Here we are! End of day 12. Woke up a bit later than usual because I’ve been going to sleep around 2 am this past week. My goal is to go to sleep before 12 am today. It’s currently 11:24 pm. We’ll see how that turns out. Relatively calm day. There was a massive downpour today that felt like God just rung out his wet robe all over Chiang Mai. It lasted for a couple of hours and cleared up pretty quickly.
I had breakfast at home, made from groceries I bought when I went to the immigration office to extend my stay in Thailand.
If you’re a U.S. citizen, you automatically get 30 days visa exemption, so you just come into the country for 30 days without a Visa. If you want to stay for another 30 days, which I did since I wanted to go to Bangkok, you go to the immigration office, bring your passport, fill out a form, photocopy your passport, take a passport photo picture, and pay them 1900 Bhat (About $60). Luckily, they do everything there. It ended up costing a little over 2150 Bhat to get everything done. I was in and out of there in about 30 minutes. While I looked up online how to do it, I heard stories that it took hours or even days for some people. Mine was straightforward and easy.
Luckily, the immigration office in Chiang Mai is right below a mall. In the mall, they had a grocery store! It’s seriously the little things that can make you happy. I was able to buy some groceries for breakfast. Super stoked.
After breakfast, I did some quiet time (read the Bible) and worked on tweaking the theme to this website. Afterward, I wrote the blog about my South East Asia trip decision that you can read here. Then I swapped out my SIM card to my old number so that I could access my Facebook ads manager since I put two-factor authentication on.
Once I finished with the SIM, I headed out to the mall to work at CAMP, but before I went I grabbed some dinner at that other floor in the MAYA mall that I found! Tons of food options.
I was trying to find some healthy options, but I couldn’t find anything so eventually, I settled with some Pad Thai and some chicken wings at this swanky restaurant that had both Italian and Thai food. I think it was initially made for Italian food, but I don’t think it worked well with a predominantly Thai community, so they added Thai food options to compete with the other stores. It was pretty empty. The restaurant was really nicely done and had a large selection of charcuterie boards, wine, and a decent whiskey menu. I’m definitely going back for the whiskey. A Glenfiddich 18 was about $15. Usually that would cost easily double that.
After dinner, I went to CAMP and worked on tweaking the landing page to Network & Market and turning off my ads I was running. They weren’t converting well. Three main factors were crappy copy on my ad, poor image, and my autoresponder (Aweber) was having a bunch of glitches. Made some adjustments but didn’t get to finish because my 2 hours of wifi turned off.
I left CAMP and went to the grocery store on the secret floor I was at before. I picked up a bunch of groceries and headed home. I got home and was doing so good with keeping my iced Americano upright in one of the grocery bags, but as soon I put the bags on the ground…splash… I almost got annoyed but realized; this is just part of life. When I have kids, I’m sure I’ll be dealing with this stuff ALL the time. Better get my emotions in check now.
After cleaning up the mess, I finished tweaking the website, went over the SEO specialization I’m doing on Coursera, and now finishing up this journal entry. I’m going to sit outside for a couple of minutes to unwind, shower, and then get some sleep before it becomes 2 am again.
That’s it for today.