Trip to Immigration

As I mentioned in my previous post about getting a Thai Visa in Kuala Lumpur I have a ED or student visa through my language school Language Express.  This student visa is actually good for up to 3 years provided I keep my tuition payed at my school and my ED visa current.

To keep the ED visa current you DO NOT have to leave Thailand.  You simply must go to immigration every 90 days and pay the 1800 baht ($55 USD) fee.  Since I plan to travel outside of Thailand often I have to also purchase a re-entry permit.  The re-entry permit allows me to leave the country without losing the student visa.

The multiple re-entry permit I get costs 3800 baht ($116 USD) which allows you to leave Thailand as many times as you want before the 3 months are up and keep the ED visa.  Single re-entry permits are also available for 1000 baht ($30 USD).  While I consider the re-entry permit to be a necessity it does cause a major headache at immigration making it a whole day event.

New Location

The Thai immigration bureau was previously located at Thanon Suan Plu which was very close to Silom and convenient for most people who live along the BTS.  The street was a nice, friendly neighborhood with the typical food on the street, 7-elevens and shops.  The actual immigration building was a dump to say the least.  It was extremely crowded and had minimal, if any air conditioning which is probably the reason why the location was updated.

The new location for immigration is in a GIANT government building complex consisting of multiple buildings.  The immigration department is directly on the right as you walk in (see photo at top) and if you walk forward you will see a huge convention center surrounded by various government offices.  It looks bleak at first but the basement floor has a bunch of surprises for you long immigration wait.

In addition to the copy shop which charges a ridiculously low 1 baht (3 cents) per copy there are several restaurants, a giant coupon cafeteria,  7-Eleven and even a small kiosk-style shopping mall not to mention a bunch of real estate advertising and even more shops which I didn’t explore.  You’re no doubt going to be waiting if you go to immigration and if you time it right, you could avoid sitting listening to the horrific Scottish-Spanish sounding woman recorded voice of the queue numbers.

Ground floor of the Goverment Building

Getting to the New Location

The new location is far more inconvenient for anyone living near Sukhumvit or any BTS station.  It is located near the Don Muang Airport.  To get there the best and fastest way is to take the BTS to Mo Chit aka Jatuchak where there is always a line-up of taxis right as you exit the BTS.  Make sure you exit the BTS station on the side of the Jatuchak Market and the lake to catch a cab in the right direction.

The cab ride from the Mo Chit BTS takes around 10-15 minutes and costs around 100 baht ($3 USD).  The immigration is located inside building B of an ENORMOUS government building complex.  It is on the ground floor (2nd floor) which is visible directly as you enter the building from where the taxi drops you off.  After you get there, your immigration adventure finally begins.

New Location for Thai Immigration

New Queue System, Very Long Wait

Instead of the free-for-all type of queue where people rush the machine to push the button to get their number, the new immigration has a system (the word system should be used loosely).  First you have to get your forms from the agents at the front desk as you walk in.  Signs were posted saying you would NOT get a queue number if your forms were not completely filled out.

Once the forms are filled out and the photos are glued (glue provided) to the forms you walk through a metal detector in the main waiting room.  A line awaits which is for getting your queue number ticket.  Once you get the queue number it is time to wait for your number to be called.  Once your number is called you simply walk up to the agent, pay your fee and sit back down and wait again to receive your freshly stamped visa on your passport.

In my case I had to go back to the initial line to get another queue number for my re-entry permit.  IF YOU NEED A RE-ENTRY PERMIT THIS TIP MAY SAVE YOU AN HOUR OR MORE. If you are getting your visa extended as well as a re-entry permit, make sure to get the queue number for your re-entry permit directly after you submit your passport for the visa.  Make sure you get your re-entry permit application at the time you get your passport application, fill it out and have it ready.  It took me over an hour (2 counting lunch) to get my passport back and if I waited to get the re-entry permit queue number until after I got my passport I would have wasted at least another hour.

I took some photos in immigration but decided not to post them as it may get me in trouble….

Lunch for All

Something that really bugged me was the lunch.  Signs were posted throughout the immigration office “Lunch: 1200 -1300.”  I was thinking, “there is no way they are going to shut this place down at noon.”  I was wrong.  Instead of having separate shifts, the entire immigration department has lunch from noon to 1 while everyone is shooed out of the office.  Most people went to eat but I went to the copy shop to start this blog post.

Learn from My Mistakes

My language school recommended being at immigration at around 8:30am which is when they open.  This is dead on.  If you arrive from 8:30am to 9:30am there is a good chance you will be out of immigration before noon when everyone goes on lunch.  If you think you are going to be there much after 10 or 11, it may be worth it for you to just wait until after 1pm when the workers get back from lunch.  I arrived around 10:30 or 11:00am and I ended up leaving at 4:30pm which wasn’t desirable at all.

Whoever is helping you with your visa should give you all the directions but they aren’t always very clear.  Anything dealing with a visa requires copies of everything.  It is a great idea to make MULTIPLE copies of every (pertinent) page on your passport.  Also remember to get multiple copies of your passport/visa photos so you don’t have to take them over and over again.

Renewing a visa is akin to going to the DMV in America.  Driving is a privilege and in order to be able to drive you have to put in some time in the DMV.  Living in Thailand as a foreigner is a privilege and every 3 months for a student visa holder this privilege is beaten in your head with a wasted day inside immigration.

Best Part about Going to the Government Center: Leaving

What you see above is NOT the entire Thai alphabet!  It is what makes the language so difficult to read, write and speak.  It is actually the list of vowels along with the tone marks.   What you don’t see on the list is the 44 consonants in the Thai Language.

I took Japanese for an entire year and I can tell you, as a native English speaker who can read/write Spanish Japanese is far easier to learn than Thai.  Japanese is very systematic and orderly.  The two sets of Syllabaries in Japanese the hiragan and katakana were easy to remember as each consonant sound had 5 vowel sounds for example ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.  It makes it easy to read, write and speak basic Japanese (w/out Chinese characters).  Japanese is not a tonal language so you can say it pretty much any way to ge the point across.

Thai Vowels

The chart above has all the Thai vowels.  Confusing right?  You don’t even know the half!  You see the dash which is surrounded with a red dot?  That is where the consonant is supposed to be.  So for example what the vowel above is “sa-ra aah”.  Sa-ra aah is the name of the vowel as all vowels, consonants and tone marks have.

The name usually includes the sound the vowel makes as well as something else.  I will get into that more with consonants.  There are 44 consonants which all make different sounds.  A simple example is adding the first consonant people learn which is called gaw Gai, which means means chicken and makes the g sound.

So you see all the vowels above right?  Some have symbols on both sides, above and below the consonant.  This makes reading very difficult as you must look a group of a bunch of symbols which is complicated by the addition of tone marks and the fact that there are no spaces or punctuation!

Thai Tone Marks

The Thai language is a tonal language.  This means that words that are spelled the same phonetically and sound relatively the same in Western ears, mean something COMPLETELY different in Thai.   For example if you say mai in Thai 5 with the 5 different tones (no tone mark = no tone) it could mean either mile, new, not, right? or silk.  Maybe now you can realize the difficulty of speaking and understanding Thai.

The tone marks are located on the top right of consonants.  To complicate matters, sometimes different vowel and consonant combination have automatic tones which do not have a tone mark!

Thai Consonants

Thai consonants are probably the easiest part of the Thai alphabet to master compared to the vowels but this doesn’t mean they are easy at all.  There are 44 Thai consonants but some look very similar and some make the exact same sounds as others!

What makes Thai consonants complicated is each letter, has a name, a sound, and a meaning.  The name, for example is like double U (W).  The name means nothing and has nothing to do with the sound but in Thai the names has the sound as well as a meaning.

For example the first character, gaw gai (above) means chicken and makes the g sound.  Like I already mentioned, it gets confusing because some look very similar and some sound exactly the same.

Speaking Thai

Speaking Thai is easy if you are reading the phonetic spellings w/out taking into consideration the tone marks.  The problem with this is, it is completely worthless as you are not speaking right.  You may as well be speaking Chinese.

Speaking the words with the correct tones even slowly is difficult and speaking it fast like the people in the street is virtually impossible at this point.  I want to go back to Japanese because it’s about 1/10th as frustrating.

My Class

My class at Language Express is pretty fun.  The structure of each class is pretty much exactly the same for this beginning section.  The first hour is spoken in English.  We start off by going over new consonants and vowels, how to say and right them and their meanings.  Then we have listening exercises then finish the first hour with a game.

The 2nd hour is the speaking hour in which the teacher speaks Thai the entire time.  We listen and read a set of words and phrases then say them outloud in the class.  Next we get in partners and read these conversations in which we have to substitute words we are supposed to memorize which gets very frustrating.

The interesting thing about the class is the demographics.  Even though the teacher speaks perfect English over 1/2 of the class is from non-English countries.   My classes which have different people from time to time had a student from, USA (2 counting me), Australia, France, Japan, Italy, India, Singapore and China last time.  Even though many people use English as a second language there seems to be no problem with the class being taught in English.

Below is a List of the Thai Consonants.

Sawatdee Khrab! Today was one of the very few days in the past 2 months where I actually had to be somewhere at a specific time.  I had to go look at apartments (read about apartment) then I had my first Thai language class which takes place Monday and Wednesday from 5-7 pm at Thai Language Express and gives me the all-important 1 year Education visa.

First of all, it felt kind of wierd actually having to be somewhere.  Keep in mind that for the last 5+ years I’ve been running around from workouts to personal training appointments 6 days a week.  I went from a schedule heavy in appointments to a schedule heavy in sleep. I managed to arrive to both appointments last minute.

To get to my language class I even considered running  the wrong way down two escalators from the BTS skytrain but I decided I didn’t feel like spending the night in a Thai jail so I took the long way around.

Tonal Languages are Difficult

You can see the Thai alphabet is very different from the letters you are reading but that is only half of the story.  Each word can have 1 or more tones.  There are 5 different tones in Thai, mid, low, falling, high and rising.  Each letter which has a little mark on the top right signifies a different way to pronounce the word.

As we learned there are different tones in English but they do not completely change the meaning of the word.  In Thai they do which makes it extremely difficult for me to grasp on the first day of class   For example you can say mai 5 different ways.  Each tone completely chances the word which could either mean, mile, new, no, right? or silk but western ears won’t likely be able to tell the difference.

How the First Thai Class Went

Anyone that knows me can pretty much see how my first class went.  Of course I was staring at the pretty girls walking by and spacing out while I got my ass handed to me in group activities.  Evidentally, like most Thai things, the cirricululm was not put together with strict rules in mind as some members of my class of 8 or so have been taking Thai for weeks and others have just started like me. The first half of the 2 hour class was tought in English, explaining some rules, etc. while the second half was the total immersion style with the teacher Nana speaking all Thai.

I have heard the immersion method of learning a language is the best but I cannot see how.  I am in living in Bangkok, Thailand and would think that living my day to day life would enable me to become immersed in the Thai language enough. I will leave it at that as it is 5am (my usual bedtime) and have more on Thai language very soon.