A Series of Unfortunate Events

Update on Sept 11:  Now I thought about it, the bad luck really did start last week, with a credit card fraud! I logged on to my credit card account early last week and noticed a charge of over $300 that neither Gary and I had any recollection of purchasing but I wasn’t completely convinced. I just contested that charge. Then on last Thu, I noticed another $100 charge for a Starbucks card. It definitely couldn’t be us. I called the credit card company and reported the fraud. They found another $100 for the same Starbucks charge last month which I missed. We canceled the card and they had a new one sent to me in Thailand. We just got it on Monday. We were amazed that it arrived so quickly and without any Customs issues.

I was just thinking the other day that life seemed to have settled into a boring routine, and we were becoming boring along with it. I thought we should take advantage of our setting and start to explore more around the city during the weekends. Little did I know that excitements were just right around the corner…

Pressed Clothes

It all started yesterday with the pressed clothes (or did it start late last week when Gary caught a cold and has been complaining ever since). Gary took some clothes to the little laundry shop next to the restaurant within our housing development last week. They were washed and Gary just wanted them to be pressed. We finally went to pick them up yesterday. The lady handed us all the clothes folded and squeezed into a tight plastic bag! When we got home and took them out of the bag, some of the clothes looked no better than when they were sent, while others looked way worse. At least the financial damage was only about 133฿ (~$4.30).

We did see some other people picking up their clothes on hangers, which looked better. Our theory is that you would need to bring your own hangers to the laundry shop in order for them to do that. Gary will give that one more try and see.

It worked out quite well when we were at The Spa Resort and a lady came in to clean and to iron clothes. She came recommended and we felt safe leaving her in the empty to do her work. At our new house, we haven’t gotten any recommendations so far and our neighbors and friends have told us that they wouldn’t trust someone they did not know. So for now, I am the cleaner and Gary has been the “iron” man but he really wants to outsource. Let’s hope his next experiment will be more successful. Have I mentioned that we both miss having a good clothes dryer?

Body Massage

Yesterday, while picking up the laundry, I was quite delighted to discover that between the convenience store/restaurant and the laundry shop there was a massage place! So convenient! I wasted no time in visiting and getting myself a body massage.

Well, I waited about 30 minutes between the calls for a masseuse and for my masseuse to show up. It seems that in Chiang Mai in a lot of the places where they are not that busy, massage therapists are on-call instead. That looked to be the case for both the spas in The Spa Resort and at the Prem Residence. Most of the time you would need to make an appointment for the next day.

Back to our local massage place, for a few minutes it looked like I wouldn’t be able to get a massage. While I did not understand any Thai, I could tell that the phone calls kept on happening. However, at the end, I thought that I heard some relief in the lady’s voice (the one making the call) and she told me in very limited English that it would take about 10 minutes.

Well, it took a bit longer than that, but no matter as I was fully committed in getting a massage that day! The lady asked if I wanted a body massage and I answered “yes”. Their brochures listed Thai Massage, Body Massage and Foot Massage for150฿/hr, (~$5/hr), Oil Massage for 300฿/hr (~$10/hr), and Massage with Thai Herbal Hot Compress for 450฿/90 minutes (~$15). I definitely did not want a Thai massage as I wanted something more relaxing, so it seemed that a body massage would do. From past experience, I thought the oil massage was more like the body massage with aromatic oil.

My masseuse finally came, a slightly plump lady in her late forties or early fifties (? – I can’t tell ages well) arriving on her moped. She came in and brought with her some clothes. She gave them to me. I thought that was for me to change into, but instead, she helped me right there to put the top over my dress, and then put on this pair of HUGE bottom pants. It was so big it could probably fit 3 or 4 of me in there. Even the lady was laughing as she tied the pants for me at the waist.

After that, I was told to lay down and she started the massage. Pretty soon though, I realized that this massage was like no other full body massages that I had ever gotten! There were a lot of stretching and pulling, a lot of work with the feet. I think I must be getting a Thai massage instead! Oh well, I had never tried a Thai massage and had been curious about it so I calmly accepted my fate and hoped for the best.

Overall, the lady was good. She was strong and she knew what she was doing. The only problem was, I was not getting what I was supposed to be getting. To make things worse, I was wearing this dress with a bow at the front, so as the lady pressed hard down on my back, it really pressed hard on the front of my body. Well, the massage’s made a lasting impression on me as my chest is still hurting today.

The massage place is certainly not a spa, but it is clean and my masseuse was friendly. I can’t fault them for not understanding me as I haven’t bothered to learn much Thai so far (though I have been intending to). For just 150฿, I am not going to complain too much anyway. Next time, I will try the oil massage instead.

Honey Jar

Our bad luck continued this morning. As Gary was in the process of putting the honey jar back into the refrigerator, it somehow slipped out of his hand and ended up on the floor with honey splashed all over. Lucky for us, there was only a small amount of honey left in that jar.

Gary and I told Sammy to stay away and quickly cleaned up the broken glasses and the honey. A small naughty piece actually hiding in Gary’s slipper and gave him a nice little cut so that last piece was cleaned up as well. I haven’t noticed any ants in our house today so we must have done a decent cleaning job.

More Water Leakage

It seems that we just cannot get away from water leaks! I don’t know why the Thais are so enamored with plastic pipes. We saw them in The Spa Resort and we have them in our rental home. There are two kitchens in this house, and two kitchen sinks. The one separated from the lounge/dining room has the proper pipes, but the one with the dining room has the plastic pipes. We have installed a Reverse Osmosis water filter in there.

Today when I opened bottom door under the kitchen sink to put some water bottles in there (we still buy mineral water for drinking as it tastes better), I noticed that there seemed to be some water on the shelf bottom. I thought maybe the Reverse Osmosis machine was not installed properly and was leaking. I dried up the little bit of water there and told Gary about it. Gary later confirmed that it was the sink/pipe that was leaking, not the water filter.

Well, at least the leak is very small. I wrote to our rental agent and asked for a contact name to fix the leak. Let’s hope there is help tomorrow.

Thailand Visa Extension

Since we have been here for just over two months, it was about time for us to apply for a 1-year extension so that we would not need to leave Thailand (or do a border run) every 90 days. One of the requirement is to have at least 500,000฿ (~$16.6K) in your account for 30 consecutive days. I originally had that much in my account, but then we had to buy the car and then the balance dropped below that. I wired some more money but into a joint account with Bangkok Bank instead. I had been patiently waiting for the 30 days and that just completed yesterday. So I wrote to the visa guy Rhys today and asked him for the next step. He wrote back with the requirements, one of which being a bank letter with an account in my name only for the required amount.

So I screwed up! I don’t know how I came to understand that I could use a joint account for that purpose and did not even check the requirements again until today. My current visa is a 12-month multi-entry visa, but each stay is up to 90 days, and it requires me to leave on Oct. 3. So I could transfer the money today from the joint account to me own account, but i will short of 30 days by the time Oct 3 comes around.

I thought about doing a border run (to Mae Sai in Myanmar), or leaving to go visit Singapore or China, but those are not very practical. Gary definitely did not want me to do a border run as we haven’t seen anything being reported.

Gary called Rhys and the solution was for me to over-stay my visa and just pay a fine of 3000฿ (~$100). Rhys said that would be the least expensive option (and the least amount of hassle as well). I don’t like wasting money, but I don’t see another way out of this right now. I just can’t believe that for someone who was so detailed oriented at work, I would have missed something so basic (and I can’t even blame on using up all my quota at work right now). So I comfort myself with Gary’s saying (from a long time ago): if you have a problem and money can fix it, then you don’t have a problem after all. Lucky that this is indeed such an “non”-problem, unlike many other things in life.

As my day draws to a close, I hope our luck with the various small and big issues also comes to an end. Tomorrow is a brand new day with new things to fill, and hope the new things are more fortunate events!

A Brave New Day

We made it into the city (Chiang Mai) today and back, without having any accidents. We consider that a big achievement!

We went to see Rhys at Assist Thai Visa today to get the work started on visa extension for Samantha and me. Gary has a retirement visa which allows him to stay for 12 months without leaving Thailand, but Samantha (on Education visa) and I (on Caretaker visa) can only stay up to 90 days without leaving. Our visas do allow us multiple entries within a year, so if we don’t mind doing border runs or plan to visit somewhere every 90 days, we don’t need an extension, but we don’t want to deal with the hassle.

Anyway, it was supposed to take only 40 minutes or so to get to Rhys’ office, but Google Maps did not quite do its job this morning and we kept getting lost (definitely not an operator problem as I was the one operating this). For someone who hadn’t been driving on the “wrong” side of the road for many years, Gary was doing a good job driving and hadn’t turned onto the wrong lane at all so far, so let’s hope that continues! It made me nervous just sitting in the passenger seat and seeing how close the mopeds, bikes, and the other cars were. There were even people walking across the highway with their bikes, and people multi-tasking: driving a moped and smoking! We got stopped by policemen a couple of times during our journey but once they saw the passengers, they just waved us to move on. Well, our supposedly 40 minute journey ended up taking us about 2 full hours, with Rhys sending someone from his office on a moped to lead us from the Shangri-La Hotel to their office close by.

After talking to Rhys and had a quick lunch close by, we set our target to visit Tesco Lotus, a British supermarket along the super-highway. We wanted to get a few things to make our place more livable and stop eating out all the time. We were hoping for a British Tesco experience, but the Tesco Lotus here was more like a department store with a large food section as well. We found almost everything that we needed to get, except for garbage bags and cereal. I used the Google translator to translate “garbage bags” into Thai and Gary showed it to a staff there and we found our bags. For the cereal though, Gary was led to an aisle for grains, not quite the box cereal we had in mind. Anyway, we had enough of this and decided to check out.

As the cashier was scanning our items, she stopped when she reached the 3 beer bottles that Gary wanted. She pointed to a sign to Gary and put the beer aside, not into our basket.

Apparently in Thailand, you cannot buy alcohol early in the morning, nor in the early afternoon. I don’t quite understand why but I was not unhappy with this outcome!

As we were getting ready to leave Tesco for the Resort, I finally got Google Maps working properly and now a nice female voice was giving Gary the driving instructions, instead of me monitoring the little dot on Google Maps and trying to tell him to turn left or right. This had a very calming effect on Gary. I wondered if I could borrow that voice to tell Gary to do other things, such as giving up on alcohol.

When we got back to our rental, we saw an army of men working in our house, with all the doors and windows wide open, inviting in the ever friendly bugs and mosquitos. Oh, I forgot to mention that the pipe in the kitchen sink that was “fixed” yesterday did not really work and water was coming out from the pipe this morning when Gary tried to use it. Needless to say, Gary contacted Robin immediately and asked him to send someone else (who knows what they are doing) to fix this ASAP. As we all know that quantity does not equal quality, the many men working on this issue haven’t fixed the problem today. As I am typing right now, the pipe that was installed yesterday has been taken off and there is a bowl sitting at the bottom of the open kitchen sink pipe to catch any water should we be foolish enough to turn on the faucet. Gary declared that he would find a new place in town for us tomorrow and move out, never mind the money we’ve paid. I think we should ask for a discount.

Samantha has been a pretty good girl all day, mostly staying quiet when her parents were arguing about driving directions, and only occasionally burst into singing. Her only complaints today were the same complaints she had for the last few days: Robin and Daddy were talking too much, and her mosquito bites are itchy. She was doing her “Itchy Mosquito Bites” dance for us in the bedroom, rolling back and forth on our bed and chanting “itchy, itchy, itchy”, but that was too entertaining to catch on video and she made it clear that she did not wish to share that with anyone else.

So another mundane day in Chiang Mai with very little achieved. Our plan tomorrow is to visit the bank and to look for a more suitable long-term rental. Wish us luck…