RETIREMENT VISA . . . or
Rex and Rex's Excellent Adventure, The Sequel
Well, it's official! I is retired! Got my hammock and my tree all picked out and intend to spend the rest of my days snoozing and feeding pigeons from a park bench, watching the children play as my body slowly turns to aromatic compost!
I chose to apply at Bangkok Immigrating because I have heard that Nong Khai can be difficult sometimes. And besides, as I will explain, the trip to Bangers was actually much more pleasant and took less time than doing Nong Khai!
SUNBELT ASIA
A big thank you to Greg Lange at Sunbelt Asia for his assistance ==> glange@sunbeltasia.com , http://www.sunbeltasia.com/ . I have had good experiences working with Greg in the past, but we only ever had e-mail contact. It was good to meet in person and have a name to match to the pixels! As Greg has always answered his own e-mail, I arrived at his place expecting to see a shophouse office and one-man show. Instead, I found that Sunbelt occupies, apparently, all of the 26th floor of Fortune Town with dozens of professional staff and and a swanky layout you might expect to see at a San Francisco law firm. Not that that is so important, really. Service and results trump that by far. And I got plenty of both.
One of Greg's staff, K. Koy, a lovely young lawyer trained in Australia, helped me with the paperwork and took me down to Immigration (got to ride on the new-fangled subway train), got me through the mess to the right queue and right agent. I doubt that we were there for a hour, everything went so smoothly. I am sure I could have done this myself, and I'll never really know to what extent getting help actually mattered, but being a wimp, I was happy with the support and hand-holding . . . and the fee was little enough money to spend for such an important matter.
Thanks Greg and Koy!
This trip was whey kewl! The taxi picked me up at my house at 7:00 a.m. I was knocking on Greg's door by 10:00 a.m. Finished and done with Immigration by 11:30. Time enough to change my reservations and grab a taxi back to the airport in time to catch 1:00 p.m. flight home. If the taxi driver had not been a maniac, I might not have been able to make the flight. Taxi scared the sh*t out of me tailgating and moving in and out of lanes at 65 mph! The guy was cackling at the end of the ride, giving me the thumbs up as he relived the experience, using his hand as a visual aid to illustrate the trip! Have not been that scared in a taxi since I lived in China where they all drive like that! By comparison, it made the ride on the aeorplane seem relatively safe and uneventful. I like that part of the emergency instructions where the flight attendant tells you to put the oxygen mask firmly over you nose and mouth and "breathe normally." As George Carlin points out, it is usually difficult to breathe normally doing a power dive toward the earth at 600 miles per hour!
Anyway, back safe and sound in my little cottage by the lake by 2:30 p.m.!
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Fri 24 Mar 06, 12:57 p.m.
