Living in Bangkok with Two Lurchers

Although I’ve moved to Bangkok, I’m not really going to be working in Bangkok. Technically I’ll be based on the outskirts, but my main role will be to look after one customer so I will spend most of my time at their three sites, all between 90km and 135km outside of Bangkok. The head offices of my employer and customer are in central Bangkok, so all is not lost but I don’t think I’ll be needing many motorbike taxis. Driving With a Difference In the UK, I have at times needed to drive quite extensively for work. In one job I could easily be in Peterborough, London, Northampton, and Wakefield in the same week. More recently I’ve just flitted between Coventry and Redditch, and very recently I got to work out of a site that was 3 minutes from my house. I don’t particularly enjoy driving, I find it boring but I’m comfortable with it, in the UK that is, where I understand the rules. Driving in Thailand is a different game altogether. Like every other basic task, I’m going to have to le...

When we were planning our move to Bangkok, I opted to delay starting work for 1 month, with the aim of getting our affairs in order. We didn’t really know how well the dogs would settle and we obviously needed to arrange for someone to look after them whilst we were at work.  I also just quite fancied some time off! Too Easy? Now that all the mandatory tasks had been completed, life in Bangkok was starting to feel a bit easy. Other than “Emma’s Missions” which were tasks that Chris would set me each day such as finding him a barber or buying ponchos for the rain, I didn’t really have a lot to do. I’d also managed to stay out of trouble for a few days, I could more than competently hail and survive a motorbike taxi ride, go to the supermarket and get around by various means of public transport without incident. With still more than a week to go before I started work, I was going to have to go looking for trouble. One aspect of Bangkok life that hadn’t really entered our though...

It was always going to happen at some point, I just didn’t think it would come around in what was only our third full week in Bangkok. One of us was going to have to go away leaving the other to fend for themselves and the dogs in the scary Bangkok house. I know I’m being a bit melodramatic, but you quickly get used to doing everything as a tag-team, particularly when it comes to the dogs; it’s never a good thing to be outnumbered. Abandoned! Chris was going to Phuket for 2 days, allegedly for some sort of work team-building thing. I thought it sounded dubious as the whole team is based in Bangkok so why they all needed to fly to an island with glorious white sandy beaches is beyond me, but I didn’t question it. It sounded like a total jolly though. Chris’ absence meant that I was going to have to perform my first solo dog walk. Now, for those that have read the earlier post ‘Walking in Bangkok’, this was never going to be easy, dodging all the various obstacles that the Bangkok ...

In my last blog post, I touched on what is likely to become a recurring theme; jobs that probably wouldn’t exist outside of Thailand, either because they aren’t really required, or the labour cost in other countries would probably outweigh the benefit. I get a sense that people generally want to be doing something in Bangkok; no matter how menial or superfluous the task, or how little they are paid, working is better than not working. To facilitate keeping people busy it seems as though various inexplicable job roles have been created. Directing Traffic I have grouped several similar job roles under one umbrella and have christened this group as “The Men with the Whistles”. By clustering these roles together, I will no doubt cause offense by failing to comprehend the relative differences in rank and social status, but they all pretty much do the same thing. They’re not all completely pointless tasks either, they are small cogs in the big Bangkok engine that must be kept moving, it’...

Although Bangkok is incredibly westerner friendly with many signs written in English & almost everyone having some sort of basic grasp of spoken English (or at least a willingness to interpret vivid gesticulations without taking offense), I still find myself at times not being entirely sure of what is happening. This includes scenarios where I have been told to wait somewhere but I’m not exactly sure what I’m waiting for and being asked to sign my name on a document which is written entirely in Thai. I am no stranger to not questioning uncertain scenarios. On our reconnaissance visit to Bangkok in August, I was perfectly happy to get into several different cars with complete strangers & then enter properties with them in a country I’d never been to before. This is all worked out fine & life is far less stressful when you overlook the ambiguities. The Medical To get a work permit in Thailand, it is necessary to obtain a medical certificate which I think declares that y...

Having experimented with “Walking in Bangkok” and meeting some, shall we say, ‘challenges’, I wanted to explore alternative means of getting around. This completely excludes dog walking as that just needs to be done, and we’re all (dogs included) starting to become oblivious to the chaos around us. We have also very quickly learned to appreciate the relative tranquillity that the weekend brings, and how a relaxing dog walk is possible. Next Step I’d been fortunate enough to only need to visit fairly local places so far, generally within a 2.5km radius of our house, so had opted to walk. I had once almost been foiled by my inability to cross a busy road but had overcome this obstacle on that occasion. The time of day had probably helped as a few days later I was met with the same hurdle on another road. I’d set out at 08:30 one morning to attend a doctor’s appointment at 09:30, that was just under 3km away. I’d planned my route and had studied Google Street View so felt confident th...

I suppose it’s probably about time I started writing about living in Bangkok instead of yammering on about nice walks in the Northamptonshire countryside. In fairness, I have only been here for 5 days, although, as is often the case in these kinds of scenarios, familiarity with my surroundings has developed at such a pace that I feel like I’ve been here for a few weeks. The First Walk Having landed at Suvarnabhumi Airport nice and early on Sunday morning, I was able to beat the Bangkok traffic (for once) and get to the house for 08:00. The most obvious thing to do after a 12-hour flight was to take the dogs on their first walk in Thailand. Chris had quite rightly opted to allow the dogs to settle into the house and garden for a day or so, rather than attempting to take on the soi dogs and whatever else Bangkok had to offer, but there was no avoiding it now. The roads were quiet, the temperature was relatively mild, and we had two pairs of hands. We set out equipped with a good sup...

As October progressed, the departure plans were shaping up nicely. Chris was returning from Bangkok on the same day I was saying a tearful goodbye to my Halfords colleagues, and we had various other farewells to make over the weekend. We had managed to find tenants to rent our house & they were keen to move in a week before we were flying to Bangkok, so we saw this as a rare opportunity to take a relaxing break with the dogs. We booked a little cottage in the South Northamptonshire countryside and looked forward to a week of long walks on crisp winter mornings, the dogs taking in new sights, sounds, and smells; and then us all snuggling in front of an open fire, exhausted from our adventures. We’d arrive in Bangkok impossibly fresh and ready to experience what would, in all reality, be almost the complete opposite of our week in a cottage! Time to Say Goodbye Everything was going to plan on Monday; we moved the last of our possessions out of our house although this did ultimate...