I have heard rumors around about how painful Immigration Departments can be regardless of which country you are visiting and now I have experienced first hand that it is true. When we decided to take the job in Thailand we started arranging all of our necessary paperwork to live in a foreign country as temporary residents. We got ourselves Non Immigrant Visas which we can use multiple times for 12 months. We assumed that this would allow us to stay in Thailand for 12 months and because we had to produce paperwork confirming Marcus' employment etc we also thought that this was our work visa as well. WRONG, we should know better than to ASSUME!
Turns out that the Visa is only valid for use for 12 months and the maximum allowed time to stay in Thailand consecutively is 3 months (90 days). So we have to leave the country every 90 days to get our Visas stamped then we re-enter get stamped again to allow us to stay another 90 days. As well as that we were told that Marcus needs a work permit which can only be obtained once you are living in Thailand through a Immigration Law Firm, mountains of paperwork and all sorts of weird questions are asked and now they want Marcus to chase up all of his education paperwork from Australia as well to prove that he is qualified. They also told me only days ago that this process can take over 60 days. So we cannot apply for a 12 month extension on our Visas and forego the border runs until the permit is approved. My frustration was that none of this information was given to us either before we left Australia or when we first arrived. Maybe if someone had of informed me then we could have gathered all of the documents they needed. Also I would have been more prepared and organised to make a border run, I could have made a little holiday out of it and visited Singapore or somewhere like that.
I know, I hear that little voice in the back of my mind telling me that I should have researched all of this before we left and should not have left it up to other people, but when a International company asks you to live and work abroad a person can be allowed to assume that they will take care of everything. Boy do I now know that that is not the case, we were given a few flights and then dumped to figure it all out on our own. I get upset some days when talking with other expat wives and they tell me that their companies handled EVERYTHING, insurance, expenses, housing, Visas, work permits, cars, drivers etc etc etc. I come home and then tell Marcus how shit I think we have been treated by his company and of course he gets all defensive about it. But in another light I think that maybe it is kind of rewarding and encouraging to know that we moved here with 2 small kids and did it all by ourselves with minimal help, maybe we are experiencing the real expat life, and for that matter the real Thailand.......
So now after spending the morning sitting in Immigration and handing over another handful of cash we have a 7 day extension on our visas to arrange a border run and get another 90 day stamp. The closest country to Pattaya is Cambodia, its about a 3-4 hour drive one way and there are many bus companies that run daily trips over there for tourist and temporary residents like us. Apparently everyone who doesn't have a work permit extension has to make these runs, you can go to Malaysia or Laos as well. They charge you a pretty high fee for this service but they take care of all of your paperwork for you and make the whole process (hopefully) pain free. We leave at 6am next Tuesday from a pub in town in a minibus. Oh and did I mention the kids have to come too? We stop for lunch somewhere along the way, then when we get to the border we hope out, walk through the Immigration gates into Cambodia (or a neutral zone), get a stamp, then we walk a few steps to the other gate and walk back through the Thai Immigration gates and get another stamp and then back into Thailand, hope on the bus and head on back to Pattaya.
Or that is how I have been told it goes. I have also been warned to watch for pick pockets and begging Cambodian children, it is apparently quite bad. There are also meant at be alot of Casinos that have been built recently along the border as gambling is illegal in Thailand but not in Cambodia so alot of Chinese -Thai people go there. We wont be trying any of that, not with the kids anyway. It will be stressful enough just keeping them occupied in the bus for such a long boring day.
So my week so far has been stressing about going into Immigration to request an extension (our Visas expired today so we were really leaving it to the last minute) and about organising and making the border run and stressing about making sure we have all of the papers we need. I will absolutely die if I go all that way and end up forgetting a necessary document. But the beauty, as I said before, is that the visa run company should handle everything all we have to do is walk through a couple gates and smile for the camera.
Well here's hoping anyway.......
No comments:
Post a Comment