Quit Your Job and Move to Thailand
April 23rd, 2007The title of this article, Quit Your Job and Move to Thailand, is exactly what I did 2 years ago. It was not a spur of the moment decision, I did not just walk into work one day and tell my boss to get stuffed. I had planned to quit my job and move to Thailand months before I actually left Australia and moved to Asia. My main motivation in moving to Thailand was due to a number of holidays I had taken in Thailand in the previous years coming to visit friends who had done the same thing, quit their job and moved to Thailand. To be honest, when one of my mates suggested I move to Thailand when I was visiting him here a few years back, I said to him, are you crazy I could not do that. His reply was simply, why not?
Those words, why not, must have stuck in my head since after I returned home from that trip to Thailand I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed the lifestyle in Thailand, the hot weather, the friendly people and of course the high quality yet ultra low cost of living. The more I thought about it the more I thought, why not?
The scariest thing I needed to get over was the idea of actually moving to live in another country. I had traveled internationally on a number of previous occasions but I always planned to return home so traveling was not such a big deal. Go to the travel agent, buy a plane ticket, fly to where ever you want to go and then fly home, easy as that. This time it was different, I was not planning on coming home and it is very difficult to line up a job in Thailand until you actually arrive here. Some people manage to find a job before they arrive but I did not have that luxury so it was all a bit of a gamble but hey that is all part of the adventure.
So although I did quit my job and moved to Thailand I did it with careful planning and did my homework online before I left Australia finding out all I needed to know about the relevant visas, work permits, finding an apartment and what all my expenses would roughly amount to. By the time I arrived I had all the information I needed to go about my business and everything fell into place just nicely. I had a month holiday in Pattaya where a few of my Aussie mates live before I started working and it was during my time in Pattaya that I managed to land a great job in Bangkok through a friend.
Since I was not stressed about moving to Thailand, when I arrived I kind of had a feeling that everything would turn out ok and that is exactly what happened. Actually things turned out better than I had planned and over the last two years I have probably been the happiest I have ever felt. Thailand is a very easy place to get used to and the longer you stay the harder it would be to leave. Living in Thailand is not without its ups and downs but that is life. The culture here is generally laid back but it is very different to Western culture in so many ways, sometimes this can cause you an enormous headache but if you want to live here and be happy sometimes you have to forget about your old ways of thinking and adopt a different culture and when you can do this it makes life so much more enjoyable when you are living here. Anyone who has lived here will know exactly what I am talking about and the truth is Thailand is not for everyone but if you can make the adjustment to the Thai way of thinking on some level anyway, it would be impossible to completely give up the Western mentality altogether, you will acclimatize well.
Before I left Australia I had heard stories from both points of view from people who had lived in Thailand before. Some told me they had lived in Thailand and enjoyed it at first but after a few months the Thai culture ate away at them to the point they had to go home or they were going to go crazy. On the other hand people had told me Thailand was a great place to live for a number of reasons. I do not want to spoil the surprise but the best advice I could give on quitting your job and moving to Thailand would be to definitely come to Thailand on a holiday first, or even come a couple of times like I did before you move here. Talking to other expats who have lived in Thailand for years is the best way to get good information on what it is really like to live here. Thailand is a huge melting pot of cultures and people from countries all over the world now call Thailand home. It’s great to listen to the stories and experiences of other expats but at the end of the day you have to make up your own mind about whether Thailand is for you.
So if you plan to quit your job and move to Thailand do your homework before you come, even if you have been here before on a holiday. I think it is a wonderful place to live but it did take some getting used to especially in the first year. Things have worked out great for me over the last two years and I have no plans at this point to leave Thailand. If you decide to go for it yourself I wish you all the best of luck and I am sure you will have a great adventure no matter what you decide to do.
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May 13th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
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