Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, I don't know if I would call this a series but it is just something I have come up with, Thailand Tales, just observations. I have been out here a while and things I have just noticed, just oddities about how things work within the system, the legal system here, the Immigration system. 

One phenomenon that I was thinking about the other day and frankly I have had a lot of time to think because there is frankly nothing to do in the evenings or in one's off time other than to think or read or tend to oneself. This notion of Legend versus Law. What am I talking about here? Well I just noticed and I came in right at the end of 2007, went through the bulk of 2008; I was coming in right at the end of 2007 and the I don't know the zeitgeist, collective notions, the conventional wisdom might be the right word, might be the right phrase of the Expat community was an interesting beast if you will some 13, 14 years ago. What I am talking about here is when I first came to Thailand, when I first came to Bangkok, you heard a million different sort of explanations for why visas were done a certain way or explanations about Work Permits; explanations about the requirements associated with those things; explanations about how a marriage worked in Thailand; property rights and there was this almost mist, it was almost ethereal where these notions you couldn't really pin them exactly down. Obviously there was law but the internet on top of it actually brought things into less focus; it made things more opaque. That was the era, it was the true hay day of forums and there were a number of them, Thai Visa being one of the most notable but there were a number of forums and the internet was a different beast. I found it interesting at the time. There were a lot of misconceptions, a lot of practices. I have talked about the era of the "Ghost Visa Run" where basically you give your passport to somebody and they would run it to the border and have it stamped up and brought back and you didn't have to do a "Visa Run". That was always illegal but everybody just, it was in this mist, the grayness that was considered acceptable during that period. Obviously that has definitely come and gone. There were a lot of unfortunate consequences for some folks that got caught up in that. They got their tail caught in the crack when the law enforcement against it became much more aggressive and some people got into real problems.

The point I am trying to make is, other things like the notion that a yellow Tabian Baan, a Yellow House Book exempted someone from having to do things like 90-day reporting. I had heard that a few times. One time I thought it myself because I didn't know any better until I checked it out. Again it was just kind of a different time and I think the further you go back in time, it gets more and less opaque. I really find it interesting that when I first came out here call it the beginning of 2008, right at the end of 2007, it was actually oddly more opaque because of the internet in a certain way and the internet had not become quite as populated with information; things like YouTube didn't exist on the level they do now and again this heyday of the forum, you have a lot of people just talking, not really knowing what they were saying or they were talking about something that worked one way in one place at one time. Then a lot of people would take that and it is like playing the telephone game; they spread that information, disseminate it around the broader Expat community and it would become conventional wisdom. There were a number of different things that I saw, that I heard back then that just weren't true or half true and it wasn't really a clear representation of the way, whatever mechanism they were talking about actually worked.

Then you cut to now and it is rather interesting that things are much more I would say concise. I think there is quite a bit more clarity out there although with respect to some issues, I think perhaps there might be actually the same opacity. It is to me rather interesting just this evolution that we have seen especially mainly with things like Immigration, I think that has really changed a lot. There was a time when that was much more vague and you would read things on the internet and it was just not quite so grey. Now these days, I like to think I hope to provide some clarity out there and now I think these days it is just not quite the same as it was. That being said, there is still a lot of misinformation out there; a lot of misnomers out there floating around on the internet. So it is still a good idea to check and double check and maybe even contact a legal professional but I do think it is interesting that we have seen a major shift with respect to this information out there in the ether, these legends out there in the ether.