That post makes your total lack of knowledge about Thailand obvious to all.
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Hooked on Mao's greens.
While I am not a sociopath or a recluse, I really enjoy my life up north. I definitely need a mix though of quiet yet creature comforts so being 20 minutes from Lampang City is just perfect and all the bypass traffic heading to CM or to BKK isn't anywhere near us. I moved to this area after living in quite a few places around Thailand before it just happened to be my wife's home town but checked all the boxes. :)
I like having the airport in Lampang I can fly to numerous places or to Swampypoo and its a very nice little airport. International, its 45 minutes to CM. So when I need a fill of a beach resort/tourist area for a week with my wife, we hop and go.
^^ Lampang is hardly the sticks. It is a beautiful little city.
Condo pool is out of action for a month as whoever was contracted to fix a some of the plumbing drilled a hole where a hole was not supposed to be drilled.
If you didn't know what I meant then you're a clueless fuck. I didn't know looking at maps was passe.
If you cant find somewhere sleepy around Chachoengsao town ( also the name of the province) or something , I dunno what to tell you. Then you're about an hour from BKK or Pattaya. Instead of 8 hours from BKK and 8 hours from Chiang Mai.
I'd be some pissed off about that.
https://media.tenor.com/mYSWfV1ueWgA...believable.gif
3 Christmas parties in a week could well kill me
^ You forgot 9. Go to Korat.
I once told the wife that my favourite part of Korat was the west-bound carriageway of Highway 2.
She said that I was being negative.
I sympathise with Shutree as I'm sure that Nong Bua Nowhere makes Korat seem like a metropolis, and while I may complain from time to time, this is a bit tongue in cheek as I am in fact living on the outskirts of Thailand's second biggest city (or third, depending on who you ask). To me, Korat feels like a small town but with big city traffic.
It does in fact suit me OK living here... I couldn't live on a sterile modern housing estate and enjoy having some land with few restrictions on what I do. I have a friend who lives on a new Supalai housing estate and to me it feels like living in a goldfish bowl. You'd have to put proper clothes on just to walk around your own garden.
Regular work trips give me the Western socialising I need and when at home I rarely leave the property, apart from school runs and stuff. I'm happy with that. If I'm here longer term I try to combine the occasional Bangkok business trip with some leisure time and the upcoming fast bullet train linking Bangkok should make these trips easier.
In fact, if Korat wasn't so God awfully hot and humid during the hot season, wasn't so terribly congested with traffic, had a civilian airport and was was around four hours closer to the coast, it would be quite nice.
But in saying all that, while it is OK for the time being the Covid lockdowns gave me an insight of what actually retiring here would be like... and it terrified me.
We call them Lego prisons. :)
They're like rows of identical prison cells, built like a kid builds Lego. As I tell the kid, or try to instill in the kid a sense of creativity and being individual, who wants to live inside a giant prison where every house is the exact same design, exact same colour, row after row of mediocrity, all manufactured by a faceless corporation. Fudge that.
Lampang is MK. Totally agree. But 10 miles in any direction and you quickly become rural. I ride my motorcycle up around the area and its dark country roads pretty fast. Since I picked up my ATV I have been trekking back into the mountains and I see some homes that are basically off the grid. Some are really nice places with huge beautiful lakes surrounding their homes, crops growing etc. Most of the roads I am mapping are dirt roads that during rainy season turn into mud so getting back and forth in a vehicle is not an ideal life (at least for me) but clearly a way of life for those folks. I pass Kubota trackers on these old dirt roads towing rice plow equipment or a trailer behind it with 10 cows. I will work on getting my YT acct set up and post some vids of me up in the hills nearby our place. Its another side of the North I really like.
I fully agree Mendy. Those gated estates are far to controlled and the houses are cookie cutter deals and I would feel terribly constrained. I have many Thai engineer friends that live in those in and around BKK and I drop by and see them and its very vanilla.
Covid overall was a terrible global pandemic however for many it was a blessing in many ways. For me now that I WFH, I adjusted to a life that I fully enjoy. Every day is a different day and there is always something to do. My wife does her thing and I do mine and we enjoy lunch and dinner together but the rest of the day is doing whatever. I get my social interactions chatting with my US friends in early morning and my Thai friends during the day. When I finally retire by mid next year it will be an easy transition and one I look forward too.
Woke up this morning and no hearing in my right ear. No virus and no ear wax so it is off the docs tomorrow to get my head examined.