LIVING IN CHIANG MAI | $750 Apartment Tour & Thailand Tourist Visa Extension

this is a bedroom I don't see more grab right we've officially been in Chiang Mai for a whole month now which feels absolutely crazy but we've been loving the digital nomad life hey didn't a driver we have accumulated a lot of things way too many hard drives two cameras rooftop how weird does it feel unpacking your stuff knowing you don't the Pekka backup for five weeks I love that form [Music] the crazier thing is we have spent one month somewhere and we haven't filmed a single video because we were actually supposed to be here catching up on videos because if we never stopped filming we're just gonna get further anything constantly for months so hopefully you haven't noticed our month break until today I had to film another video even though we haven't been filming I have been doing a lot of instagrams storying and a lot of people have asked pretty much these same two questions over and over so we thought that we would make this video to help anybody who wants to come to Chiang Mai for a long period of time we're doing the digital meta thing cuz it's really fun and we were good list so in today's video we're gonna be tackling two questions two we get the most which is what happens if you're a tourist and you want to stay for longer than 30 days because when you come to Thailand you get a 30 day tourist visa and if you want to stay longer you have to figure something out the second thing people keep asking about is how we found this apartment in the process of renting an apartment long term instead of Airbnb which we're also pretty clueless about so we'll walk you say that too if this is your first time to our channel this video is very out of character for us we're trying to travel to a hundred countries by 2020 so we're normally moving like really quickly and we normally don't do how-to videos but that would mix things up today we promise we're gonna make some fun Chiang Mai videos after this but first we have to head to the immigration office and renew our visas because they expire in two days two days from now is Saturday so today is actually the last day we can renew him and the office closes in a couple hours oh yeah I'm fine thank you and you get Jim my mission there's a lot of steps to this process from everything that I've read all I'm but I think we have everything together that we're going to need we have 4,000 Thai Baht we have two passport photos which are the wrong size but we're hoping that we'll accept we have our form for the temporary visa extension which we haven't filled out yet because we're running later than we want to take we have a photocopy of our passport with the immigration card that you get when you come in and last but not least we also have our passport and the immigration card I've read like a lot of differing information online I'm expecting to have to wait a long time and maybe not even be able to get in today to actually get our visa it's send it and if that's the case then we have to go back tomorrow because tomorrow is the last day that we have on our visa otherwise / stair decency what happens okay we have just arrived at the Thailand immigration office it's out right beside the airport and we have about an hour and a half till it closes and we're hoping we're gonna be able to get our visas today and then you put your reasons we're trying to be prepared we're printing these out of our apartment and how to feel down we got here but what's our own core we didn't have a background for himself refilling everything out the immigration office is a government building which is why there was no filming inside but 30 minutes later we have our visas that send it that was so easy I can't believe a faster one had read all these horror stories about likes people spending their whole day there waiting in line people show you up an hour and a half our way to get a ticket for the queue i like 6:30 a.m. and we walked in on a Friday [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] we just got back to our apartment and we've really really loved living here so we're going to give you a quick little tour and then we'll sit down and tell you all the details of how we found it and stuff starting with the best part this entire window wall so the point of us being here was to work and sit on our computers so having a nice work space with like top of our list and when we walked into this apartment in this entire wall was a window we knew we hadn't have it so this table is actually at the kitchen table it was against the wall over here and we dragged it over to this window and two steps away it is the kitchen take city Macy's but it has everything you need is fridge kettle we bought the Chemex for the months we can have real coffee every day and then all of your normal kitchen stuff like silverware mugs plates bowls and stuff do that sacred and not in the living room bedrooms over you this is our bedroom it has its own AC which made us really happy and there are two other things that we really like about this room walk-in closet which I don't think that we've had ever in our travels so all of these cabinets and a vanity where I put my makeup on and have all night girl things so I actually took all my toiletries out of my toiletry bag and put it in the cabinets and the drawers plus we have another window wall in the bedroom we the balcony when you don't spend too much time right here because it's been about a hundred degrees in Chiang Mai but there is a wash and our clothes dry it really nicely in about two seconds out here now the bathroom which you can access from the kitchen or the bedroom it's your standard bathroom and that wraps up the tour of our room but I don't even think this is the most exciting part there's a rooftop pool and a gym which we have tried to use daily now let's talk about how we found this place for those of you who are interested in staying here long term so the first decision that we had to make when we knew that we were coming here was which neighborhood we wanted to stay in the first time we came to Chiang Mai we stayed in the old town and we completely fell in love with this city it's why we wanted to come back but we had heard that all the digital nomads stay in this place called Nieman but we had never even been here before and we booked an Airbnb for a few nights when we first got here to fill out the area and totally fell in love with this place too so that's like the first big tip is don't book a place before you come you should book like an Airbnb or a hotel for a few nights in the area where you want to stay check it out and make sure it's where you really want to be for the next month or two or three or however long you plan on staying yeah everybody tells you that once you decide what area you want to stay in you should just walk around going random apartment buildings ask them for their rates but we found a few problems with this strategy because one it's really hot outside and it takes a really long time and it's kind of hard so our advice would be like yes still go walk around check out the apartments that you want to stay in but come up with a plan before you just go out wandering the streets and there's two good ways that we found to do that one look around on Airbnb because a lot of the apartments on Airbnb are actually in some of the same buildings where you can rent an apartment for a month or two or three the second resource you should check out is a website called perfect homes code UK our friend patty who lives here is the one that told us about it it has a ton of apartments for rent I think they're like real estate agents and you can actually rent through the website but I don't think it's worth going through all that trouble instead make a list of like five or six places that you want to go see then walk around and go check those places out when we made our little list and went out to go check them out in real life it's super easy to just walk in like everybody told us ask for a rate she asked to see a room we would go in there and check the Wi-Fi speed stuff is in the cabinets but one of the problems we kept running into is they would say oh we only rent rooms for two months minimum or three months minimum when we were only going to need one for one month and actually this place only rented out for three months and we just said please I said well what if we pay a little bit more and just stay for one month and that was all you had to ask you made a quick phone call I think we're paying an extra like fifty to a hundred dollars to stay here for one month instead of three but like going back we probably could have done that to all the ones that we rolled out in the beginning because they said we could only say for three months so it was our experience with running an apartment in Chiang Mai hopefully it was helpful to someone I don't know if it was the best strategy but it worked for us and we're paying 750 to stay here for a month which were pretty happy at the same time you can definitely pay a lot less our friend who lives here full-time like your round only pays 9,000 baht per month which is way less than what we're paying but for a month in this nice place we have we are very happy and what we found is pretty standard is that that rate is going to include your room like the dishes and the TV and the furniture and like all the stuff you kind of like need to live and it's gonna include Internet at least it did at all of the apartments we were know around and looked at the two things that it's not going to include our water and electricity and but how we vote was this video we will probably got our bill so if we have that we'll put it on the screen and just for some context we've kept the AC running ever since well you've checked into the apartment so it'll be like your max level of what you would pay it's one thing that we almost forgot that almost was a huge problem for us is you have to pay for the room upfront in cash and you have to put down half of whatever the monthly cost is on the spot to hold your place or something like that so you have to pay for the first month up front and then you also have to pay for a second month you have to put a deposit for a second month I guess in case you try to squat in here and we pay to at least have your payment for the second month and then you get that back yeah all custody in cash an eight losses bank card at they are important who you got a business and so we didn't have enough cash to exchange and we didn't know what to do thankfully we have really nice bed so that about wraps up this video I know it's a little different but hopefully you found it helpful the next two or three videos that you see here inch a mile will be a lot more of our normal style that have to do a lot with food but you donate the wings and the big lantern festival it's coming up oh my gosh all of which we were very excited about and we hope you are too now we're going to get mango sticky rice [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] good decision [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 329,372

Rating: 4.9395008 out of 5

Keywords: chiang mai, digital nomad, thailand visa, thai visa, living in thailand, visa extension, thailand tourist visa, thai tourist visa, digital nomads, moving to thailand, thailand visa extension, thailand visa on arrival, thai tourist visa extension, extending your thai visa, expat in chiang mai, how to extend your thai visa, living in chiang mai, chiang mai apartments, living in chiang mai for a month, digital nomad chiang mai, travel vlog, chiang mai apartment tour, travel

Id: esb-rdjGKeM

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018