Have Passport, need Visa.

Day two in Thailand, still waking up before the sun which is great. We eat an AMAZING breakfast at the Dream hotel, find a cooking class to sign up for and figure out where the Myanmar embassy is. Next stop- Myanmar embassy to obtain some visas. Could we have done this in advance- yes. Did we no? Why you may ask would we spend precious time in a foreign land obtaining visas? Well, glad you inquired. About a year in a half ago, our passports were lost in the mail (yes yes, completely my fault for sending them regular mail) when we applied for our visas to Jordan in advance. And no- you are not required to get those in advance, I was just trying to be prepared for once in my life, but it back fired on me and we ended up missing our flights, paying the $500 change fee and getting 24 hour passports which cost even more. Jason refused to go through that again for visas to Myanmar and miss our honeymoon. He got me on board by reminding me how pretty my passport was getting with stamps and visas and that I might be able to achieve my goal of adding passport pages if I didn’t loose this one. He always knows how to get me on board. SO here we are, at the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, 30 minutes before it opens, and it packed with travelers! Getting visas makes us giddy with excitement despite the fact that it is sweltering hot and we are missing the cooking class I’d signed us up for earlier this morning.

Seeing throngs of people excited about exploring the uncharted territories of Myanmar excites me. It’s like we are all explorers waiting for the King to grant us permission to sail to the new world. It’s also beautiful to see the throngs of shops that have sprouted up to cater to the influx of foot traffic at the embassy. Tuk Tuks with instant passport photos and copiers for the required pictures and passport copies to obtain a visas, men selling coffee, women selling meat skewers- it’s capitalism in it’s purist form. We wait for approximately two hours, drinking coffee, taking turns exploring while one of us stays in line, playing would you rather, and then our number is called. I’m nervous. We are requesting same day visas and don’t have proof of exit from the country- no way they’ll grant it according to everyone we’ve talked to in line and what we’ve read. If they don’t we’ll have to come back to Bangkok in a couple of days, but will we even be able to check into hotels without our passports?! Probably not, and we won’t be able to fly back to Bangkok either… we have to get them today or we loose another day of a hammock on the beach. I put my biggest smile on and start chatting with the woman behind the counter, our fate lies in her stamp. Things are going well until she sees that I’ve foolishly written “producer” as my occupation. It’s habit, for years it’s been my primary occupation but now I have several other side projects I could just have easily written, “chef, entrepreneur, wedding industry” anything else would have been less threatening than producer. The last thing a country that’s barely opened it’s doors to the world wants is a producer in there filming the less than perfect parts of their country. Little does she know, as a post production producer I don’t do anything cool like filming or making any kind of creative decisions. She growled at me and then grabbed her colleague who came back and also growled. “what will you produce in OUR country” they questioned. Sweat beads began to appear on my forehead making me look like I was an under cover spy rather than a tourist on a honeymoon that was dying to explore new frontier. I managed to make them believe the truth, and we went back to our jovial chatting when she said, "ok, you come back at 3:30 for pick up” We tried not to let our joy and shock show until we got outside and we burst out laughing and cheering. They et us in!!!! No questions about an exit strategy even asked. This turned out to be the easiest and cheapest (approximately $37 USD) visa I’ve ever gotten. Why is everything so easy in Asia?! 

Now we were an hour late for cooking class at Silom Thai Cooking School but we decided to give it a whirl anyway. Much to our delight, we were welcomed with open arms and brought up to speed. It was a FANTASTIC experience. They require you to cook barefoot, I love Asian’s insistence on bare feet. In America, we’re required to wear close toed shoes when cooking commercially and here, they require you to cook barefoot. It’s so liberating. We made and ate green curry, pad thai, tom yum soup and mango sticky rice and then went on the market tour we’d missed from the morning class with the afternoon class group. While we cooked dishes catered to the western world, it was super fun learning making curry paste from scratch and touring a market with so many foreign fruits and vegetables with a chef. With still a couple of hours to kill before our visa was ready we popped into one of the thousands of thai massage places and got hour long massages for $7.50. I’m madly in love with this country. Now to find a bus to start working our way down the coast. Our only schedule is to be at Six Sense in Ko Samui 5 days from when we landed.