Report Of First Non-"o" Visa Extension Run To Bangkok

[HAL9000]

For those who have been helping me, and those who might have been following my posts, I thought I would post the result of my first non-O visa extension application that I submitted to the Bangkok Immigration office on October 8th prior to the October 12 expiration of the 90 day non-O issued to me in the US prior to my July 17 wedding in Phitsanulok.

First, I didn't want to take anything more than what the Thai Immigration website states, both in their posting of Police Order 606 and the summary posted under Required Documents, Visa Extension. There is a conflict in the lists in the summary, in which one list asks for embassy verification of marital status and the other does not, so I played a hunch that the requirement was miscopied from the Marriage requirements list and did not obtain those. They were not needed.

Fortunately help from forum members paid off in gettting us to prepare photos as there is no reference to this on the web summary or Police Order. We didn't catch the tip on us being in the pictures and since we ran the camera, there were no photos of us in the pictures, but the Immigration Officer said she was satisfied with the materials we had and did not ask for more pictures.

Actually, I should clarify that statement. I had noticed while waiting that things were going slowly because the officer was allowing people to leave and return with things they were missing, and consequently she found herself dealing with multiple people at at time as they would come and go, and then return with the requested item they had brought back. I felt satified that if they were slow because they were willing to be helpful to people that I, too, would benefit from this treatment, so I felt satisfied. The first screening officer saw that we had wedding pictures but no house pictures and told us to come back after lunch with the other pictures. My wife had prepared them on CD thinking that Immigration was hi-tech enough to accept our CD of about 55 pictures, but they were not interested and we took the CD to the next-door photo printing shop and returned with about 8 pictures of the house. The only other thing was that my wife was asked to make the map to our house and was allowed to work on that while the officer worked on other things. Lop Buri was correct about the 400K rule not being allowed. They did not even want to see the bank book and letter from the bank we had prepared, but luckily we also had the letter from the Embassy concerning over 40K monthly income. They requested no further substantiation of that letter.

The interview was wonderful and the officer very kind and helpful. As predicted by others on the forum recently, I received my 30-day provisional stamp and have an appointment in 30 days to return "To Hear the Result". My wife felt this was fairly automatic and didn't think there was any chance of rejection having passed this point.

Hope this helps!