AMAZING THAILAND

My two sisters, one close friend and I planned to have a holiday in Bangkok and, as we did not want to face any troublesome situations later on in a foreign country (none of us can speak or understand the local language), we decided to take a package tour – 3 days & 2 nights.

We are all Indonesians; 3 of us live in Jakarta and we all travel pretty often. And for me, since I’m living in Singapore, I got the most interesting job to book our flight tickets including the accommodation, and without thinking any further, I booked 4 tickets SIN-BKK-SIN via Zuji online, leaving on September 09 and returning on September 11, 2005.

To cut the story short, here we are 4 of us standing in line, queuing for our passports to be stamped. As for my eldest sister and our close friend, this is the first time for them in Bangkok, so I could imagine how excited they were to start the tour right away.

As we slowly approached our turn to get stamped, which is quite normal in Bangkok - as you all know, Don Muang is one of the busiest airports in the world - finally my second sister got her turn. After she was done, it was our best friend’s turn next. It so happened that at the same time the immigration officers changed shifts, and all of us were hoping progress would get faster.

WRONG…!!!. When Sinta (our friend) took her turn, standing firmly inside the yellow box with a picture of two footprints in it and looking straight into the camera on top of the desk as instructed, the officer couldn’t care less about her at all, as she received a social phone call and just kept on talking, laughing, joking, yapping away on her cell phone and ignored Sinta completely, not even typing or pretending to type, nor flipping through her passport, and acting as if it was her break time… As proof of this, my second sister was waiting behind the immigration counter, and could see everything that Miss Immigration Officer was doing (or not doing!).

And of course Sinta was getting more & more frustrated as she stood there hopelessly waiting, waiting, and waiting. She turned her head to me and said in 'bahasa Indonesia' that the lady is still busy on her cell phone. I could only smile at her and think it will surely end soon.

Finally she finished talking, stamped Sinta’s passport and let her pass. In spite of her treatment, Sinta said thank you, but was completely ignored and got no response at all. So she walked through and waited behind the counter with my second sister Eka, who was already pissed off with Miss Immigration Officer’s lousy attitude.

But the story is far from ending. Next, it was my eldest sister Lucy’s turn. As she was standing in front of the counter to get her stamps, Miss I.O ripped Lucy’s passport out of its protective plastic cover and tossed it over the counter at her, so that Lucy ended up having to pick it up off the floor. No word of apology, no sorry, no nothing! Without knowing what’s going on, Lucy just kept quiet and didn’t say anything. Seeing that, Eka immediately said “Don’t be rude, please!” After a while, Miss I.O. turned her head round to Eka and told her to stay back and don’t cross the red line, and then started mumbling in Thai language with a bitchy look on her face. Guess she was pretty angry that someone dared to tell her off.

And finally it was my turn. Aha, as I had already learned from the above experience, I immediately took off my passport cover, just in case it was her normal habit to throw things in people’s faces. She looked at me and asked where this passport had been issued. I gave her the short answer “Singapore”, and without asking me anything further, she stamped it. I still said “thank you” to her after all that, even though I was pretty pissed off as well with her attitude and treatment of my sisters and friend, and of course there was no response from her side.

That was the rudest experience we had in Thailand. Is this the right attitude for an immigration officer to act like that? I believe the authorities must take action in these matters, to make all visitors from all around the world to feel welcome in their country and not to forget that these visitors are valuable assets to the country.

As we all know, one’s passport identifies the country to which we belong; by throwing the passport cover like that, it is an insult and shows prejudice against that person’s country – hardly the way to encourage visitors to return to Thailand or to promote Thailand to other potential visitors.

So much for the slogan “AMAZING THAILAND”…maybe the authorities should think of changing it to “INSULTING THAILAND” instead.

To be fair to the Thai Immigration Officials – they were not the only Thais who managed to insult us during our short (and probably last for my sister,she still pissed) visit to Thailand. The hawkers and shop assistants in Phatphong / Chak Tu Chak market were equally proficient at demonstrating their superiority over foreigners by taking every opportunity to cheat us and compete with each other to see who could be the rudest.

Now tell me how amazing is that!

Khap phun Ka!

September 16, 2005

*this is base on true story, without any disrespect to the authority or thailand people in general, please take it as an eye opener.Some people might have faboulus and great experience and some people not.