Thai Life

One perk about being in Thailand is the ease of travel to get to so many different locations in less than two hours.  Using Chiang Mai as my home base, there are several major cities accessible with an AirAsia flight.    I often travel for a week at a time, often five or six nights.  I found that this is enough to really get the vibe of a city – and see if I want to revisit in the future.

I travel very light.  This is for a few reasons.  First, I want to avoid checking in bags, since this incurs fees with AirAsia and gobbles up time spent at the airport.  Second, if I need to get on a Grab motorbike to zip from point A to point B (and not get stuck in traffic) then I refrain from using large baggage, especially with wheels.  Third, I don’t like rolling luggage while walking on a busy city street or on sand at a beachside destination.  

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Visa: What visa do you have in Thailand?

My visa is the non-immigrant “O” guardian visa.  It is a long-term visa that allows me to stay in Thailand for one year, as long as my child attends international school here.  Hence, the “guardian” role that I play, parenting my child.  

Technically, the visa allows me (and my child) to stay in Thailand for 90 days, at which point I applied for a visa extension for one year.  Even with the one year extension, though, I have to report to Immigration every 90 days (but I circumvent this by traveling every quarter; more on this below).

This post covers the benefits of a long-term visa, benefits of the non-immigrant “O” guardian visa, and some lessons learned on how I obtained the visa.

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“That’s crazy – you moved to Thailand without knowing anyone?!”

I guess it does sound a little crazy, if not irresponsible, to move half way around the world to a country where I didn’t know anyone.  It’s been over two decades since I lived in Thailand – and suffice it to say, I lost touch with my friends here.  I have met a few people – in my MBA, in my career – who lived in Thailand, but no one who is still living here, let alone in Chiang Mai.

This post is about how an introvert like me has made a conscious effort – and several mistakes along the way – in making friends here.  I’ll organize this post based on the sources (where) I was able to make friends – giving a rating (1 being difficulty for me to find friends; 4 being easy) – and highlighting some advice along the way:

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Being stronger and fitter was one of my priorities during my mini retirement.  And there are a plethora of opportunities to do so in Chiang Mai.  So how did I choose which activities and routines to adopt?  

This post discusses what works/worked for my fitness.  I break up my fitness priorities into three categories: 1) strength, 2) cardio, and 3) mobility.  For each category, I’ll outline what I currently do to stay fit as well as other options I tried out.

Strength

For most of my life, I have been a skinny, lanky guy.  While growing up, my parents would say I didn’t eat enough.  During grade school, I adopted a nickname “stickboy” (for better or worse – I embraced it, using the nickname for my screen name on AOL, eBay, and other platforms).  The mini-retirement afforded me plenty of time to explore whether I can put on more muscle.  While having a healthy, high-caloric diet was critical in muscle gain, I won’t be discussing my diet on this post – but instead where I went for my strength training.

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I chose Chiang Mai because of the high quality of life at a low cost.  

In my prior post, I showed how much it costs to live in Chiang Mai – and how the costs are much lower than in the U.S. for the quality of life you have in Thailand.  This post discusses how I define quality of life, and why I think Chiang Mai has the best quality of life I have seen of a city.  

I’ll break up quality of life into separate categories that matter the most to me and my family, in alphabetical order: 1) Climate; 2) Culture; 3) Getting Around; 4) Health Care; 5) Safety; and 6) Schools. For each of these categories, I provide a rating on a scale of 1 to 4, 1 being negative quality of life and 4 being positive quality of life.

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