Koh Phi Phi

Patna, ancient Patliputra, stands as historical icon in the era of the battles. It is an eyewitness which saw lots of kingdom rivals, lots of battle ground conflicts, etc.

With duct of time the place has undergone vast changes.Situated on the bank of holy river Ganga,the big city of Patna has invariant tastes of life.

Phi Phi Beach

If we see the infamous monument "Golghar", which was used for storing grains in ancient times, it gives a reflection of the past statue and architect. One can have a remarked of the whole city on seeing from the top of the monument. This monument "Golghar", round dome shaped huge construction presents an exquisite piece of architecture by Garstein.

Apart from that Patna Museum market a vast reserves of ancient unearthed monuments as well as ancient arms & ammunition.

This city is the birthplace of Guru Teg Bahadur and the Patan Saheb Gurudwara is the infamous pilgrim of the Sikhs.

If you go through Daastane Patliputra by Ramjee Mishra Manohar,you will find many unrevealed facts buried deep inside the history. Many monuments were undertaken by Archaeological observe of India after this book was published.

The city of Patna equally has variant types of dishes and its special cuisines. The yummy Jalebi is an awesome preparation of the place. Khaja,Ladoos are some special sweet dishes.

The city has an foremost place on the Railway map and you can find passage to all the places. The trains are available to all nook and corner of the country.

Patna - aged Patliputra

In a good year, in excess of four million habitancy visit Phuket in Thailand. A lot of those visitors will love it. Some will love it so much that they want to live here.

Every year thousands of habitancy come to Phuket hoping to set up a new life on a tropical island. Many of them need to make a living and speedily scrutinize that employment opportunities for foreigners are very limited. So what are their options? Well one of the most likely avenues is to spend in your own business. And what is the easiest business to get into? Owning a bar.

Phi Phi Island

To many habitancy it sounds like a dream. A life on a tropical island, days by the beach and evenings partying in your bar. But does the reality match the dream?

It is something I considered doing when I first arrived in Phuket. I checked out the options; spoke with estate agents, bar owners, even bar girls. In the end, I decided it just wasn't worth it.

I was new to Phuket and still naive to many of the pitfalls that await bar owners but even then, I could see there were so many problems with owning a bar in Phuket. To begin with, 'owning a bar' is a misnomer as you will practically legitimately be leasing and probably at very unfavourable terms.

It is difficult to make a decent living from a bar and in fact most fail in the first two years. Even if your bar does make money, your working status will probably be illegal. The laws in Thailand are stacked against foreigners owning a small business.

As much as all these things concerned me, they were not my biggest concern. The biggest factor in turning me away from owning a bar was the lifestyle. I got to know quite a few bar owners and when I looked at their lives, I knew it wasn't for me. It is just such a crap life.

Don't get me wrong. I love a night on the beer. Even several nights on the beer. But having to do it every night at the same bar as a job? It would soon lose its charm not to mention the confident health problems that go with such a lifestyle.

Since I made that decision to leave the bar business alone, there has not been one second when I have looked back and regretted it. I know fullness of bar owners and reconsider several to be friends but I never envy their lives. Recently, the untimely death of one of those friends legitimately drove it home for me.

He was not yet 50 years old. He owned a bar in one of the sois (side streets) off Soi Bangla in Patong. He was a nice guy, easy going and easy to talk to. Although I saw him no more than once a week, we all the time enjoyed a good chat and he was one of my favourite bar owners.

Over the former year, he had a few health problems. He had been in hospital several times and the guidance from the doctors was plain and clear - stop drinking!

The qoute is it is very difficult to stop drinking when you are a bar owner. The two things that bring customers to these small bars are the girls and the owner. And often the girls will not work very well if the owner is not there.

Regular customers like to have a chat with the owner. Often, if the owner is not there they will just move on to the next bar. Quite naturally for these bars to work, the owner has to be there most of the time.

So couldn't my friend have drunk soft drinks? Well he did that for a few days but the boredom got to him. You spend the evening sitting at your bar, bombarded with the deafening music that these bar complexes seem to think is a good drinking ambience. For a good part of the evening, you may not have any customers, but still you need to be there just in case. You can watch the Tv but you can't hear it. Your only business is the bar girls who are probably nagging for time off or free drink.

And when the customers do arrive, they want to get drunk and they want you to get drunk with them. Of course, it is okay for the customers. If they are on holiday, they are only doing it for two weeks before they return to their quarterly lives. The bar owner is doing it night-after-night, year-after-year.

They offer to buy you drinks and it is bad business not to accept. If you do keep your discipline and stay sober then the evening is insufferable. Drunks are very piquant when you are drunk with them. When you are sober, there is nothing worse than trying to laugh at their inane ramblings.

So despite the doctor's warnings, my friend was soon drinking again. It just goes with the territory of owning a bar; you are going to drink a lot.

It all caught up with my friend. He had a bad motorcycle accident. He never drove drunk but motorcycle accidents happen legitimately out here. He discharged himself from hospital too quickly, again ignoring doctor's advice. His next boozing session was too much for a body that was tired of it. He passed away in his sleep.

The crazy thing is he didn't even need the bar. He had worked hard in his home country and was in a position to retire. I and other friends had tried to persuade him to give it up. The qoute was he was one of the few bar owners who was production a good profit and he found it hard to walk away from a good business. In the end he was too good at being a bar owner for his own good.

The strange thing is most of the habitancy who buy into bars have come to Phuket for a good lifestyle. They want to live in a tropical island paradise. Phuket is their dream home and owning a bar is how they will fund their life here. The qoute is owning a bar excludes them from enjoying the island.

Most bar owners wake up mid-afternoon with a hangover. They lounge colse to their budget apartment shaking off the hangover until it is time to go into the bar and start work again. They could do this anywhere. Phuket's glorious beaches, islands and other traveler attractions are irrelevant to the bar owners because they hardly see them.

I know a concentrate of bar owners who did not even know there had been a tsunami until the evening when they set off to work. I know someone else who after three years in Phuket had not yet seen Phang Nga Bay, Phi Phi Islands, Nai Yang Beach, Nai Harn Beach, in fact in any place more than a few kilometers from Patong.

I don't want to totally put off possible bar owners. I just want to open their eyes to the sort of life they will be buying into. I think for the right type of character, under the right circumstances, it is an okay option. If you are young, you can handle this lifestyle much better. I know when I was in my twenties I did lots of boozing and was all the time able to shake it off ready for the next session. As you get older, your powers of rescue diminish.

For somebody who is looking for a concentrate of years partying and is willing to get in and out, owning a bar in Phuket is a decent option. If you have the sort of discipline where you can go to the bar and entertain customers without getting drunk every night, then maybe it is for you. But as a long-term source of revenue - for most habitancy it is just not worth the sacrifice.

Another bar owner friend decided to sell up after a concentrate of years in the business. He was a young guy and his bar was production him a living. The qoute was he had got to the stage where he hated his bar. He hated going to the same place night after night, he was sick and tired of dealing with bargirls and their petty squabbles and he was tired of feeling crap all the time.

So he sold up and got out with a nice puny profit. It wasn't until after he sold the bar that he discovered the speculate why he felt crap all the time. It wasn't just the hangovers; they were masking the real problem. He had Leukemia.

I'm not saying that owning a bar legitimately caused his Leukemia but it legitimately did not help his body deal with it. What it did do was put him in a frame of mind where he notion it was general to feel bad all the time and he appropriate it. Fortunately, he got out in time, was diagnosed and returned to his home country where he was successfully treated.

He is now all clear and he hopes that one day he can move back to Thailand. At the moment, his quarterly check-ups prohibit that. He says that now he looks back at his time in Phuket and realises he was in a rut. He was production sufficient money to live but he couldn't save anything. His life revolved colse to going to his bar every night so he was just not doing the things that drew him to Thailand in the first place. He would never return to the bar business in Patong.

So to recap. If you are mental about becoming a bar owner in Patong, what can you expect? Well you will spend most nights sitting at your bar waiting for customers and listening to dreadful, loud music. You will struggle to make a worthwhile profit. You will have to deal with the antics of your bar girls. You can settle to either spend your evenings sober and bored or drunk and happy.

Assuming you go for the drunk and happy selection (most bar owners do) you will at last pay for it. I don't know a singular bar owner who looks like a photo of health. It is a demanding life and if you do it long term you are probably taking a few years off your life expectancy.

You could take the attitude that work is all the time crap. It is crap in your my home country so you might as well have crap work in Phuket. Well fair enough, as long as you go into the bar business with your eyes open and not with some rose-tinted foresight of days by the beach and nights partying.

Owning A Bar On A Tropical Island - Is It truly A Dream?

I spent two years in Bangkok before I decided that I'd had enough. It was nothing against the city, but I just felt as if I needed a change. I was given an chance to work in Phuket and I took it. Twelve months later and I feel a craving to return to Bangkok, but I won't, because I've been there and done that.

People often ask me what it's like in Phuket. I receive numerous emails from habitancy mulling the idea of bright to the island.

Phuket

Different habitancy come to Phuket with dissimilar expectations and dissimilar ideas. When I came to Phuket, I had a fair idea of what the place was like. Phuket is a large island. There are more than 10 main beaches and just as many islands dotted nearby the coast. For this reason, you can find whatever it is you're seeing for in Phuket.

If you want unspoiled beachfront, then head to Mai Khao Beach or Yanui Beach. If you want rowdy nightlife then go to Patong Beach. For surfing you ought to check out Kata Beach. There are even a few splashes of Sino-Portugese culture in Phuket Town.

I live on the outskirts of Phuket Town. I have easy passage to decent restaurants, shops, beaches, everything really. While I don't plan to stay in Phuket forever, I am glad to have lived on the island and for real seen it for its good and its bad side.

I'd propose to whatever to spend a bit of time in Phuket to for real see what the place is about.

However, after spending the best part of a year in Phuket, there's something about the island that just hasn't clicked with me.

After Bangkok and Pattaya, Phuket is the destination within Thailand that attracts the most expats. habitancy come to Phuket in crusade of beaches, romance, work, whatever. It isn't the aesthetics of Phuket that bugs me - there are enough gorgeous Phuket beaches and islands to keep whatever happy; it's the lack of operation that can be a bit of a downer.

Coming from Bangkok down to Phuket, there are stark differences that I haven't been able to get over, no matter how hard I try and convince myself that I'm happy in Phuket. For a start, the collective scene sucks. You just don't have the same mix of like-minded habitancy as you do in Bangkok.

Then there's Phuket nightlife. I'm not necessarily referring to just clubs and bars, but to everything that goes on once the sun sets. In Phuket, you can't stray out at 2 am and find habitancy all over the place. You can't even travel nearby the island after dark for fear of being mugged if you're on a bike or being ripped off if you're riding in a tuk-tuk.

One year in Phuket has left me sure that the island is not a place I want to determine on. However, my idea of paradise is, of course, not the same as the next person's, which is why many habitancy come to Phuket and never leave.

The Lowdown on Phuket