Today, after all the stress, we were headed off to sort out visas! We got up early and got in the first songthaew we saw, which cost us 200, not too bad really. We arrived at the promenada shopping mall, where the immigration office is, just after 8 and there were already a lot of people there!
We tried to finish filling in our forms, hoping to get some help but not getting any! Hoping we had filled everything in okay we joined the queue for tourist visa extensions and started to wait. We got chatting to an English guy in front of us who told us that we would be better off getting the right size photo as they were quite strict at the moment. This meant more money on photos but the English guy and an American next to us offered to save our space. A lot of people turned up in this time so we were grateful for having our original space! A bit more waiting and eventually we reached the front of the queue and our forms and documents were checked over and we were told to wait until our name was called. We hung around outside chatting to the people we had queued with before sitting in the air con to wait. The English guy, called Joe, got his passport back before us and offered to wait for us and he had a car and was heading into town. A little bit after we were both called up to have a webcam picture taken and then again to collect our passport and our extended visas just before 10.30am!
We headed to the parking lot with Joe and he drove us in to town telling us about his life in Chiang Mai, where he has been for over 10 years! He also told us about a friend of his who has a bar and offered to show us where it was. When we got there he asked if we had time for a drink and seeing as we had much more of the day left than we had thought we decided why not! 4 hours later we eventually left after a couple of drinks and lots of talking! We grabbed some food from 7/11, got changed and went out for a wander to the oldest temple in Chiang Mai. This was pretty cool and we spent a bit of time looking in the different buildings before walking back. Joe had said he was going back to the bar from earlier around 5pm for happy hour so we got changed and walked back over. We sat with the owner, Rob, who got a text from Joe to say he wasn't coming, but we had a good couple of hours talking to Rob and the other staff and watching his super cute little boy! After a few drinks we headed to the food market for something to eat and a few cocktails before heading back to bed after a long day!
We decided to book an extra night here after the visa stuff took up so much time so we have our last day tomorrow to do some more exploring!