Krungthep Ho!

In the 2½ years I've lived in Thailand, I can count the number of times I've been to Bangkok (a.k.a. "Krungthep Maha Nakorn Amorn Ratanakosindra Mahindrayudhya Mahadilokpop Noparatana Rajdhani Burirom Udom Rajnivet Mahastan Amorn Pimarn Avantarn Satit Sakkatuttiya Vishnukarm Prasit") — not counting the airport — on one hand... two of those times within a week of each other when my mother came to visit.

The truth is, unless you have a meeting with the king or the prime minister, want to buy real Gucci as opposed to knock-offs, or need a new passport, everything you need is in Pattaya.

My monthly visa runs to Cambodia eat up my passport at an alarming rate thanks primarily to the Cambodian visa, which takes up exactly one page in a passport... possibly to discourage visa running, or an ego booster for such a small country. 48 pages in 24 months. That, along with some odd stares from the immigration officials due to my dated passport photo, caused me to need a new passport.

So off to the bus station I went. I like the bus from Pattaya to Bangkok. There are 2 busses every 15 minutes coming and going all day long, and it is $2.50 each way. I usually take along my Thai flash cards and study them to make the 2-hour trip go buy more quickly. I hop off the bus in Bangkok at a curbside stop about a mile before the Ekamai bus station and get on the sky train which zips me 100 feet in the air above jam-packed Sukhumvit Road, down to Wireless Road for 75 cents, and a motorcycle taxi drives me the last half mile to the doors of American Citizen Services for another 50 cents.

I was in and out of the Embassy in about 2 hours, having to go through the line once to make sure everything on the form was filled out properly, once at the cashier's to pay the $67 renewal fee, once again to drop off the form with cashier's receipt, once again to answer the inevitable questions about my dated passport photo, once again to drop off an add-new-pages-to-my-passport-please form, and then once again to get my passport-with-new-pages returned to me.

So even though there were only 2 or 3 people in the line each time... it did stretch out a bit.

After that, it was quickly back to the bus station and on the next bus out of town... which, other than the 2 visits with my mother... is exactly the same as every other visit I've ever had to Bangkok: Bus station, sky train, embassy, sky train, bus station.

Well, if I ever have an appointment with His Highness Majesty**, I'm sure I will see a couple of other things Bangkok has to offer then.

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** Steve Rosse writes, "You refer to a prince as "His Highness", you refer to a King as "His Majesty". You'll see them in the papers, HRH for His Royal Highness and HRM for His Royal Majesty."