I get a kick out of developing countries, especially when they use their developing countries status to opt out of things like shutting down sweat shops and climate change regulations.
Perfect examples are Malaysia and Thailand which are both classified as developing countries. They both have astounding, beautiful airports and malls that make everything in Canada look like a strip mall. There are more Ferrari, Maserati, etc. dealerships in those countries then there are in Canada and the US combined. They have excellent transit systems, especially the BTS/MRT systems in Thailand. They are rolling out fiber optic networks that puts Canada to shame, especially when it comes to speed and price and unlimited downloads.
What prompted this post was my visit to the new Thai passport office for Thai nationals. Where the Thais usually fall down on is common sense, but this passport office is located right at the Klontoey MRT station so it is extremely easy to get to from anywhere in central Bangkok. Kudos to whoever thought this up. It is also a state of the art setup with about 50 stations, all equipped with state of the art Canon cameras and digital finger print scanners. I also noticed each station has a camera recording the whole session. The canon cameras are used to take your photo which bypasses the archaic system in Canada where you have to show up with the appropriate photos in hand.
The Klongtoey station also has a convenience store and a Coffee shop to while away the fairly short wait times. Pony up 60 baht and the passport is hand delivered to you house/apartment within 3 days. Really, really efficient. Third world or developing country .. not!
Developed countries are going to find themselves leap-frogged by these developing countries, which includes the behemoths China and India.Trump has it right .. We are being played as fools and more power to these countries to have the smarts to pull that libertarian toque (needed a winter reference) over our eyes.
The other thing I noticed is that the new passport office has about 79 employees and 69 of them where young females. I think the job requires a university degree and most Thai males seem to end up driving taxis, motorcycle taxis and tuk tuks.
It kind of portends where Canadian society will be in another 10 years now that most Canadian universities have over 70% female enrollment. Not that I do not prefer to be serviced (no pun intended) by pretty young Thai females.
TTYL
Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur definitely have impressive structures and sometimes actually appear to be ahead. But we can't point at just the shiniest parts of the country - how about the rest? I look forward to my upcoming explorations outside the big cities.
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