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Life in Thailand
by Thaiboxinggear
I don’t know about you, but when I was a little whipper-snapper, my parents and their friends use to tell me, “time flies, you’ll see. Before you know it,  you’ll be old and wondering where the time went.” Well I’m still not old yet but I am now a “middle-aged” 41 years young. They were right though, time does fly. I’ve now been living in Thailand for 7 years and 5 months and it’s odd because it feels like it was just yesterday that I came over for the first time and it also feels like I’ve been living here for all my life. I feel at home now here.
I sometimes feel out of place around farang now, especially farang who don’t live here and I often think in Thai. I never liked Asian women much and could never see what the big deal was about Asian chicks. My first Asian girl was when I was 17, she was a Korean girl who was allot of fun in bed but was way too clingy for me. She soured my taste for Asian women. Little did I know that 20 years later I’d end up married to a Thai.
So when I first started coming over to Thailand, it was because I had lost interest in the usual sort of destinations that people go to. I’d been all over Europe, trained in England and Holland, been all thru Canada and Mexico and felt ready to make the long journey to Asia. I started using up my vacation and sick time and in the first year made 5 or 6 trips to Thailand. What I found out rather quickly was that a few weeks was not enough for me and if I wanted to train in Muay Thai, I was going to need to stay longer and be prepared to dedicate myself.
As things do, my life changed. The place I had worked for 5 years went out of business so I started my own business and while this allowed me greater freedom, it also put a lot more pressure on me. I was fortunate enough to make some decent money and put a nice chunk of dough away. One day, after feeling particularly stressed, I thought how in our day to day life, with stress and responsibilities, we sometimes tend to lose touch with who we really are. This single thought was the second step in moving to Thailand. The first had come after coming back from England, losing my job because of it and then telling my folks that “I don’t have to work or live in the U.S., I can live anywhere.” I knew this was true but had no idea of how to implement this feeling.”
Anyhow, after coming to the conclusion that I had lost track of who I was, I made the decision to sell my business and take a year off. The plan was to use the money I made from selling the business to live off and the residual income that was to be paid monthly as my set-up money for when I came back home. I figured, one year with no work, training in Muay Thai and learning a little Thai would allow me to “better get to know myself.”
Well, after I moved here semi-permanently, I discovered Thai women in quantity. I trained but it’s hard to wake up and run when  you are going out or staying up all night and when you have a different beautiful woman or women in bed with you every night, it does make things quite a bit more difficult. So I was experiencing Thailand in many ways. This experience was costly though as was the lifestyle I was living. In about 4 months I went thru $30,000 and while I was set up pretty nicely, I had blown about triple what I had budgeted for. My one year stay would be cut short if I couldn’t start making money somehow. Without getting into too many details, I taught English, ran a print shop for a friend and did a few other things to make enough money so I didn’t have to tap into my savings and could continue to live here. I had really started liking the life here and didn’t want to go home.
It took a couple of years but I was finally able to start making some pretty good money by anyone’s standards and especially by Thai standards. After a couple of years I was speaking a lot better Thai and learning things about the culture that the average tourist will never learn. Living here affords you the luxury or curse (depending on how you look at it) of seeing things as the really are and not just the often superficial, tourist view. Some people say to me that I am “lucky” but I disagree. I made my own way here and luck didn’t have much to do with it.
There are some people who I speak with that think I’m living some sort of a dream life. Well, to that I say this, It doesn’t matter if you’re sleeping with a supermodel, you can still experience boredom. You can live in total paradise too and still experience boredom. Living here is not always fun and at times it can try your patience to say the least. Some days, when the sun is shining and people are waving and saying hello, I think that “this is what it’s all about.” Other days I ask myself what in the hell I’m doing here!
Next month - day to day life here, what it’s like.
 These are a few of my favorite things in Thailand:
Lumpini and Rajdamern stadium
Get to watch Pay-Per-View fights on regular TV
Can find Muay Thai on TV without really trying
Excellent Muay Thai training
A high percentage of exotic, hot-looking women who unlike some nationality of women
(?) don’t usually give you an abundance of lip service
Awesome food
Excellent service
Lower prices than most place in the US or Europe
Traditional massage parlors
Soapy, non-traditional massage parlors
Blow job bars
These are a few of my not so favorite things in Thailand:
Thai’s who stand in front of escalators to make their decisions
The following words / phrases when used by Thai’s:
Can not
No have
I lub you too much, too much
Sorry, sorry
Two-tier pricing
Backpackers / Foreigners who with no money
Visa runs
Going to immigration
Crappy service - waiting for a waiter but even though there are 2 people in the entire restaurant, you get served because they are all standing in the corner yapping to each other.
The Thai’s who say they want to learn to speak English but then refuse to speak it because “they’re shy.”
Paying for my kids education system
10 Thai salesmen running up to you in a department store to “help” you buy your shoes or underwear.
* Article by Thaiboxinggear.
* Back to This Issue's Frontpage
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