Udon Thani TimeMy Last Hours In Thailand
For a more personal change of pace, this post will concern myself — in fact, what were to be my final 36 or so hours in Thailand back in 2005. I did not know then that I would not return — I likely would not have believed such a thing. But that is how it has come to be.
Yesterday I uploaded a YouTube video about those final hours spent in Bangkok, so I thought I might as well offer it here. What follows is the description I offered with the video:
Due to about five video format changes since first recorded in 2005, the quality has suffered accordingly.
I married my Thai wife, Jack (Supranee), in Udon Thani on May 30, 2005. We had gotten engaged in early 2004, and had originally met in January, 2003.
Those have been the only three visits I have ever made to Thailand.
After some wonderful times in Udon Thani following our marriage, the end of my vacation was nigh…and the excruciating need to part from my new wife and return to Canada while we awaited the results of Immigration’s judgment concerning her visa application.
Unfortunately, I had not wanted to waste any of my trip getting any of the visa application process started, so it was not until we had gone to Bangkok for the last couple of days of my holiday that I went with her to the Canadian Embassy to start the actual process. We had tried unsuccessfully to get her a visa after my first trip in 2003; and I had gotten engaged to her in 2004 in the hope that such a bond would impress Immigration sufficiently that they would grant her a visa that year.
They did not.
So we got married.
When Jack and I visited the Canadian Embassy the day prior to my early morning June 18 flight back to Canada, she realized the enormity of what was before her — it would not be some fast fix. We would still be looking at months of waiting. She was so upset with me for not tackling the onerous visa process earlier in my vacation when I would be there to help her with it, that our last day together was unbelievably strained. There is a scene well into the video in which she turns the camera upon me while we are seated in a roadside bar, and the pain I am going through is keenly evident. I was feeling so unforgivably guilty for being so selfish about my holiday as to have done this to her…and to me. After all, I would be returning alone to Canada and my old miserable working life, and I so dreaded that flight the nexct day that I was on the brink of tears the entirety of our last day together. I knew how unbearably painful it was going to be to have to part from Jack at the airport when I would have to leave her, and head on into the secure passenger section where she would not be allowed, and where we would not even be able to see one another.
I wanted to die rather than go through the profound loss and sorrow that I knew was ahead.
The video opens with a view of the Nana Entertainment Plaza from where Jack and I were seated at what I believe was the Cathouse Bar. We knew one of the waitresses there — Vi was from near Jack’s village of Nong Soong near Udon Thani City, and she was one of the handful of Thais I had gotten to know early on my first trip to Thailand in 2003 before I had yet been introduced to Jack.
Jack was always responsible for booking us into wherever we stayed, and we were located in this area of Bangkok by her choice — she was familiar with a rooming complex I believe was called the Orchid Inn. It was a walk of about a block or two down Sukhumvit Road Soi 4 from the NEP, but on the same side of the road as the Nana Hotel (which was far beyond our budget).
It is from the Orchid Inn that the next sequence of the video takes place once we break away from the NEP scenes. I tried to capture the street view (Sukhumvit Road) from our room, panning all the different buildings up and down the street.
The final lengthy sequence in this video is the street-level view as Jack and I had some drinks just down and across the road from the NEP — we have the camera facing towards the entranceway to NEP, actually.
The sequence where Jack and I are seated at a roadside bar opens with that most miserable shot of me. A little girl soon appears and starts making faces at us — we knew her from 2003. She used to pester us every time she saw us, for she sold flowers, and was always pressing for a sale. When we met up with her on this 2005 trip, she did not initially remember us. Two years is quite awhile for a young girl.
As I said earlier, you can see one of the bars at the entranceway to NEP — I believe it is called Big Dogs. I had always thought it was Morning-Night. Jack and I enjoyed sitting streetside at that bar, but would we up at the place from which we were video-taping because there were no tables available near the street at Morning-Night.
There is a glimpse at the end of the video of my cab ride that next morning to the airport to catch my flight back to Canada. I do not ever want again to know the loneliness and pain that separating from Jack was to bring me.
My Last Hours In Thailand
Tags: Asia, Bangkok, Canada, Sukhumvit Road, thailand, Udon Thani
