# Oddball Travel Tips



## gino (Jul 20, 2009)

1.	If you’re bringing cash from the States, exchange any old-fashioned Benjamins for the new bug-eyed bills before you travel. Some of the currency exchanges are skittish about the old bills and some use electronic scanners that don’t recognize them.
2.	Aspirin are cheaper than candy in the States. I’m not sure about Thailand, but in the Philippines they are sold by the pill in little blister packs. 
3.	DVDs. I thought everybody in Asia used jail-broken region-free DVD players. But not at my hotel. I brought some DVDs that will play on my laptop, but not on the big screen television in my room. Local DVDs are a hit or miss proposition. I bought a copy of _Little Big Soldier_ that was nicely encrypted and seems to be a legitimate copy, but _Case 39_ was an obvious bootleg with murky shadow detail. You can’t always tell the bootlegs from the legitimate copies. Or at least I can’t. I bought three copies of the Twins’ _Samba_ before I found a legitimate version. But some titles and vendors are more suspicious than others. _Edge of Darkness_ won’t be released for another week, but copies are available on the street, sans jacket.
4.	Razors. Gilette has a strong presence in Thailand, but I haven’t seen any Power Fusion razors or cartridges. Fortunately I brought enough cartridges for my trip. 
5.	Unlocked iPhones work well, but they charge more for service if it’s not a Thai model.
6.	I still haven’t figured out how to put goofy Thai street addresses into my Garmin GPS navigator. 
7.	If you’re planning on importing lumber, you might consider that some Thai buildings don’t use finished lumber for their studs.


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## hydroman (Feb 21, 2010)

Yes you are very correct my wife banks with K bank at Future Park if the notes even look old they just hand then back. In MBK I think third floor there is an exchange booth they exchange any old torn up notes. As for phones my wife when she was working for a company in Thailand she had a contract phone you don’t get a free phone, calls cost the same as pay as you go and you need to pay 500B a mouth + calls what a barging. DVDs in Thailand 5years ago you would have found it hard to find a DVD they used VCD what a let down just as you got into the film you needed disc 2, when I moved there and got a home I got the latest LG DVD payer wow got it home put the films I had brought from the UK it just said no disc, my wife sorted out by phoning LG just need to press a button or 2 and enter some code. As for the sticks they use when building your home its amazing it ever got that far, have you seen there ladders yet they are the same old sticks just nailed together


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## gino (Jul 20, 2009)

*Vcd*

I have a couple of Thai movies on VCD, as well as a couple of old Shu Qi titles that aren’t available on DVD. The only attraction to the medium is it’s easy to bootleg. The image quality is very poor due to a low bitrate of 1.15 megabits/second which compares to a VHS tapes. DVDs offer a maximum bitrates of 10 mbit/s and Blueray offers 48 mbit/s. Part of that is allocated to selectable audio tracks and subtitles, but most of it impacts the quality of the video. High compression results in muddied colors, loss of detail and less fluid motion. 

Thai taxi cabs are painted in bright colors that only an interior decorator can correctly identify, but their movies are in muddied pastels due to over-compression to fit on bootleg VCDs.


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