The Visa Run

While living and working abroad has it's perks, one thing I quickly realized you take for granted is the ability to live and work in your home country, hassle free. Figuring out visa and work permit business in order to legally live and work in Thailand has been a challenge. Not to mention the constant visits to the immigration office and labor office to request to change my visa, extend my visa, report myself every 90 days, extend visa again, apply for work permit, extend work permit, etc, etc, etc....

Well of course, as soon as I FINALLY had my work visa (called Non-Immigrant B) and my work permit sorted out, I changed jobs. Since your work permit is only specifically attached to your place of employment, I would have to get a new visa for my new job and start the process all over again from scratch. Ugh.

The absolute only place you can apply for a visa is at a Royal Thai Embassy. However, as you may or may not know, there are no embassies located IN a particular country. For example, there are no U.S. Embassy's in the United Stated of America and no Royal Thai Embassies located in Thailand. But there is a U.S. Embassy in Thailand and Royal Thai Embassies in the U.S. Make sense?

Therefore, my only option to obtain a new visa was to physically leave Thailand and apply at a Royal Thai Embassy in another country. This is what is refereed to as the infamous Visa Run. Almost every expat knows the term and has done it at least once. To be honest, I'm surprised I got lucky and haven't needed to do it before now.

There are technically two different types of visa runs. The second type, I would consider the "easy" visa run where no visit to an embassy is necessary. All you have to do is physically cross a boarder to leave the country, even if it's only for 1 minute. For example, this process could look like this:
1. Stamp out of Thailand
2. Cross the boarder
3. Stamp into Cambodia
4. Turn around
5. Stamp out of Cambodia
6. Cross the boarder
7. Stamp into Thailand.
Done.

However, this type of visa run isn't very common when living in Thailand because when you enter Thailand by land (i.e. not airplane) you're only granted a 15 day transit visa. 

Anyway, back to my visa run. I highly considered flying somewhere, but since I only had 5 days to both move from Ayutthaya to Bangkok AND do a visa run, I opted to go by land. Technically, the Thai Embassy in Cambodia is the closest in distance to Bangkok, but I was warned by numerous different people that it was risky to go to Cambodia as they deny many applications with no reason. So then, Laos it was.

I could have bought an overnight train ticket to Laos for a bit cheaper, but with the chaos of moving, visa run, and starting a new job all in the same week, I decided to pay a little extra for convenience and went with a visa run company/agency. For this, you pay one set price that includes transportation by mini-van, 1 night in a hotel, meals, and all visa application and processing fees. Basically, you're only actually IN Laos for about 24 hours total while you're waiting for your visa to process, then you turn around and go back to Bangkok.

I won't bore you with all the details of the visa run. Despite the name, the visa run did not actually involve any running. In fact, quite the opposite. Just a lot of queuing up in long lines, standing around, and waiting. If anything, now I'm "running" quite low on passport pages...

The most interesting aspect of the visa run was the other people on the journey. I really had no idea how common these visa runs were until I showed up at the meeting spot and saw 60 other people, which they divided into 6 different mini-vans.

My van had quite the interesting crew of expats: 2 other teachers like myself, 2 models, 4 businessmen, 2 guys with Thai girlfriends/wives, and a movie star (seriously!). After discussing this with my new coworkers, it actually sounds like that is the pretty standard mix of people for a visa run from Bangkok. But the craziest thing was that the guy sitting next to me in the van turned out to be best friend's with my future boss of my new job. Bangkok, a city of 11 million people and I'm sitting next to my boss's best friend on a Visa Run to Laos? Small world.

So anyway, I'm back in Bangkok and started my new job about 2 weeks ago. I have SO much to update you on but have been busy getting settled in Bangkok and the learning curve of my new job. More updates soon, I promise!

Hope all is well for you!