I have been giving Thailand a bunch of criticism lately, a lot of which I think is deserved. Someone pointed out to me something along the lines of what we in the foreigner or "farang" community here in Thailand on a regular basis: "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave?"
I think that is kind of a copout answer when you are trying to address government overreach, corruption, and poor management of a lot of things but I suppose I can understand where they are coming from. For all intents and purposes, I am essentially trapped in Thailand right now. Getting back to my home country would be an extremely difficult prospect and thankfully, Thailand has been very kind to me and many others by extending visa amnesty over and over again - meaning that we don't have to apply for visas, they are simply automatically extended.
For this I am grateful and yeah, I will admit that I am sometimes a bit harsh on the country that has been quite kind to me in the grueling past year and a half.
Therefore, I would like to explain why it is that I would much rather be "trapped" in Thailand right now, than "free" back in the United States.
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First off, there is a major reason why anyone would want to be here rather than somewhere like USA, Canada, Australia, the U.K., or lots of other Western countries and that is overall cost of living. Thailand is dead cheap compared to all of those places. My apartment costs a little over $250 a month after all my bills are paid. It is also furnished, in a major city, and close to a lot of things that are both lovely in a nature sense, and convenient in a shopping sense. If I were to have all of these things in a western country I would be paying at least four times this much for the pleasure. Hell, I lived in kind of a dumpy house in a college town of little consequence before I left USA and was paying more than this for a 3 bedroom house that I shared with 2 other dudes. The affordability of this country is just amazing.
This extends to all other aspects of life as well. Whether it is transport, eating out, going to pubs and bars, or just doing just about anything, it is dramatically cheaper than back in the west.
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If I decide to go and have noodles or a wide variety of curries at one of these plastic chair street food places, I can have all of my meals for under $2 each. Try pulling that off in the USA? I don't think it is going to happen and if it does it is going to be for something really boring like a slice of pizza and a coke with very few options.
Secondly, even though things are turning for the worse here in relation to Covid and lockdowns are back and forth in what seems to be an extremely random way, we have never really been subjected to the level of crazy loss of freedom the likes of which I have heard of happening back in the west. We have never been told we can't leave our houses - we were only encouraged to not do so. We were never fined huge money for being out past a certain time, only questioned and told to be on our way. I don't know of anyone that has been arrested for refusing to wear a mask let alone beaten down by police for not doing so. Personally, I don't think the masks do anything at all but I wear it anyway in public just because I don't see the need to make other people uneasy. Maybe this makes me a bit of a pushover, but I guess I'm just a polite dude.
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Plus, masks aren't really anything new to us here in Chiang Mai since we have pretty horrible annual pollution anyway. We were wearing masks before it was a Covid thing.
Lastly, I want to look at employment. I know a bunch of people back in the US that have had their lives upended by the inability to work and there are also a lot of people here that have had the same thing happen. I guess I am one of the lucky ones because the school I work at has still kept all of us teachers on board when the schools were shut down, but at half pay. This was fine and nobody really argued with it because honestly, they could have told us NO pay and there wouldn't have been anything we could do about it other than quit. In that time I have supplemented my income with doing some online teaching and honestly, I've reached the point where I would actually rather be doing that than in-person teaching anyway. I make more money doing this but at this point I would feel like a real traitor if I were to up and leave my school after half a year of them treating me quite nicely.
So there you have it: I would much rather be here than my home country during all the terrible stuff that has happened in the past year and a half. It's actually quite extraordinary when I think about the fact that it has been that long. I can't believe it is still going on on a global scale.
But anyway, I guess this is my thank you letter to Thailand for being as cool as they could be during these tough times and I am thankful that I am trapped here instead of back in the States during all of this. I can't even imagine what it would be like to try to do job searches in the USA right now... Thanks Thailand. You're good in my book :)