Thread: Has Your Communication With Friends/Family Back Home Changed Since Moving To LOS?

Since moving to Thailand has your communication (emails, letters, phone calls) with friends and family back home stayed the same or changed quite drastically?

If you have drifted away from them, then how has this affected you?

I left the US in 1979 and moved to Saipan. At that time, the only reasonable option for staying in touch was paper mail. Saipan did not have International Direct Dialing until the late 80's. Phone calls to the US had to be booked in advance and cost about $3.00 a minute. I never called, and wrote letters only sporadically.

When Saipan got computer network access in the late 80's I started using MCI Mail to send, at first, paper letters to family and friends in the US and elsewhere. As more people got MCI Mail accounts I started sending electronic MCI Mail.

At about the same time I got dial-up access (via an x.25 PAD) to a unix shell account in California which, of course, included e-mail. (Anybody remember bang! e-mail addresses for UUCP e-mail?) By the early 90's quite a few friends and family members had e-mail so communication improved immensely.

By the time I retired and moved to LOS (2005) the options for communications had improved dramatically: e-mail, Skype or Gizmo, IM, etc. Even calling Mom from my mobile phone costs less than 1% of what a phone call from Saipan cost in 1979.

it did for a while chi
but since we had the bin lid last year we seem to be constantly in touch with the UK
with skype, facebook, cheap calls its much easier these days for sure

Haven't called parents or siblings more than a few times a year since 1980s.

Not gonna start now.

Nothing left back home.

Rarely, apparently I've got 165 friends on that bollocks facebook - I've probably replied to about 2 of them. It should be renamed "people I met".

Originally Posted by Dalton

Nothing left back home.

Pretty much the same as me...a few friends that I might exchange an email at Christmas time with.

I speak to Mum about every 6 weeks or so.

I speak to my sister about 4 times a year (2 birthdays, Christmas & New Year).

^ That must be stress-ful...

And your bro ?

Originally Posted by November Rain

Only keep in touch with my Mum. Never speak to the rest of my family (which has made me hugely popular with my sister & my Gran ) Well, they never contact me, either...

I've never been good at keeping in contact with friends, once my life has moved on. I lost touch with schoolfriends, then nursing friends & so on through every period of my life. I'm not really the Friends Reunited or Facebook type of gal, I guess...

Originally Posted by chitown

And your bro ?

Originally Posted by November Rain

Only keep in touch with my Mum. Never speak to the rest of my family (which has made me hugely popular with my sister & my Gran ) Well, they never contact me, either...

I've never been good at keeping in contact with friends, once my life has moved on. I lost touch with schoolfriends, then nursing friends & so on through every period of my life. I'm not really the Friends Reunited or Facebook type of gal, I guess...

Aaah, I'm in contact with him most days. He's a member on here, you know...

I phone my Mum about once a month, and my Sister about four times a year. Everyone else, that's important, gets an E-mail every so often so I manage to keep in touch. Some people, I thought I knew quite well, seem to have turned their back on me but I don't miss them. Most people have been very supportive of my 'going off to a warm place to have a good time'.

I do miss the people that I used to sit and talk with, and drink Tequila with, but I can catch up with them when I go back to Blighty. I will go back every year because Mum is getting old now. When She passes on, I 'spose I won't need to go back so often. Some dificult decisions lie ahead.

do you spend time thinking about poo threads like this or do they come to you naturally?

^ Actually, I post what comes to mind. maybe an incident in my own life or from what another expat shares with me.

I am all for some good threads, so by all means get after it man!

^^ D'you know Obs, if TD depended on you to start threads we'd have had sweet FA since the Ant/Obs poll. Good job that others actually think about new ideas for threads & start them, really, isn't it?

quality matters.

this thread is poo.

^ And Ant/Obs was quality? Really? IMO it was crap of the first order & had an unsatisfactory outcome.

^Well, if you mean by unsatisfactory outcome that there is less volume in contributions and originations of threads you are correct. Ant had an opinion in just about every thread.

Some of them were worth reading.

ant's suicide was horrible and predicatable.

but a poo thread is a poo thread.

carry on.

Then start some earth shattering ones by all means!

my main change was when someone got my mother to buy a computer and my nephew set it up for her and he put my E Mail address on it and since then my life has not been near as nice, Used to be before when someone told her where I was or gave her a phone number I could move or change the number easy, but changing an email is just to much trouble, lots easier to block her from my mail.