Work permit, take one
on My Thai (Thailand), 09/Mar/2011 11:24, 34 days ago
Just a brief and very selective update...Well, today involved a rather fruitless trip to the labour department in Bangkok.After six months and a bit of prodding from VSO staff, my manager picked me up at about half 9 and around 90 minutes later we arrived. We duly took our ticket and waited while the numbers crept higher. We even managed to go and grab a bit of lunch while we were waiting!After what felt like a long two hours I was verging on giddy when‘53’ popped up in little LEDs.After that it went pretty much the same way as my first attempt at getting a new visa in Laos– hours of waiting followed by a fairly curt ‘No’ and being sent on my merry way.I find it pretty impressive how unflappable Thais are though.Going off past experience, I expect buildings such as the labour department to be plastered with signs proclaiming that‘Physical or verbal abuse of staff will not be tolerated’, have countless security cameras trained on the twitching lines of huffers and puffers and thick sheets of protective glass separating us commoners from the all powerful beings behind. To be fair, I do come from Oldham but it turns out Thai people get through such things with a lot more civility!On the journey home one of our tyres blew out on the busy expressway. Even this was met good humouredly and the closest I heard to a complaint was a remark about the cost of new tyres. Instead of a pricy new bit of rubber, an old one was borrowed from another car at the office and about an hour later we had a bit of a convoy that included most of the staff just coming to check out the commotion.Since my current visa expires on Monday it was really unlikely that anything could have been achieved today anyway. So, while it’s a costly process for VSO, I am now looking forward to my second visa run. Or, to give it its proper title: ‘Visa run, baby!!!’So next week I’ll be off to Penang in Malaysia for a few days, hopefully taking the right documents with me this time!