Yellow Book and Pink Card

On Tuesday morning, bright and early, Pinky and me and a friend we had roped along to serve as an official witness headed to our local district office to finally receive two very important documents I'd been working on all year.

Bangkok has special status in Thailand. It is kind of like Washington, D.C. in that it is not in any one province but is instead its own special thing. Where other towns in Thailand would have cities within provinces, Bangkok has districts within the city. There are 50 districts, known as khet, which kind of function like a city hall for the district (I am not too sure how NYC's boroughs work, but I imagine it's similar in that the districts are semi-autonomous, but administered by the city).

I was here to finally receive my tabien baan, or "house book", a strange Thai document that's hard to explain. In Thailand, every household has a house book which keeps an official record of who resides at that property. When you move, you are supposed to change your name out of your old house book and into your new one so that the government always knows your address. It is an important document in Thailand and serves as proof of identity and address and is used for a lot of things.

When my wife and I bought our condo, we received the standard "Blue Book", which was a breeze to transfer her name into. Foreigners, however, cannot be listed in said blue book, but must apply for their own "Yellow Book" which is the exact same thing, but lists each foreigner who resides at an address.

When I say I've been working on this all year, I'm not exaggerating. In fact, I started the entire process last November!

I won't really bore you with the long, long, long list of documents that I had to procure, but the hardest part was sending my passport off to the US Embassy for a notarized copy, taking said copy to a translation service who transcribed the entire thing into Thai then took that translation to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who then had to legalize said translation.

I also had to supply the deed to my condo (of course), my marriage license, my wife's ID card, my wife's Blue Book, the ID card of a friend who was going to serve as our witness (who also had to come in person on the appointment day), photos proving that we knew said witness, and much more.

The thing about the Thai bureaucracy is that, while it is slow, ponderous, and very redundant, if you have the exact documents they ask you for, things will go as expected. We turned in all documents a few weeks back for a document check and finally received an appointment to go to officially apply for the Yellow Book.

It took about half a morning. I had to additionally supply them with my work history in Thailand, everywhere I've lived in Thailand, where I was born, the last place in the US I lived, my parents' full names as well as the full names and states of residence of both my sister and brother (which are now all officially transcribed into Thai, since everything in both of these documents is in Thai only). My parents' names are even printed in the Yellow Book for some reason. I don't know why they needed all of that info, but there you go. This document is really important. It will make opening a bank account, applying for a driver's license, buying a car, and tons of other stuff way easier.

Even more exciting to me was finally receiving my "Pink Card", an official foreigner ID card that functions more or less the same as the Thai "Blue Card" national ID. They issue the card along with the Yellow Book. The Pink Card, while not offering me any residency rights or anything like that, does come with a ton of great benefits. It will allow me to get the Thai price at a lot of places (such as national parks, museums, etc.), will supersede the need for a lot of the needlessly redundant paperwork I've been having to deal with in the past several years, and will even allow me to fly domestically. It is a national ID card for people who live in Thailand, but who lack citizenship.

I look a little bit gormless in my photo, but hey, it had been a long day.

They were able to print both documents for me before lunchtime. The Yellow Book was free, and the Pink Card cost 60 baht (about $2).

It was a long process, but these two documents will finally open a lot of doors for me and make me feel a lot more firmly established and secure living here. It's a little thing, but I keep taking the Pink Card out of my wallet and looking at it. I've been wanting to get one for so long. It just makes me feel just that tiny bit more, that I really live here.