Daily Report: Back In My Chair

Got back from Ko Chang last night, and was up at 7:00 a.m. for work. Had a really good day overall.

For lunch, it was out to the Pattaya Immigration office.

As will be mentioned when I get around to posting trip details below, Saturday was a Buddhist holiday, and the Immigration office (where I had gone with the hope of extending my 60-day visa before it expired on Sunday) was closed. It was closed Monday as well.

There was an ungodly crowd at immigration when I arrived there today at 2:00. It was wall to wall people. It's simple: Back during New Years, due to all Thai embassies being closed from December 30th to January 2nd, five days' worth of 60-day tourist visas were applied for on January 3rd, and issued on Janurary 4th. Therefore, 5 times as many (actually substantially more than that because of the new visa rules) visas as normal expired 60 days later on March 4th. Add to that the visas that expired on March 3rd and 5th, there were now at least 7 times as many expired visas (although I would put it at closer to 10 or 20 times more) as normal to be processed today.

Fortunately, even though my visa expired 2 days ago, I was in the same boat as about 300 other people who passed through Pattaya Immigration today, and there was no penalty or overstay. In fact, I got 2 free days out of the deal, since the stamp in my passport now says April 3, instead of April 1 — which is 90 days after January 4th. That is going to be helpful when I schedule my next visa run.

Tonight, I took Pui, Pot, and Maid Go out to dinner at Vientiane Restaurant. After that, since we had 2 motorcycles with us, I went straight home, and gave Pui and Go 2,000 baht to go shopping at Big C. They came home with enough cleaning products to scrub all of Soi Osama Bin Laden clean, and enough detergent to launder the entire population of Naklua.