Hurry up and Wait

If there's one thing Thailand is good at, it is making you wait. We jokingly call it "Thai Time" here. It used to be annoying, but I got used to it after a while. This seems to be the only place in the world where you can show up 2 hours late and still be an hour earlier than everybody else. This has actually worked in my favor on several occasions here in this whole ordeal, but the waiting does get really old sometimes.

At the moment, I am allowed to walk the streets temporarily, but that is only because of the kindness shown to me by one very nice police officer. He knows I'm not a flight risk, and he does still have my passport after all. Once the court paperwork is processed, I will either need to have a ticket out or go back into custody. I have been trying to be proactive in staying updated and checking in on the status of everything. Today I made another trip out to the courthouse to see what the paperwork status was. Ordinary Thai people are lovely in the way that they never seem to want to say "no", give you any bad news, or tell you they just "don't know". They really are trying to "save face" and also make you feel better most of the time, but sometimes a straight answer is the best option even if it may not be what they think you want to hear.

Finally, word from the court clerk was that the documents are "Not Finished" and she doesn't know exactly when they will be. She did however give me a phone number to call direct and avoid the traffic to get out there every time I need to check something. At the moment, I am still trying to organize funds and a plane ticket back to the states. As soon as the paperwork does go through, I will be either deported or jailed depending on whether or not I can afford to get out. It's still a pretty tricky game. I will probably have only a matter of hours to book an international flight and get a police escort to the airport.

For now, I keep trying to stay current airline flight patterns and prices to find the best way out. It is a very specific set of circumstances that the local immigration police need to see before they will allow me to leave.

1. No layovers in Thailand which means no cheap re routes through Bangkok from here in the North. I may have to get bounced through Korea or Taiwan again.
2. Final destination in the USA

From there they couldn't care less what happens to me. I'm still not sure where in the states I might get dropped, but it looks like it will probably be the western half because it's closer. Likely possibilities could be Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. It's all a matter of what's available and what I can afford when the time comes. I'll be arriving without much more than the clothes on my back and a couple bucks in my pocket. About the same as when I got to Thailand nearly two years ago. But hey, if I can pull that off here in Southeast Asia and still be alive two years later, I think I can handle it.