My K1 visa Experiance for all who dare to do one.

I am writing this blog to share my headaches, fears and frustrations with lawyers, the government and differences of culture. I am in the process of doing a k1 Fiancée visa for my fiancée who is now in Thailand. Ning and I met through a mutual friend and had been communicating online for almost two years before we met in person at Suvarnabhumi Bangkok Airport.

My mother and I arrived at night surprisingly on the 20th of September 2006. If you do not know this date, lets just say the night before we watched CNN and other News stations try to tell us how the end of Thailand was coming because of Military coupe.

If you do know a little about it then you know the coupe was bloodless and we where not in any danger. My mother stayed in Bangkok for a week while she got to know Ning and Ning gave us a tour of Bangkok on her days off.
After that week of being pampered at the Windsor suites hotel in BKK. My mother returned to the States. I moved from Bangkok to a condo south of Bangkok near where Nings condo was. This was in a City called Chonburi. Now I being from USA, I would look at this name and say Chonbur I but in Thailand they use lower case I to mean E.
Ning lived close enough for us to eat dinner at night and go see movies. My condo was great but I had to get used to cold showers. It was hard to deal with the first week but I think after I became fine. My intentions were to stay in Thailand and help people with English and get to know Ning, I had enough in savings to stay and before the coupe Thailand had a lax visa policy. I had gotten two visa’s to stay for a while both was 60 days but one expired early so. Ning and I went to visit Laos, and came back for passport stamp which aloud me to stay a little longer. Through Nings co workers I met other friends a Colonel in the Thai army, his wife a teacher and they had a son. The teacher ran a school from home an after school tutoring so they offered me to come and help the kids. I did not get paid much but I did it to make friends and put my TEFL training to use.
Ning and I had the weekends and dinner at night and I went to teach most days, and other days I would go places with friends.
My Thai got ok but the highest number of words I learned fluent was around 300 to 500 just enough to catch about every 3rd word when some one would speak Thai as they would to a normal Thai person. My greetings got so good and I could count to ten thousand people thought I could speak Thai. I was able to stay in Thailand for about 5 months and many problems came up with the new visa rules, family problems at home so I came back to the states, missing Ning 15 pounds lighter. While I was still in Thailand I had my mother find an immigration lawyer, and this was a mistake. I will explain more on her later.