A Trip to the US Embassy in Bangkok and a Talk with Unhappy Americans

Yesterday, I fell into a surprising conversation with a group of Americans who no longer live in the US. Their negative opinions about the country they used to call 'home' surprised me somewhat, especially as it took place in the waiting room of the US Embassy in Bangkok. I had to make a trip to the American Embassy to get new pages added to my passport. I need to take a trip out of the country next week and my passport was almost full of visas. As my trip would require 2 blank pages for the huge visas both Thailand and Cambodia put in passports, I wouldn't be able to leave the country and come back in without new pages.

No problem though. The US Embassy adds pages for free while you wait, which is a nice little service, so I took the sky train down there yesterday afternoon. A friend had told me it would take about an hour, but that there was a nice waiting room with a big screen TV showing the news, so not a great hardship either.

I arrived at 1pm, dutifully filled in the form requesting extra pages, handed that in with my passport and settled down to wait. A few minutes went by then a man sat down beside me. I tend to be on the overly friendly side and also easily bored (the big screen TV just wasn't doing it for me) so I started to talk to him. Turns out he's lived in Thailand for 16 years, has a Thai wife and daughter and, although American, hates the US and "would never live there again if you paid me."

Now you might think from this that's just one disgruntled American, so what happened next surprised me. Before I could properly answer him, another man sitting behind us said "Yeah buddy, me too. Last time I went back to America was 3 years ago and that was for a funeral. If the guy hadn't died, I wouldn't have gone back then either."

Within a couple of minutes another man and a woman had joined in and, right there in the US Embassy waiting room, we had an entire group discussion about what's wrong with America, how it's a country in decline, and although everybody agreed they were proud to be American, none of them ever planned on living there again.