I meant to write something up on Friday May 1, to mark 3 years to the day living in Thailand. I got there in the end.
There’s always something happening in this huge, sprawling city, and life is such a contrast these days to the last (and quietest) place I lived in the UK, Stony Stratford.
There, we used to joke that the town gates were closed nightly at 10pm. They might as well have been. Here, it couldn’t be more different with 24 hour eating, drinking and partying. There are nightclubs a mere stagger from my home that are still going past 10am the following morning. Not that I stay up anywhere near that late these days – age (30 now) takes its toll…
But, a brief and abortive stay in London aside, I’d always lived in smaller places – and mostly towns rather than cities. Stony Stratford (p. 11,000) wasn’t quite smallest I’ve lived in – that honour goes to Padiham (p. 8,998). I grew up in Southport (p. 99,456), which was big enough to have a little more of interest, but was dwarfed by the city of Liverpool (p. 435,500) just 16 miles down the road. Derby, where I lived for a fun year and a half, was only granted city status in 1977, and the population is still less than 250,000 – compared to Bangkok’s estimated 15 million.
With numbers of that magnitude, there is probably something here for absolutely everybody in the world. It can be overwhelmingly hectic – I have to completely avoid certain tourist areas (Khao San Road, for example) to preserve my own sanity, but I’m fortunate enough to now be living in an apartment sat nicely between Thonglor and Ekamai – close enough to two of the trendier streets in town, but sufficiently insulated from the throb of city life that it’s rare I can even hear any traffic from my back balcony, which overlooks the tree garden of the neighbours. I can almost pick mangos from one tree – if I could just reach a little further…
There will always be things that I miss from home – mainly family and friends of course. I’ll be back in the UK for 7-10 days in August to see them, and aim to make that an annual pilgrimage. Although the BBC and The Guardian both have great UK news websites, I miss holding a physical newspaper that’s actually worth reading. Local English-language journalism is not quite on the same level, and my Thai is still nowhere near good enough to read a Thai-language newspaper.
As for food and drink, what I wouldn’t give for a pint of Bombardier and a bag of bacon fries. Or an eccles cake. Or a Ginsters pie. Or even a bottle of Vimto. Or Lucozade…
But then it’s all about sacrifices, wherever you live. My complaints that the current weather (37°C as I write – that’s 98.6°F) is perhaps a little too warm for comfort are hardly met with gushes of sympathy from my pals back in Europe or the USA. And I can always jump in the pool when it gets too much. I didn’t have a pool in England. Few people do.
There is less to fall back on here, if things ever got desperate – very few state benefits for the locals, let alone western barbarians like me. I think there’s probably enough freelance work out here for someone with my skills to be able to make a good living until the next decent real job comes along, but I’d certainly find work more easily in London, and be better paid for it too. I just don’t particularly want to live in London! If Bangkok ever got old, I think I’d be more likely to try my hand in Hong Kong or Singapore than to return to the UK. In the meantime, things are just fine.
The internet means that I can keep in touch with most of my friends and family easily enough – and having moved around the UK so much previously, I always had more friends in places other than wherever I was at any given time. I hadn’t lived in the same town as any of my family since early 2002, and then only briefly. So nothing has really changed except the distance. I keep in touch with family regularly, and probably speak to my mum more often now than I did in the UK. I’ve met some terrific friends in Bangkok too – not replacement friends, just new ones.
Will I still be here in another three years? It’s hard to say. I never thought I’d live in Padiham until I was offered a job there. To be honest, I’d never even heard of the place. Likewise Stony Stratford. And I’d never have predicted living in Bangkok, if you’d asked me even a couple of years before I made the move. So I’m not too hot on predictions.
The long and the short of it is that I’m earning a fairly reasonable salary by UK standards, in a city where this affords me an incredibly comfortable lifestyle. I don’t know what a two-bedroom apartment with swimming pool and housekeeper would cost in England, but I doubt I could afford one.
There may be other places in the world where I could live the same lifestyle in the same job, but I don’t know of any offhand. I doubt any of them can compete on climate, food, scenery, affordability or that sense of wonderment I get when I leave the apartment every morning. So I think that the only prediction I can make is to say that I’ll be here until I need to leave – or until I discover somewhere even better.
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