Changing HERE for THERE

"There" is not better than "here". When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here".

Since traveling for 6 months in Southeast Asia I felt out of place in my home country. I returned back home and started to work again. But after two weeks of being jailed in an office for 10-hours a day and hearing all the small talk about what was on TV last night I was becoming desperate to find a way back to Thailand. So I started to do jobs in Southeast Asia, what made me feeling out of place in my home country only worse. I did not want / could anymore live the 9-to-5 life. So I left behind a good job, a good life, friends & family and took the airplane to Bangkok again. But now with a 1 year ticket.

Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand

Considering the long time view of living in Thailand

I think that most people who move to Thailand don’t plan their entire future at one time, because those kinds of people usually wouldn’t move to Thailand in the first place. But while considering moving to Thailand I asked myself a few questionss. Of course it's difficult to be sure if you can give straight answers to yourself. But just give it a try; you will never know what you will find out. 

Why moving to Thailand?

First of all I tried to realize me the quote that I started this posting with, and as someone once said to me while on tour in Thailand "You are not in love with Thailand, you are in love with Thai girls". Did I try to fool myself by saying that Thailand would be better and that I loved Thailand and not the other thing Thailand is famous for? 

Can live in Thailand long-term?

Secondly I tried to measure the value of staying in my home country with a good paid job, friends, family and social security or moving to Thailand. As you see I choose the latter, but I also realized that my new home country Thailand would basically give me nothing in return. And that while staying away from my home country in the end I would loose all my contacts with friends, work, business and maybe even all my social security that I had build up in my past live. And of course for the first year or tree, euphoria will make me overlook this, but eventually it will come to everyone. And maybe that becomes a moment that I will have to measure the values again, but then of staying in Thailand or moving back home or somewhere else. That's a choice a lot of us have to make at a certain moment. But some of us cannot cope with this decision and they choose to go back in a body-bag. 

I did choose to move to Thailand but to be prepared that I maybe would return back home soon again. And I did choose to return home once a year for a reality check and to maintain the ties with back home at least a little bit. That worked great but somewhere did come a moment where I decided that I have to build up a future in the country that I adopted as my new home country. 

Going to live in the Big Mango

It was finally with a China Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok that I made the first step into my new life. While still in my home country I had made contact a few people in Bangkok. First of all with a German man who lived already in Thailand for about 20-years, he and his family have become good friends of me. 

So choosing where to live in Bangkok was easy, but in hindsight maybe not the best idea. After 3 days staying in the hotel where I had been working before I moved to an apartment building at Phra Kanong. Some friends did not understand why I liked to live in this 30-years old apartment building without air-condition. Well first of all its located 5-min walking from BTS-station Phra Kanong, so I have an easy and cheap transport in Bangkok. And the neighborhood is very much Thai, not as western and expensive as the rest of Sukhumvit. And other parts of Bangkok were unknown to me at that time. 

My new home is a 2-room apartment with wooden floors and a big open balcony overlooking Phra Kanong and Onnut. The room is more ore less furnished so I did not have to buy any furniture. After 2 weeks I was settled and ready to start my new life .... getting work.

On Monday I had a job interview at a tour agency and Friday I was on a touring-car as tourleader of a group of 30 people traveling all over Thailand. So for next few years I would be more on the road as at my new home. So I vacated my new home and lived in hotels. That sounds nice but you do not have a "home". So after 1 year I moved back to my old apartment again and I lived a life of doing "Tours of Duty" and party in Bangkok.

Cooking? Eating out is cheap and delicious.

Doing laundry? That was done by the apartment service.

Cleaning? A neighbours girl did that.

I started to make Bangkok my new home town. Meeting new friends, exploring the small soi's. I loved the 24hr/day life on the streets of Bangkok. Still fresh in my memories are the very early breakfasts that I had when I returned home from a party at 5 o'clock in the morning. It's the time for people to start their daily life because it's still cool, for me it was time to go to sleep. But not before I bought some food and to sit down on my balcony. From here I watched Bangkok awakening and saw the sunset above Onnut, with in the distance a soft sound of one the many mosques that spread their morning praying all over the roofs of this villages called Bangkok. 

Yes, THERE had become HERE

Of course there were some caps in my new here. As I am not a linguist my skills of speaking Thai did not come much further as "Kap Koen", "Sawadee kap" and some small talk with a vocabulary of maybe 30 words. And with that my social contact was limited to foreigners and Thai speaking English. And with that I placed myself in a social isolement. But I was not bothered by that at the moment.