FalangTingTong

Did this require the police background report or whatever it’s called?  If so, how did you get that in the US?  I know it’s possible but when I looked into it, it seemed like a huge hassle.

On 1/8/2022 at 2:01 PM, DrJoy said:

Moderna booster is available at Bkk Hospital HQ, anyone welcome (My friend recently got it)

 

Not free, need to pay THB 1650/- online

That would be my preference but their web site says it’s suspended.

Maybe I’ll call tomorrow, there is often a lag between reality and website.

23 hours ago, StayinThailand2much said:

After 6 months, as for the government's guideline?

Six months from when? I think the other commenter has it right that this category will appear when it’s officially something happening within Thailand.  Six months from my second jab is next week, and so far I don’t see any way to register as Pf+Pf for Pf booster.

Any word on whether those of us with two Pfizer shots are eligible?

The web site doesn't have a category for that.

I've thought about just showing up and playing Dumb Falang  (my Thai is bad enough I can be pretty convincing) but it's quite a schlep if it doesn't work.  And I've thought of getting a "first" Pfizer shot but I don't like cheating and also I'm worried I'd end up with useless documentation, since many countries are already starting to require 2+booster for entry.

Anybody have any experience with two foreign Pfizer shots getting a Pfizer or Moderna booster in Bangkok?

On 1/4/2022 at 11:59 AM, ThailandRyan said:

If you can afford it check out the River near Icon Siam, has a few very good gyms and a few pools as well on the property.

I live there.  The pools are awesome and the cardio gear is first rate but the weight room is tiny and I would hesitate to even call it a gym.  The River was built  just before “proper gym” and a few other amenities became popular.  I go to Fitness First  Icon Siam for weights and it’s OK, 10 minutes walk, but even that is not a weightlifting gym.

I haven’t been there but Magnolias might have a better gym in this area.  I love the neighborhood but it’s not exactly central, takes me about half an hour to get to Asoke by BTS and we have the fastest boat to the pier.

For a “proper gym” I would look at high end new construction stuff built after 2015.  And some older places have much better sports facilities (tennis etc) but that’s not what OP asked for.
 

However I would note that when gyms closed down so did condo fitness rooms. Unfortunately I expect the same will happen in the imminent freak out about Omicron, and if the General says shut it your building management will ask how fast.

I just started looking for a rental car for this weekend from Bangkok and was a little surprised to find the main websites not even processing queries.  Has me a little worried… I know that in some parts of Spain the tourist shortage led to a lot of companies selling off inventory as it would just depreciate (rapidly) If left in the lot.  Salt air and sunshine. Then the tourists started coming back and they had so little stock they were asking ridiculous prices for high season.

Gonna have the Faen make phone calls but I’m starting to think long-distance taxi.

2 hours ago, thvima said:

when somebody asks for an antibody kits maybe he knows better than you what he needs ?!

That's what I love about this place: come for the help and advice, stay for the passive-aggressive meta-commentary.

I was recently informed that the Khlong San Market has been closed (this was rumored to be coming, they'd been struggling for a long time).  I haven't checked yet, probably will next week, but I believe it and the news makes me sad.  It was possibly the last market for people of modest income in the area around Icon Siam.

Does anybody here know what the plan is?

I don't want to be cynical and just assume it's going to be bulldozed to make room for Magnolias 2.0 (which would also need Jam Factory to sell out, but I'm pretty sure the Covid era has been very hard on them too, I hope they don't but I wouldn't blame them).

I would also try MBK.  Bangkok light pollution is pretty horrible so I doubt it'd be worth getting anything more powerful than what the 4-year-old needs, and even then you'll probably get more out of pointing it *across* town than above. ????

I have a super cheapo spotter I got on Lazada for like two baht, and it's actually pretty fun to watch the river traffic with it from my glass box in the sky.

I can't see any antiBODY test kits online, but Shopee has the same antiGEN test the Test & Go people are tossing at us without further comment:

https://shopee.co.th/Gica-Antigen-Test-Cassette-ATK-ชุดตรวจ-2in1-แอนติเจนโควิด19-1-ชุด-ชุดตรวจโควิด-Covid-19-i.3294693.12136576326

If your goal is to test for Covid at home, that's probably your best bet at the moment.  If you actually need an antibody test, I'm afraid my google-<deleted> has not come through for you tonight.

I didn't use WellMed for PCR but I would recommend them unreservedly in principle, the doctor spoke perfect English and was very accommodating and charged much less than I expected for an exam/consultation pre-lockdown.

For PCR I used Bumrungrad which was actually not that pricey -- in June I paid 2700 -- and you get the fancy-hospital service.  Location maybe inconvenient but I got my results super fast back then, same day.

16 hours ago, tonray said:

Not sure about the ferries...but I believe they are open now...I remember it was about 3 baht. last year cash.

Ferries in my area are 4-5 Baht each way (no idea why some are 4 and some are 5) to cross the Chao Phraya.

Worth noting that on many of them you only pay on one side, i.e. if you get in on the non-pay side you pay when you get out.

Express Boat I think is still 15 baht and you can ride it for hours but only one way, and be careful with evening trips as a taxi ride back after the service is finished can be quite pricey.  Closed Sundays since the lockdown I hear.

Sathorn Pier (Saphan Thaksin) is under renovation and thus a bit hard to navigate but I think everything is running, maybe not the big new electric boats?  But I've only been back a couple days, maybe I just didn't see them.

If you have no fear of poisonous sludge nor of being eaten by water monitors in the event of a capsize, there is also khlong kayaking available in Chinatown.

I don’t have so much Thailand experience but I do have a lot of tech experience, so filter this reply appropriately.

If you want to live in A but earn in B, generally speaking, you should concentrate on your ability to earn in (from) B.  Don’t spend any serious money on A before you are set up for B.

Thailand offers many options for living inexpensively while figuring it out. Don’t overcommit.

I was wondering something similar -- I have "non-O" via agent, and a rental in Bangkok but I don't have any documentation of the rental on hand, so I was wondering if they would be cool with that for after quarantine considering that back in February (for real quarantine) they very much did want to see my post-release booking, which fortunately I had but unfortunately had forgotten to print out.  The officer copied the info from my Booking.com apps.

Anyway nice to hear it's not a requirement.  I'm printing out my address in English and Thai anyway.  I will be sure to post a topic about my experience after I make it through the Q queue.

What do these look like?

I’m coming back soon and I’d love to get something small and compact with my picture on it and “vaxxed” or whatever.

Explaining to the Germans that they need a different reader app to verify my American QR code, and also carrying my passport in order to drink coffee indoors, has not always been fun.

I also have the AXA and will certainly start a thread here if I have any Quarantine Surprise come Saturday.

My understanding is they don't cover "negative-test contact quarantine" because that's not a health situation, it's a forced trip interruption -- and at least in Germany there is separate insurance for that.  Which I don't have because it's, what, 60K THB for two weeks in a quarantine hotel?  IIRC from last time with proper quarantine, they did cover asymptomatic hospitalizations, but I can't remember where exactly I read that.

However I find it weird that people worry about the asymptomatic hospitalization case when saying "I can't smell" or "my toes feel funny" makes you symptomatic.

3 minutes ago, ThailandRyan said:

Wondering when to apply instead of waiting until I am in the US to make sure I have no issues.

You would need to have your flight booked and insurance paid for, for the return trip to Thailand, in order to get your hotel booking.  And then you would need the hotel booking and the insurance in order to get your Thailand Pass.

If you plan to have all that before you leave, then if I were you I'd go ahead and get the Thailand Pass if they let you do it that far ahead.  You can always re-apply later if your plans change.

9 hours ago, goldmagpie said:

Your new application was auto approved, most likely. No human involvement. I used the same e-mail address when I applied again. It got auto approved immediately, again.

I thought of that.  The software quality of the web app speaks strongly against there being a proper auto-approval system for this, i.e. actually automatically confirming the data... but then if I were a manager and I saw a flood of re-submissions for borked applications, and I didn't really have any ace developers on hand, I would probably say something like:

"If we already approved someone for this name and passport number, assume the new application is them correcting stuff they couldn't correct in the app, and just auto-approve it. If the data is still wrong deal with it later."

Still I find it calming to imagine I got some kind of concierge approval.  After all, humans answered my e-mails in real time, so anything is possible! ????

Update: problem solved the low-tech way! TL;DR: just contact support and do a new application if you can't change the dates.

I spent way too much time trying to fix the problem, which in the end was a React web-app misconfiguration on their end.  I thought I had a hackaround but the config persisted on the server and there was just no way to enter a date more than one day before/after the stored date.

So I e-mailed support and quickly got a reply.  They tried to edit the dates and ran into the same problem -- but, presumably because they know what to expect from government programmers, they told me to just do another application.

Which I did, using a different e-mail address.  And it was approved almost instantly, I'm pretty sure in under a minute, which I take to mean someone was actually sitting there expecting it to arrive.

Support Team was super helpful and I feel a little stupid for not just contacting them yesterday, but hackers gonna hack I guess.

Throughout this little trip down the web-app rabbit hole I kept wondering... there must be people out there who had dates to correct but didn't even try correcting them, because on the first day after that e-mail went out the system told them it was "rectified," right?  So they will be showing up at airports with approved but maybe invalid Thailand Passes, right?  And what happens then?

I hope the folks in the call center are as responsive as the online team was today, because I guess they're going to be getting some frantic calls from the check-in counters.
 

23 hours ago, JCP108 said:

Yesterday the link provided did not work (as I guess many of you discovered). Today the link did lead to a page where my birthdate was correct but my arrival date was one day off. It did not ask me to correct my vaccination dates. After I corrected the information, it gave a link with instant approval of my pass.

Today I tried again and it lets me edit the dates... hahahaha NOT!

I can change the arrival date but I can't change the month of my birth date, and the month is exactly the thing they entered wrong.  An the page says very clearly you can only edit the data once.  Lovely.  (Same as for you, it only shows the two dates, arrival and birthdate, in my case arrival was off by one day and birth by one month.)

This is one of those Amazing moments, really.  You upload your documents, they botch the data entry, they realize they botched it, they ask YOU to correct it, and their system won't let you make the necessary correction.... assuming, like me, you were carefully watching the replies on this topic and didn't just stop at "they told me to ignore the email" which would have been the rational thing, considering the system had already told you everything was "rectified."

I think at this point the advice is to re-try the correction link and see if it lets you correct...?

4 hours ago, donx said:

So you already received your QR code? I thought only those of us with our applications still under review received this email.

I had the QR code already when I got it, and if you did not then it probably is not connected to your application status.  Fortunately it sounds like just a SNAFU.

But now I have to figure out whether their listing my departure date as my arrival date is...

1. An inconsequential error of language
2. Intentional but unexplained handling of +1D arrivals
3. Invalidating my QR code until corrected (by whom?)
4. Meaningless but still able to block my departure because the airline won't know what to do
5. None of the above
6. All of the above including #5.

Agree with others that this is by no means a tourist-friendly operation so far, even though I support the one-night quarantine and PCR on arrival.  I worry that Actual Tourists may try this and get so frustrated they start badmouthing Thailand which can't be good for the industry especially if it gets the attention of the media.

Hello all!

I received the following email today, but when I followed the link and entered my data it said the corrections had already been made and further editing was not possible.

Has anyone else gotten one of these?

Quote

Dear Mr. XXXXXXXXX
Please proceed to the provided link to correct your `Date of Birth`, `Date of Arrival`, and `Date of Vaccination` within 7 days after receiving this email.

Thailand Pass would like to apologize for this inconvenience.

https://tp.consular.go.th/issues/cases/access

* This email is automatically generated. Please do not reply. *
 

Also, separately, I just noticed they put the wrong arrival date on my Thailand Pass: I arrive one day later than I depart, and they used the departure date, but they did give me a number and a QR code.  I will try to get that sorted tomorrow by e-mail and post an update if anything interesting comes of it.

23 hours ago, wasabi said:

That's true for most states but I got vaccinated on California and QR codes are available online there. However they use a proprietary system called Smart Health that a standard QR reader can't scan. However Thailand recently added these to the automatic approval process. 

 

I gave them both my CDC card and my California certificate and also used the QR code from the latter, worked fine and I was approved in under a day.

15 minutes ago, donx said:For AXA I received 2 different certificates - one that is tabular with a heading labeled THE SCHEDULE in a dark blue background preceded by some Thai script and another that is more like a letter starting with the phrase “To Who It may concern”. Which of these did you upload with your application.?

Not the “schedule” one with the Thai writing.  Assuming you got what I got, you will notice the letter has two important things:

The policy number, which you need for the application; and an unambiguous statement that the COVID insurance requirement is met.

They could highlight them better, but both are present.