Embassy Trip, take one.

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Monday morning, 8 am we headed into bangkok centre to go to the embassy to sort out our affirmation to marry. It was one of the hottest days I have ever experienced and we were glad of the Air-Con in the taxi. We got to the front office of the embassy and before they would let us through the very severe security checks the woman wanted to check that all our paperwork was in order. We had to bring pre-printed copies of our affirmation sheets and we were confident all was in order. Not so.

I, foolishly, made the assumption that my passport was issued by the UKPA the same as Cheryl's. It was not, it was issued by IPS. Everything else was present and correct except for these four letters. The woman told us we would have to go and print out a replacement with the alteration made. She pointed us in the general direction of the end of the street and said we could find an internet cafe up that way. So we headed off... 6km in a giant round trip in the wrong direction. after nearly half an hour we found an internet cafe but the freaky looking 'Deliverance' child told us we couldn't print there. We came all the way back round and found another one, this one couldn't print either. We then were almost back to the embassy when we found the cafe which the woman had been talking about; directly across the road. This cafe did let you print but wouldn't accept SD Card, only USB. The consular services closed at 11 and at this point it was now quarter too. In the same shopping centre as the internet cafe we found a Visa services shop and, with no time to argue the price we had a Thai man type out a replacement at the shocking price of 300 bahtt (6 quid).



We went running back over the road to the embassy and in keeping with the spirit of the day, the consular department had closed 3 minutes earlier. We had decided that we would just hang about until it opened again at 2 if we missed the 11 deadline and were informed that it was only open again for collections. At this point, we gave up. Tuk Tuk back to Khao San Road and lunch. In the afternoon we hopped out to the Stray office to find out the deal with our Laos trip and as you can probably guess, we walked away back round the road in the scorching heat to their offices to find out that they had moved... to two seconds from our hotel.
After making our way round and speaking to the very nice lady we decided to regroup and plan for tomorrow taking it easy and having an early night.

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Comments

[Angela]

Embassy Envy
As rubbish as that sounds, at least you are in amazing Thialand - my passport has currently been lost somewhere between Ayr and Glasgow thanks to the silly Ghana Embassy and I get a nice view of the Clyde to consol myself with ;-) Keep the stories coming bro! Take care. xx

[MumG]

....and what happened next?
did you get you affirmations sorted?