A friend and I have a long-running line that every non-teacher expat in Bangkok lives essentially the same life here. Aside from the Soi Cowboy-haunting old lechers—but they’re usually on their way to Pattaya and only stopping here for a day or two—Bangkok lady drinks stretch the pension fund a little too far for their liking.
So what does this “same life” look like?
You wake up around 9am, 8:30 at a push, but 10 if you’re not a morning person. Maybe you’re of the motivated type and get up for a little journalling—a good habit I’ve adopted. Then it’s off to the condo gym. Sure, the very large among us may head to Muscle Factory a few days a week and the influencer types may go to The Racquet Club, though the condo gym sees most of the action.
7/11 time. Grab a protein shake, the bottled water that you forgot to buy yesterday, and perhaps a little treat—fruit if you’re a good boy, and toasties or a chocolate and banana muffin if not.
You order your breakfast—yes, you have a kitchen, and yes, you do have eggs remaining—but FoodPanda (RIP) or Grab will bring you anything you ask for in about 20 minutes. Enough time to shower.
After the healthy-ish meal you ordered, it’s time for some emails. Head to a café nearby—somewhere in Thonglor probably, or maybe Ekkamai. You arrive, take an iced Americano—at 120 baht you reckon this secures you a few hours of work time—it shouldn’t, but it does.
You put the small Apple screen down, pick up the slightly bigger Apple screen and stare into the void while waiting for the coffee to work its magic. Fire a few messages out, knock up a mini to-do list, and get to it. Once the Americano turns to exclusively murky-coloured ice water, you’ll know it’s time to leave.
Now you’ve got some options: dinner somewhere local and a pint with a friend, or do you stick to your actual day-to-day life and head home, ordering another meal, then chilling + scrolling for the remainder of the evening.
That’s the routine.
But it wasn’t always like that. It wasn’t always as consistent or stable.
It was nuts.
When you first arrive here, everything is new. There are motorbikes literally everywhere, cars driving with their own interpretation of road safety, people paying for things with a QR code payment system you’ve never seen before despite your “travels around the world” (to Europe and Australia, throw Japan in there for spice), full-spec tuk-tuks flying past you, proper street food vendors with scents that are sometimes divine and sometimes purely caustic.
There’s monks and temples, and hookers and strip clubs, and students who seem to be perpetually graduating with a new photoshoot every 10 minutes. New buildings springing up every day and new events to fill every night. And it’s all just here, existing around you.
When you first arrive here, you can feel that wave of intensity, but you don’t understand how to move with it yet. At the start, it’s a little too much, and your early steps will involve a lot of trial-by-alcohol at Khao San Road, while you learn to navigate taking a Bolt vs Grab, or figuring out what is a decent price for rent to avoid being ripped off, or deciding where to eat so you can give up on just spamming McDonalds and KFC (Zabbs are still a delicacy in this house, however).
Every street corner is a new photo-op, and every rooftop bar is some magical new experience. Each local restaurant seems like it was in Bourdain’s dreams, and you get to visit them!
And the cost! When you compare it to the West, you think it’s all practically free!
It’s hard not to be in awe of how you can walk the countless luxury malls eating cheaply and bounce around the city on £1 or £2 bike taxis that’ll weave in and out of traffic at high speeds to near-teleport you to a whole new area—and then head to meet a bunch of new people at an event.
And then bounce from bar to club, to banana and Nutella roti on the street, back to your luxury-ish condo with a view of the city—for a drunken balcony yap session and hopefully enough sleep for tomorrow’s shenanigans… and a little work, of course.
This honeymoon period is immersion, and it is chaos. It’s fun as hell, and you love it, but you still have no idea how to make sense of it.
So give it a year…
Hell, give it 6 months, and you’ll start to see how the city flows—and learn how to flow with it.
You know that scene in The Matrix where Neo can finally see the world as code and understand it? Or when Bradley Cooper takes the NZT in Limitless and suddenly he sees things for how they are?
That’s you, once you figure this place out.
It’ll start small. You’ll know where to stand on the BTS to optimally avoid all the masses of people that’ll pile on. You’ll know which restaurants are actually consistently good to order from, and how to time your order in the app while you’re out so that the food arrives at your condo at the same time as you—a true Bangkok convenience, all to save a 2-minute ride in an elevator.
I should say “lift” in British English, but I’ve lived here a little too long, and British-isms are slightly harder for everyone to understand, so American English becomes an easier default setting.
Anyway, over time this city starts to make a little sense.
You become aware of the best nights to visit certain events based on the type of people you reckon will be there on a Tuesday vs a Friday evening. Motorbikes on the sidewalk [pavement, my dear chums] no longer faze you—they’re just a mild convenience to you and everyone else here. You roughly know how to dodge them now anyway.
The Thai attitude of “sabai sabai” or “relax relax” has become ingrained in your system, and your newfound calm mostly prevents any major stress building up about these things.
“The ability to let that which does not matter, truly slide.”
This “sabai sabai” way of living has also infiltrated your formerly rigorous insistence on being early or on time for things. Bangkok seems to operate on a sort of “island time”, whereby people arrive when they’re ready as opposed to when you all agreed.
For the British, this is comically difficult to comprehend at first, and will result in stress—especially when you arranged a maintenance person to fix your aircon and they don’t come at the agreed 2pm, and instead meander over at around 3:30.
Once the aircon starts working again and the stress abates, you realise it may be easier just to move with this system rather than against it—you can’t fight waves but you can surf them.
Gradually, you’ll start to do the same as these people.
You’ll start being—dare I say it—late for things! Not one and a half hours late, but late nonetheless—10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. The first few times it happens, you may blame Grab for not teleporting a bike taxi to you immediately, or the elevators in your condo for stopping on every one of the 40 floors.
But eventually, you’ll become accustomed to being late—just a little late—and you’ll start to kinda like it. Or at least not feel horrific pangs of anxiety when it does inevitably happen.
Sabai sabai, baby.
The more you understand this place, the less wild it feels, of course.
And without that high level of stimulation and the dopamine hit that goes with it, you can start to drift into a mindset that all of this is totally normal: your low-cost luxury condo, super-fast but cheap internet, incredible food on every street, instant motorbike taxis, open and accepting communities, extreme levels of personal safety, the view from your bedroom over this mega-city, and communities that are open, accepting, and non-judgemental.
But it’s not normal.
This stuff does not exist everywhere.
This city is unique.
So you mustn’t forget to be grateful to live in a place that doesn’t ask you to be anyone else. Maybe you don’t look out your windows so much anymore to admire the view—but when you do, it’s a nice reminder that this place is still fucking gorgeous.
Well, that’s the post pretty much over, so here’s my final word on the place for now:
Your whirlwind romance with Bangkok has now changed into a more consistent love. It may not be wild and there may be routine and consistency, but it is still meaningful, and there’s always new places to discover and new things happening.
You’ve picked the one place where you feel you can explore who you are and grow in any direction you choose.
Gratitude was never my strong point however, so I’ll remind myself:
Max, if you aren’t careful, you’ll forget how good you’ve got it here.
Don’t.
Quotes I’m vibing with rn:
The wound is where the light enters – Rumi
I go down with the water, and come up with the water, I do not struggle against it – Zhuang Zhou
“You’ve changed”, “We’re supposed to :)” – Some lovely artist, hard to attribute
Favourite song for now:
Sumb Luck 