From Warsaw to Bangkok
Like other Melbournians I’d spent most of 2020 and 2021 locked away at home. So when borders finally opened up, I couldn’t wait to set sail.
Having figured out a way to earn my income online I was confronted with the question: if you could work from anywhere, where would it be?
There were constraints, cost being the most obvious. I knew that the lower my living costs the more I’d be able to funnel back in to my investments. But there were also many other things to consider from climate, language, healthcare, and safety to the ease of making friends. And the all important ‘vibe of the place’.
Experience has taught me that my initial instinct about a place, activity or person isn’t always right. Often I’ve found you need to visit and see what things are like for yourself. Sure you can make an educated guess, but it’s only ever a guess. If you decide against visiting off-hand, you may just miss something great. It’s hard to really know until you get there. Case in point: Thailand.
My plan was to be in Europe by May 2022, but I had a few months to kill first. I didn’t want to get to Europe while it was still cold. I figured that I’d spend time in Asia first. The trouble was that most of Asia was still in lockdown, or at least not accepting tourists. Thailand was the exception, so even though I didn’t have any particular interest in going there I made my first stop in Phuket.
At the airport I had to go through a whole covid screening procedure, which included showing them my vaccine documents, the online health pass and then get a PCR test done. The whole thing went… smoothly. I was pleasantly surprised.
Next I jumped into a huge van that the hotel had organised to pick me up. It had a beige interior with neon strip lights and speakers throughout. It was halfway between a nightclub and a minivan. I discovered later this is par for the course in Thailand. I had this whole 10 seat van to myself. The driver evidently couldn’t speak much English. So I sat there quietly while taking in my first glimpses of Phuket.
The people and the streets flashed past the windows and where I should have felt excitement about my upcoming trip, I felt nothing. Just a quiet emptiness. It struck me in that moment that the long lockdowns had taken their toll. I had gritted my way through it and thought I’d done a good job, but in reality I’d just pushed the unpleasantness down. The result, I’d lost some of my spark. I wondered whether I could get it back.
Being more of a city slicker, Phuket wasn’t my kind of place. But I met some interesting people there. It became clear that Thailand attracted people that didn’t quite fit in back home, wherever that was for them. I met a guy called Jack originally from Poland that would leave his hotel door wide open as he was convinced that it was impossible for him to be robbed. It was simply not part of his ‘karma’ as he described it. He was a nice guy, with some very strange ideas. He showed me around Phuket, I get the feeling I reminded him of his son who was back in Poland. I felt a bit sorry for him. It was clear that his ideas were so out there that he had become estranged from his family as a result. He seemed pretty much normal, but then would go down bizarre rabbit holes. I was amazed that someone could be sane and functional, while concurrently holding these insane beliefs. But I suppose our default way of explaining the world is via narrative as opposed to logic and science. So I tried to cut him some slack. We’ve been doing narrative for 200,000 years and science for 200.
I like to hedge my bets on that front. I know that science and our understanding of the universe has it’s limits. So I reserve 30 minutes of my day for meditation, just in case like Pascal in his famous wager, there is a ‘god’.
To my relief as the days went by I started to feel more alive. Shortly after arriving in Bangkok I wrote in my journal, “lately when I close my eyes, I just feel energy, excitement and life. It feels like putting my hand into a cool mountain steam.”
As my time in Thailand come to an end I was shocked to feel a tinge of sadness at leaving. Of all the places in the world, I never expected that I would enjoy Thailand. After all I thought that clean, orderly and on time was my thing, like Japan. But the flip side of that orderliness is a restraint on ones true feelings and expression, a greater distance between people and often an icy existence. Thailand was the opposite and it thawed me out no end. I was a bit like Han Solo coming out of perma freeze, it took me a while to regain my senses, but once I did, I was loving life.
The next stop was Thessaloniki in Greece. Greece being my ancestral home, it was the place where I expected to feel most at home. Again the opposite of what I expected happened. Despite speaking the language I found it difficult to connect with people in Thessaloniki and had a pretty terrible time. I had to laugh at myself. It was a lesson in humility.
I continued on to a few countries in Eastern Europe, from Poland down to Hungary and Serbia before stopping in Cyprus on the way back to Asia. By this point I was just going through the motions more or less. Somehow Thailand stood out.
It’s worth turning over as many stones as you can. You never know which one your treasure will be under.