If you follow my stuff you will know that I have lived in Thailand for a long time and for the most part I think it is one of the best places to live on the planet, particularly up in the north where the weather is cooler and the population is large enough to facilitate plenty to do but not so big that getting around is possible.

The people are nice, the crime is low (despite the fact that the police are nearly useless), and the food is excellent and varied. Basically it is an awesome place, except for one aspect of it.

They really seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to live here for the long-term. On one side of the coin they are really pushing for foreign investment but what they really want you do do is spend a crap-ton of money and then get the hell out of here. That is not an official opinion by any means but some information has leaked in the past about the Tourism Authority pushing for short-term "desirable" tourists.

They briefly seemed to embrace digital nomads like myself but unfortunately that was short-lived. It becomes increasingly difficult to remain here as time goes by. Currently, in order to have a long-term visa I attend a martial arts school and even though I actually do attend every class, and participate in all events, we still have to be coached for our trip to immigration to renew our visas every 3 months.

This includes making sure we "have our stories straight" about what goes on in the classroom. I don't really understand this because I know what happens in the classroom because I am there every time, perhaps this is just because there are a number of students who don't attend. Then I have to know other students names and that is just silly since I interact with the instructors, not so much the other students. We are not pals outside of the classroom.

There is a also a absurd amount of paperwork that must be copied several times and each page of it needs to be signed by me.

The above picture is an exaggeration but trust me when I say that it is excessive. The most frustrating part about it is something I have mentioned in the past and that is that these documents are not used for anything, the aren't even referenced or stored, yet they have to be submitted every time. (There was a time in the past where I needed to access the documents that I had presented to Immigration in order to ammend them and I went to immigration to retrieve them only to discover that they had no idea where my documents are.)

I love this country but I suppose you could say that I dread interaction with the officials who run it. Tomorrow will be my first time renewing my latest visa in my new city. Let's hope that I can remember all the scripted answers that I have been told to memorize.