‘pool room’ where players and spectators would wager bets.

After, Eight Ball pool came about just after the 1900s and then Straight Pool, with Nine Ball pool coming about last in the 1920s.

In the early croquet type indoor game, women were often not allowed to use the ‘queue’ end of the mace as it was thought that they might tear the cloth. Quite unfairly, men were often only allowed to use the queue end. So it is nice to see in modern days, women excelling at billiards games as well as men.

Danny Basavich, a.k.a ‘Kid Delicious’ is perhaps one of the greatest hustlers in pool billiards ever known, and also one of the most interesting pool players ever too. Kid Delicious emanates personality and has a unique playing style.
He plays now at professional level in pool billiards tournaments, but he started off as a hustler. Not just any old hustler, a highly skilled and clever hustler, using the fact that he was overweight to his advantage. Danny Basavich would stuff dollars into his trousers and target a pool hall where amateurs were playing.

Kid Delicious Life Story & Highlights Video:

When we get older, especially into old age, it seems as if our memory is not quite what it used to be. We forget phone numbers easier and misplace our glasses as well as forget many other things that were easier to remember when we were younger.

The sad fact is that neurons in the brain steadily decline and die as we grow older. So, the answer to the question as to whether memory gets worse with age is ‘yes’. However, we will look at ways in this post to actually improve your memory. So hang fire, as there is good news for older people in store.

Professor Arthur Shimmamura from the University of Berkeley has done studies into the effects of memory loss as we go into old age and has identified three main ways in which our mental capacities to remember things change.

1) Mental Quickness

Due to reduced efficiency in the way the brain’s neurons work as we grow older, our mental speed reduces. For instance, if you sat a teenager down to play a fast-paced driving game against a man in his eighties there are no prizes to guessing who would win. Quite often we find ourselves pottering along behind a slow moving (usually beige coloured car for some reason) car with a older couple driving. This is not because they are retired and find annoying people who are late for work good fun. This is because they are taking extra care driving as their mental speed has slowed with age.

2) Learning Ability

The temporal lobes control our abilities to pick up new skills and are vulnerable to the effects of ageing. If you are young and are learning a new instrument or want to learn a new language you will pick it up a lot quicker than in your later years. Just look at the rate very young children learn to speak.

3) Working Memory

If you picture your short-term memory as a whiteboard with everyday tasks to remember written in marker pen. When we are older this board is cleared pretty quickly due to the marker pen fading fast. When we are younger we are able to retain more in our short-term memory, so the marker pen would be more permanent in our whiteboard example. These short-term memories become more vulnerable and affected by distractions or tasks that we must undertake.

The ‘Working Memory’ system is located in the frontal lobes which are the most vulnerable part of the brain that is affected by old age. Whereas the temporal lobes handle ‘Learning Ability’.

So . . . here is the positive part of this post. The part where it is revealed that it is not all doom and gloom. There is a method to combat the effect of ageing on our memories. And let’s face it, it’s good news for everyone, because all of us will become older – there’s not much we can do to escape that one.

There is evidence to support the ‘Use It Or Lose It’ theory. You may have noticed that people who are older but have never lost interest in learning appear more switched on. This is because stimulating the brain by new learning experiences gives rise to the sprouting out and lengthening of the connecting nerve fibres in the brain. This has been proven in tests where they’ve kept animals in stimulating environments and unstimulating environments.

Have you ever sat down to watch a quiz show and seen someone who is older really shine and even beat younger contestants? This is because they’ve never given up on exploring new learning opportunities.

Professor Shimmamura did studies on several groups of people: intellectually active university professors compared to people of the same age. It was found that the mentally active older professors in their sixties were far superior to there contemporaries and also as good as younger people.

I personally know people who are older but mentally active and also people who have settled for the same routine day in and day out, and I can see a marked difference in how mentally sharp they come across as.

So, in a nutshell, if you are no longer interested in learning to stretch your mental capacities, favouring watching the TV with a cup of tea in a non-challenging job, prepare for an easy life, but bare in mind that you will end up a bit doolalee in your old age.

However, if you fill your life with new experiences and continue to learn about the world, you can not only train yourself to have a good memory, but you stand a chance of having just as good a memory as someone much younger.

I did have one last thing to say to add to the end of this old age and memory blog post . . . but I can’t remember what it was;)

Many families fail to eat together now because of shift work or hurrying around, not to mention fast food options for busy people on the move. The series of American books titled ‘One Minute Bedtime Stories’ have become best sellers, as it enables busy mums to fit in at least a minute to read to their children. Motorists rushing from place to place are prone to road rage or curse other motorists under their breath. What is stress in hurry sickness? Read on . . .
The term ‘Hurry Sickness’ was coined by a well known cardiologist about 45 years ago who noticed that all of his patients who were suffering from heart disease showed similar behavioural characteristics.

Hurry Sickness also involves rudeness, increased aggression, together with stress related illnesses, such as high blood pressure for instance. It is brought on by the population explosion and increasing competitiveness. Technology that is irresistible to use, and that we are pressured to use to keep up with modern times brings work home with us. How many people do you see walking around chatting on a mobile phone or playing a game, oblivious to what is going on around them. You sometimes even see couples sitting for a meal with one or both of them tapping away at facebook or some other app.

Many people have lost their sense of belonging to a community, in favour of more worldwide social trends, and with that our personal lives are more public than ever before. Many people are lonely because of Hurry Sickness as they feel apart from other people. They may go shopping and not really recognise the people as people, just other shoppers getting in the way.

Hurry sickness may be one of the key elements to the question “What is stress?”

Social media sites become a place of ‘belonging’ instead for people with Hurry Sickness, as they join groups and gain little rewards through email for playing games, so that they feel some sort of accomplishment and accepted into these groups.

People with Hurry Sickness start to get annoyed when anyone or anything slows them down in their hectic day’s regime, just look at the faces of people standing in a queue at the supermarket and you can see.

New vocabulary has sprung out of Hurry Sickness, such as ‘multi-tasking’, which basically means getting blood out of a stone, and the usual target is an overworked employee. There is also the ‘change is good’ cliche used by businesses intending to axe middle management and stack all the work on the senior manager’s desks. This usually involves a few in-house condescending leaflets sent to employees before carrying out the ‘change is good’ cut backs. This may also involve cut backs for employees, more multi-tasking or a bar code scanner to track employees for instance. There is no more feeling proud that you’ve worked for a company for many years these days. Most companies will tell you that you are only as good as your last 6 months track record. Then, when you become older, they’ll sit in a back office somewhere and work out ways to lay you off. As if you are just a statistic instead of a real person.

So, what can we do about all this hurrying around and being carried along with the hurricane of Hurry Sickness?

Reading though treatments of people suffering from stress due to their hectic lifestyles, one idea is to re-examine your belief system. Hurry Sickness is so widespread that you feel that it is normal, as everyone else is doing the same. However, just because it is a popular belief system, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is right. For example, people used to believe in witches in Europe and religious fanatics burnt or drowned thousands of innocent people on ‘witch hunts’. I bet it seemed normal back then to believe in witches, just like it’s normal now to rush around, feeling cut off from other people and not noticing your surroundings half the time.

So take a few days off – go fishing, or take more breaks and do something that you love to do. Turn off the computer and don’t even think about the 1000 or so friends on facebook, let’s face it, most of them you don’t even know anyway. Re-examine your routine and weed out what is really unnecessary in your life.

I have been one of the worst for cramming my time with productive activities and work lately, which is why I picked this subject to blog about. I have recently halved my workload and take more regular breaks and feel a lot more ‘whole’ because of it.

Please leave a comment with any ideas you may have for escaping ‘Hurry Sickness’ and any answers to the question of  “What is stress?”as it will be interesting to compare different peoples methods and to hear your opinion.