It's kind of funny to me that they have certain days of the year where alcohol cannot be sold in Thailand because they, I guess, don't want you to be too drunk to vote or something.
I find it rather silly that they would have a ban for this reason but it also could extend to other things such as not wanting to allow the various candidates the chance to offer a free booze-fest combined with voting or something.
Whatever the reason is, over the weekend the people of Thailand and the visitors were not permitted to purchase or consume any alcohol.
Warnings similar to this were all over the place in Thailand over the weekend and there are no exceptions including resorts and stuff like that. I am sure there were plenty of heated conversations among the people who are visiting that were caught off guard by the fact that all the bars are shut and the restaurants can not serve them so much a single glass of wine with dinner.
in the years that I have lived here there have always been some sort of backstreets mom and pop shops that would still sell the stuff, especially to foreigners but this time around I didn't even bother to look and instead just decided to go booze free and spend time doing outdoors stuff with friends instead. I feel as though the mom and pop shops are probably a bit more afraid to try to get away with this than a few years ago because for whatever reasons the government has kind of been cracking down on a bunch of things they used to turn a blind eye to such as selling booze to someone that is not even allowed to vote anyway.
Now how to feel about this? Well, I think that Thailand kind of shoots itself in the food with rulings like this but then again I have never lived anywhere else that depended so heavily on tourism nor did it have rather strange laws regarding sobriety and voting. You could probably go and vote very drunk where i come from and nobody would care and well it's not like this is going to prevent people from getting drunk if they really want to.
I recall years ago being in various places to shop and noticed that a lot of people were buying crates and crate and crates of beer on the day before the ban happens and well, that seems a little bit convenient doesn't it?
You can still probably get away with drinking at your house and even have some friends over if you wanted to but if the neighbors complained that they saw some people drinking and you were also being loud I think they would throw the book at you. This isn't necessarily to enforce any law but they would be able to get so much bribe money out of you by threatening you with multiple laws that they could punish you for. You, as the person who supplied the alcohol could also probably be held liable for the other people that are drinking it as well. I don't know how any of this works but I am sure the police could be made to go away with a generous donation to their tea money fund.
I don't think that two days of no booze would really be that bad of a thing for people just generally speaking but it kind of sucks for anyone that has a 9-5 m-f sort of job and they get off work for the weekend only to discover that they are not allowed to party for the entire weekend.
Oh well, not my country, not my rules!