The Hard Decisions

As some of you already know, after hours and hours at the hall of social non-distancing , known as the office of immigration, I was able to extend my Thailand tourist visa. I was scared that they would renew it from the date that I was in the office of immigration, but luckily, it was renewed for a month from the end of my original tourist visa. So now, I’m good until April 24th. Of course, this doesn’t solve all of my problems. My return ticket to Boston is for June 1. That means I’ll need at least 2 more renewals. A one time 30 day extension is a typical thing that the Thai government will approve. They did it long before COVID showed up. The thing is that you would only get a single 30 day extension. After that, you had to leave the country to renew your visa. Faring (foreigners) working undocumented in Thailand would simply make border runs over land or by air. Cross a border and turn right back around. I don’t think I’ll have that luxury. So, either I’ll be heading back on April 24th or I’ll simply overstay and eat the 20,000 baht ($600) fine on my way out of the country. If I were to overstay by 90 or more days, I would be blacklisted from the country for a year. I just don’t want to draw that kind of attention to my passport for when I try to do this all again.

Shortly after I got my visa renewed, a friend of mine who teaches at an international school in Chiang Mai was told that her school was going on lockdown because of both COVID and the air quality index up there. Kids were being sent home. She and other teachers were asked to teach classes online. However, because she would be teaching online, she could teach from anywhere, so she decided to take a trip down to Krabi in the southern part of Thailand. She asked me if I wanted to join, and I figured that if my stage were to happen, this would be my last chance to go anywhere.

I got down to Krabi on Wednesday night, but when I woke up on Thursday morning, I was met with a deluge of text messages. I knew that it had happened before I went to sleep, but it seemed like everyone and their mother decided to text me to ask what I was planning on doing. The United States had raised their travel alert level to level 4.

I have a friend in the State Department who told me that essentially meant, come back to the States now, because we may not be able to help you get back later. I have to be honest. This scared me quite a bit. I had just gotten to Krabi. It would take time for me to get back to Bangkok. Once I would get there, I would have to go to Suvarnabhumi Airport to talk to the Korean Air people about changing my ticket. The flights from Seoul to Boston were all cancelled. That meant that I would have had to stop through another city. It would have take a 14 hour trip and make it a 24 hour trip. In addition, I would have to pack up all of my gear in Bangkok, contact my landlord and figure out how to close everything up. Given all of this, I probably wouldn’t be ready to leave the country for a week or so.

For the first half of Thursday, I was completely consumed with fear. What do I do? Do I head back to Bangkok this second? Do I flee? What would I do when I get back? Would it be weeks of sitting in my apartment alone, spending money on food that’s too expensive for my budget? I would just be cold and alone. What would happen if I just stayed here? Would I be able to get back in June? Would I run into visa problems? Would Thailand shut down like China, Italy, and the United States did? Would it be better or worse if I were to stay here in Thailand?

I was so nervous that I couldn’t really enjoy the first half of Thursday. I sat on the beach looking at my phone as I talked with my pal in the State Department, an expat friend that I met here in Bangkok, and with a couple of friends back home in Boston to bounce ideas off of them. It was a beautiful day out. The sky was blue and the sun was shining. My friend was out in the ocean, but I was petrified. What was the right move?

To top it all off, my folks sent me ten or so text messages about me trying to reroute my flights back and about waiting until I’m back state-side to figure out the whole travel insurance thing. I didn’t respond to their messages. They have a very different view on the world than I do. It’s not to say that I’m always right and they’re always wrong, but they definitely process things in a different way than I do. Things that make sense to them, I find ludicrous, and things that I find completely rational, the think are insane. I couldn’t let their view of the world affect my decision. I also couldn’t respond to them, because I knew that the second I unlocked that floodgate, they would try to talk me into whatever they thought was the proper course of action.

By the time lunch rolled around, I was 50/50 on the whole thing. I knew it would take me at least a week to vacate the country. I just didn’t know why I would be leaving Thailand to go back to Boston. The money that I would spend in buying food in Boston would probably equal the same amount of money that I would spend in food and rent in Bangkok. In Boston, it would be cold. In Thailand, the weather is warm, the street food is still kickin’, and the fruit here is delicious. If I’m just scared about not being able to get home to Boston, what the actual fuck? I’m out here trying to see if I could live out here in Thailand. I’m trying to escape Boston. So, why go back out of fear? Why go back to a place I don’t want to be right now anyways? It would just be better for my mental health to be in Thailand trapped in an apartment, vs being trapped in my apartment in Boston. When I thought about this, and when I got the opinion of my friend in the State Department, I figured, what the hell? I’m going to stay. I’m gonna roll the dice and see what riding out COVID in Bangkok will be like.

It was pretty nerve wracking trying to figure out how to break the news to my parents, who I had concluded from their text messages was in favor of me returning to Boston. Around 11:00AM EST (10:00PM my time), I FaceTimed to tell them. They took it surprisingly well. It turned out that they were pretty 50/50 on the whole thing as well. I left that conversation thinking that I had dodged that bullet.

When I had gotten to Krabi, I was surprised by how many people there were on the streets there. I know it’s a bit of a tourist beach town, but I thought that the first bit of COVID would have scared away guests and tourists. It wasn’t crowded by any means, but there were more people than I expected. The day I got there, all of the chairs at the pool were full. The second day, 75% of them were being used. By the time the third day rolled down, maybe a third of the pool chairs were being used. There was a major drop off in the population of town.

The day before we left, we discovered this great organic cafe run by a South African woman. They were one of the few cafes or restaurants that had guests. There were maybe four other parties, and it seemed like they had all been there before. In fact, two couples jokingly fought over the last piece of vegan carrot cake. It was there that we met a Canadian couple who were there hiding out from COVID. We met a Swedish family who were denied boarding on their trip home, because their connecting flight was in Denmark, a country that is currently locked down. They had no clue how long they would have to wait to get home. I feel like the ones that were left were definitely either hiding out or were stranded.

As we speak Thailand seems to be going into lockdown. Bars, clubs, sit down restaurants, malls, massage parlors, and most non-critical businesses are closed. Takeout and delivery restaurants are still operating. Some fine dining restaurants have switched over to delivery and take out options, but, as I am being told, the cover count is pretty low. Street food is still going, as are the raw product vendors on the street. Today, I took a walk to the next BTS (skytrain) station, where there is a pretty good number of vendors that don’t sell the same things as the vendors near my condo. During most of the walk, I was able to keep social distance from people, but in some areas that had a number of vendors, or people trying to sell things on the side of the street, there was a little bit of congestion.

I have limited myself to one trip out every day, and it is during this trip that I’ll go and get my dinner and my midnight snack. Today’s dinner was a curry noodle dish, a sort of kanom jin, if you’re familiar with Thai food. I have a spicy corn salad in the fridge and some grilled pork neck and sticky rice for my midnight snack. On my trip, I also picked up some palm fruit, some bananas, a little watermelon, soda water, still water, rice crackers, and some peanuts. I topped all of that off with a well earned boba tea..

I’m sure you all know, but it sucks being in my condo all day. You all are probably thinking the same thing about your own condo/apartment/house. I wake up and turn on the TV. Sometimes I fall back asleep. Sometimes I just get bored. I’m very happy that I bought the Nintendo Switch in November. It’s becoming an invaluable source of entertainment over the past few days. I have taken to calling people on FaceTime to check up on them. As it stands now, the lockdown will last until the end of April. We’ll see how intense it gets.