What I Will (And Won’t) Miss About Thailand

At Suvarnabhumi Airport

Exactly eight months and one day ago, I sat at JFK Airport in New York City, about to fly across the planet for the first time in my “adult” life. I traveled a lot growing up, but never like this.

Jumping headfirst into living abroad, I decided to start in Thailand. I knew fully well that I had no clue what I was getting myself into, but I embraced the unknown as best I could: with an open mind and heart.

As I sit here now at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, *shockingly* still alive, the Thailand chapter is coming to a close. I’ll be heading home for a few weeks to see friends, meditate, and attend some weddings. Then I’ll fly to Vietnam, and onward from there.

Here are some of my thoughts and insights from the past eight months that I’ll take with me as the journey continues. I’ll try my best to be succinct, seeing as I have a flight to catch.

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What I’ll Miss About Thailand

Here’s what I’ll miss:

Thai People

The incredibly kind people and their welcoming hospitality. Whether it’s into a restaurant, bookstore, café, or even into an open-hearted conversation, nobody invites you to sit down, relax, and stay a while like Thai people.

Besides their kindness, Thai people often have a very playful, lighthearted demeanor. Everyone I’ve met is always cracking jokes (often teasing, sarcastic, and irreverent ones, too) and laughing together. Nobody seems too serious or too worried about the future, nor does anyone seem to take themselves too seriously.

My language teacher is an inspiring paragon of this lighthearted sense of humor. Despite being diagnosed with breast cancer, going through chemo treatments, and losing all of her hair — all during the handful of months we’ve known each other — she still dresses up, smiles, and cracks jokes more than ever. It seems that cancer has somehow only made her more positive. “How does my hair look today? Oh, wait…” she’d say, bursting out into laughter. Throughout all of this, she never stopped teaching, which is her favorite way to spend her time.

Cream, my girlfriend, is another Thai who stands out to me. She is one of the most loving people I have ever met. She’s incredibly fair and has a very good heart (fun fact, the Thai word for “kind” is jaidee, literally combining jai — “heart” and dee — “good”). She has welcomed me to this country more than anyone and has helped me feel at home here. In the past few months, I’ve helped Cream launch a freelance graphic design business, and she’ll be joining me in Vietnam.

Thai Food

Thai cuisine is so unbelievably, over-the-top flavorful. Everything you chomp into is just bursting with different aromas, tastes, and spices, including the infamous Thai chilis, which you certainly have to be careful with.

Sometimes, just from walking around the streets in the morning, I would smell restaurant kitchens cooking chilis in preparation for the day. My eyes would water and I would start coughing, practically unable to breathe — from the street! It makes me wonder how the local cooks can stand it.

Thai people are the biggest foodies I’ve ever met, so it’s no surprise that everywhere I went, the food was exquisite. And not just Thai food — in any given week, Cream and I would eat a variety of Thai, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, American, and sometimes even Italian food. Every meal was special and tasty.

Thailand’s Natural Beauty

I never realized just how much geographic variety there is in Thailand: thick jungles rolling over mountains, tiny hidden villages of wooden bungalows, terraced lush rice paddies, elephant camps, ornate Buddhist temples quietly tucked away, and the most beautiful beaches in the world (see my Krabi and Phuket posts).

Fun fact, Thailand has 147 national parks. The country is slightly larger than California which, for comparison, only has *ahem* nine national parks. (Although, to be fair, California has nearly 300 state parks.)

The Freedom of a Freelancing Lifestyle

Leaving the U.S., for me, meant leaving an oversaturated media and advertising market that permeates the lives and thoughts of both me and everyone around me — all of the time. Thailand gave me an escape from this. Essentially, it helped me clear my mind and reflect more deeply.

To me, this is the most valuable freedom. In particular, going on a ten-day vipassana course in Thailand was a very special, enormously grounding experience. Going to a silent meditation camp in the middle of the jungle, in a faraway corner of the world, was a new level of being “nowhere” — the perfect place to work on dissolving my ego.

Embracing a Different Culture

Literally everything about everything here is different from the U.S. Everything I’ve already mentioned, plus all the signs and billboards have confusing, squiggly Thai letters on them. They drive on the left and motorbikes are everywhere. The ornate Buddhist temples and the way people relate to them all seem different from Western religious culture. It’s always hot, even when it’s cold. You can’t drink the tap. Even the way you sh*t is different — you rinse off with “the bum gun” and can’t put any tissue in the bowl, or else you’ll clog the smaller pipes. Overall, the way that people approach and go about their lives is nothing like back home.

Of course, it’s still human — just a different side of humanity than what I’ve been used to. After a while, some patterns start to emerge from the chaos, and it starts to make a little bit of sense. Despite all the differences, people manage to live their lives just as fully as anywhere else. It would be impossible to understand any culture without visiting and experiencing it firsthand, and even after eight months, I’ve only brushed the tip of the iceberg. As my friend Shane wisely commented, “It’s the same…but completely different.”

This realization is one of the most beautiful parts of travel when it is embraced. All these differences can be appreciated as charming reminders to constantly widen my definitions of what might be considered “normal,” “acceptable,” and even “enjoyable.”

Keep in mind that nothing exists in isolation. Perhaps the best part about living in Thailand is that I enjoyed all of these things simultaneously and on a daily basis. A weekend trip might entail heading out with my girlfriend to a mountaintop resort to chill with elephants, a huge reservoir with floating villages, or just a new restaurant and a movie at one of the dramatically decorated movie theaters.

When I look back on my eight months in Thailand, my favorite memories will include moments sharing company and delicious food while connecting with some of the best, kindest, friendliest, and most open-minded people I’ve ever met.

Yeah, I’m going to miss that.

What I Won’t Miss About Thailand

I want to be objective here and I don’t want to say that it’s all sunshine and roses. Here are the things I won’t miss about Thailand:

The coffee is decent but not great. And if I drink too much bubble tea, then I’ll get fat, as evidenced by the few pounds I’ve gained.

Saying hello to dozens of thumb-sized cockroaches every night while walking from the motorbike parking to my apartment entrance. “Want to check out the party tonight?” I’d joke with my girlfriend, referring to their bacchanal frenzies by the sewer drain. Thankfully, they wouldn’t climb up to our place on the third floor, except for that one time…

Getting food poisoning once every three months, on average. I landed in the hospital once, and I had horrible diarrhea in my last few days before leaving the country, when going to the hospital wasn’t an option (I would have missed this flight). My backup solution was to stop eating for three days. Thailand gave me a kick out the door, it seems. Thankfully, I’m feeling mostly better now.

Inescapable heat and humidity, which helps explain why Thai people hate walking despite the enormous amount of traffic. It was nice to skip winter this year, but I wouldn’t mind some cooler weather after so many months of relentless heat. I even got a haircut for the first time in three years (although let’s be real, that one was unavoidable). March and April pollution wasn’t as bad this year as it usually is here, but it still felt sticky and gross outside, especially with the heat.

(Some of) the foreigners. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tourists of all ages who come here to appreciate the culture and the beauty, but some take it a bit too far for my taste. There are a few different archetypes, some more respectable than others:

• Some backpackers spend all their time in bars and hostels, appreciating drunkenness at a big discount, but some completely miss the culture in the process. One appeal of Thailand is in how little the drinks and accommodations cost. Ironically, this group tends to pay more than everyone else, getting scammed in the touristy parts of town — but it’s still cheaper than the U.S. and Europe by a good margin.

• Sex tourists fuel one of the biggest sex work industries in the entire world. It’s not a coincidence that the most touristy parts of Phuket and Bangkok, for example, line up exactly with the red light districts.

• I don’t generally mind foreigners who come to live here long-term – it’s cool that they want to live here, and they seem to appreciate the lifestyle. It can get annoying, though, when people split hairs over costs and payments. I have little patience for foreigners who complain that their $3 pad Thai is overpriced or that $2 is too much for a beer when their home countries cost several times as much.

Let me be clear that nobody is better or worse than any other. Instead, these different characters, and all the others, reflect a truth about Thailand — it’s a place for everyone, for better or worse. I’ve started looking at other foreigners a little more forgivingly since my time here, taking the Thai perspective of shrugging and saying, “Let them be happy!” and then minding my own business.

All in all, the positives outweigh the negatives. I don’t expect any place to be perfect and I’m not opposed to getting out of my comfort zone. Still, I would experience these things (or the risks of them, as in the case of food poisoning) on a daily basis. This certainly wore me down a bit over the months that I was here.

Thailand — Mission Accomplished?

I had two main reasons for choosing Thailand as the place to start my adventure. The first was a simple logistic one: it was the only country in Asia that I genuinely wanted to go to where travel was possible in 2021. Even two weeks of quarantine isn’t so bad if it’s spent on the world’s most beautiful beaches.

The second was that I was learning a new lifestyle, and Thailand struck me as a great place to practice and start living it. Chiang Mai, in particular, is a hub for remote workers and digital nomads for many of the same reasons why I’ll miss the country. The excellent internet and infrastructure, combined with the comfortable hospitality, best food ever, and incredibly friendly people, made it the perfect training ground to try taking my business on the road, which has thrived and grown since I arrived eight months ago. With stable internet, good food, nice people, and a low cost of living (which is also a safety net, in a way), I could learn the ropes of spending long periods away from my former life in the U.S. to practice venturing into an unknown new place.

Now, eight months later, I feel extremely comfortable doing that. In fact, I think I’ll feel more like a tourist when I return to the U.S. than I currently do in Thailand. Eight months ago and still today, I have no plan and no desire to live in the U.S.

Like I mentioned, though, I no longer plan to live in Thailand, either. With this comfort and adaptability to new territory, I want to keep wandering, experiencing new places and cultures. When people ask me where I want to go next, my answer — “everywhere” — is about as specific as I can be. I don’t have any plans after my one-way flight to Vietnam next month.

So, as much as I love Thailand, it’s goodbye, sawadee krap, yindee tee dai roo jak krap (nice to meet you), for now. Let me say one more thing, though.

Everybody Comes Back To Chiang Mai

I was in a couple bands in Chiang Mai, and after our last show, I said goodbye to my bandmates. One has lived in Chiang Mai for nearly a decade, and he replied, “See you later. I know how this place works. You’ll be back sooner or later, whether it’s for a couple days, a couple months… Let us know when you come back, we’ll play some more shows. You’re always welcome and we’ll miss you ‘til then.”

My gut tells me he is 100% correct. Chiang Mai has become one of my favorite cities in the world, and I will miss it very deeply. Even if I don’t settle here (or anywhere) for the foreseeable future, there’s a solid chance I’ll come back and visit sometime.

Because one thing that’s become clear over the past eight months is this: there’s nowhere else like Thailand.

See you in the next one,

Andrew

P.S. What’s your favorite country that you’ve ever visited? Leave a comment below!

P.P.S. I’m always a bit behind on posting articles due to my crazy schedule, and I am ironically publishing this post from Bangkok, where we’ve returned to visit after a month in Vietnam. We’ll only be here a few days, but it sure is great to be back. More about Vietnam in the next few posts!