Being An Expat

Being An Expat

Being An Expat: Summary

Published by Owen Jones on 25 July 2015
Being An Expat: Summary

Being An Expat: Summary

Being An Expat

Summary

To those of you who have read the first five parts to this series, I would like to say ‘thank you’. I don’t know what impression of being an expat I left you with except that it is a truthful one as I see it. This last article then is the summary of why I’m still living abroad.

There are challenges, as there are just from being alive; some are relished and others are a pain. The annual visa is not really a problem, if you have the money and if you don’t, move somewhere else. That is straightforward. Health care is a let-down for Brits, because we are used to not paying at the point of delivery, but to most other nationalities, it is normal. I had never faced corruption before I came to Thailand, but those who know say it is no worse than in Mediterranean countries and my wife shields me from most of it anyway.

Challenges that I enjoy include learning the language. I like to learn languages and Thai is different and so difficult. I have always liked nature and Thailand is full of flora and fauna that just doesn’t exist in good old Wales. Thailand is a fairly densely populated country, yet there are still wild elephants roaming about!

Snakes are a far more common problem, but not once you are aware that they are about and keep that awareness in the front of your mind. Having said that I have always liked snakes and actively seek them out, but even I don’t see as many as one a week in the countryside. This is partly because Thais kill all snakes on sight and eat many of them.

I have never sought the heat, but as I get older, I find that the warm temperature of Thailand suits me better than cold rain and cold wind. The elements here are always warm to hot despite the wind and rain.

People are happier in Thailand than they are in the UK. They are poorer and the gap between rich and poor is miles, but food, drink and sunshine are cheap and that counts for a lot. In summary, I would rather be poor here than in Europe – there is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that.

As an older man who was single for fifty years, I was often regarded with suspicion in the UK. I could see people wondering whether I was gay or a paedophile and it wasn’t nice. Once you get past about fifty, you become a ‘dirty old man’ if you look at a pretty girl or woman. That used to cheese me off. Men don’t cease to admire beautiful women on their fiftieth birthday and anyone who thinks that they should is an idiot. Unfortunately, most people who think that they should ‘act their age’ are women and the older ones are hypocrites.

European women and American women that is, not Asian women, who are quite happy to be looked and quite happy to admit that they are happy with what is naturally going to happen anyway. At the age of sixty now, just as many, if not more, unknown females of all ages start a conversation with me as they did when I was thirty years younger in Europe. It leads to a more natural society. Why should elderly men be ostracised after a lifetime of hard work?

And last but not least the cuisine. I have always liked ‘foreign food’. It started when I was very young. My mother adventurously used to add a spoonful of curry power to a gallon of stew on its second day and serve it with rice instead of bread. We all loved this early form of curry which would be laughed at these days, but was considered risqué in our community fifty-odd years ago. I also had a Greek friend who would invite me back for tea. I have clear memories of eating a salad hat included dandelion leaves from the garden, olives and stuffed olive leaves one summer’s afternoon.

Needless to say, I love Thai food and my wife is a particularly good cook and not only in my estimation, although I know that she tones the chillies down for my portion as she can eat them raw, straight from the bush. As a good cook, Neem, likes to grow a lot of her own raw ingredients, and I get a lot of pleasure from seeing coconut, banana, lemon, mango and many other fruit trees you would probably never have heard of growing in our garden.

In summary, this is why I stay here, struggle though it has been several times and will be again in the future no doubt.

All the best.

by +Owen Jones

Podcast: Being An Expat: Summary

Filed under: , , , and Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Being An Expat: Etiquette, Loneliness and Coping

Published by Owen Jones on 24 July 2015
Being An Expat: Etiquette, Loneliness and Coping

Being An Expat: Etiquette, Loneliness and Coping

Being An Expat (part five)

Etiquette, Loneliness and Coping

Often how you should behave, etiquette, as an expat depends not only on which country you live in but also where you live in that country as well. This is usually because city-dwellers tend to be more cosmopolitan, more used to foreigners, than rural people. Therefore, if you dress inappropriately in say, Pattaya, or stay out drinking all night, no-one is likely to say anything to your face or behind your back, but if I’m still sitting in the corner shop drinking after eight or nine, people I hardly know will tell me it’s long time that I should have been home already.

Needless to say that telling them to shut up and mind their own business is not the best thing to do, which is to play dumb, look at your watch surprised and just go home.

The daily routine for most people starts a lot earlier in the country than in a tourist spot. Many shops in Pattaya don’t bother to open before ten, whereas villagers have been up five hours by then, but they go to bed much earlier too. Nine o’clock is about normal.

On holidays, it is not unusual to see families start drinking well before midday, whereas for townspeople, three o’clock is early. You might find this shocking, but I find this breech of ‘Western etiquette’ refreshing and honest. Despite this, religion is far more obvious in the countryside than the cities despite this.

It’s as if in countries like Thailand, the population works in two shifts. I had never lived in a village before this one, but I like it and have been here ten years now.

One of the perennial questions is how do you cope with the loneliness? The thing is no matter what sort of a person you are, you will get lonely, and I suppose we all learn to cope with that in our own way.  Etiquette says you should sit with family, but I just write a lot.

All the best.

Owen

Podcast: Being An Expat: Etiquette, Loneliness and Coping

Filed under: , , and Tagged: , , , , ,

Being An Expat: Financial Aspect

Published by Owen Jones on 23 July 2015
Being An Expat (part fourr)

Being An Expat (part four): Financial Aspect

Being An Expat (part four):

The Financial Aspect

The financial aspect of being an expat boils down to always having sufficient funds to satisfy your requirements, which will vary throughout the year. For example, in Thailand, I need to have either 800,000 Baht (for a retirement visa) or 400,000 Baht (for a spousal visa) in my Thai bank account for the two months prior to and including the day I apply for my visa, but I can spend it after that, as long as I replace it within ten months.

Most people try to leave this fundamentally most basic requirement in the bank at all times and try to ‘forget’ about it.

You also need money for healthcare and or health care insurance, depending on your insurance policy, but this is also an annual premium.

If you don’t have a work permit, you will find it difficult to replace these sums as they become due, unless you have a good pension, or can supplement your income in other ways. Many expats try to do this using the Internet, but it is not easy, especially if you need a regular income.

I was doing well at this until one night Google closed my Adsense account without warning. That cost me $1,000 a month and they wouldn’t tell me the reason. That nearly sent me home with my tail between my legs, and I’m still struggling to overcome the loss now, four years later.

Don’t rely on your government or that of the target country either. Four years before the Google disaster, the Thai Baht dropped from seventy-five Baht to the £1 to sixty in a matter of weeks, and then it fell to fifty. Suddenly, my UK savings were worth a third less than they were when I arrived and they have never recovered.

If you want to live abroad, you’ll need either a cast-iron savings pot full of money or solid determination, but you will probably find that you’ll need both and a supplementary income and nerves of steel.

It’s no wonder that many expats drink too much.

All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Being An Expat: The Financial Aspect

Filed under: , , , and Tagged: , , , , ,

Being An Expat: Legal Aspect

Published by Owen Jones on 22 July 2015
Being An Expat (part three)

Being An Expat (part three)

Being An Expat (part three)

 The Legal Aspect

The legal aspect of being an expat is obviously very important. Many countries, especially those that rely on tourism, operate a relaxed approach to short term (thirty days or less) tourist visas, but this is not the case for expats unless the target country and the expat’s homeland have some sort of mutual agreement, like in the European Community.

Broadly speaking, there are usually two types of long-term visa the retirement (including spousal) visa and the employment visa, which requires a work permit. To obtain a work permit, you usually require the offer of a job in writing from your prospective employer and for a spousal visa you need a spouse who holds the nationality of the target country.

Most expats in Thailand hold a retirement visa, the broad legal requirements for which are that you must be over fifty and have at least 800,000 Baht (£16,000) in a Thai bank. There are other ways of staying here, and many use them, but this is the easiest and the cheapest in the long run at 1,900 Baht (£40) per annum.

Other ways of staying here legally are leaving the country for Laos every three months (£40 per visa) or flying to Malaysia every six months (also £40 per visa). If you use the last two methods, you will have to sleep there overnight. I did the Laos visa run for a year and found the cost to be about 15,000 Baht (£300) for each trip, so it works out expensive at £1,200 a year. I’m told that a return flight to Malaysia is 6,000 Baht, so the total cost could be 10,000-12,000 Baht a time (£200-240), so £400-£500 per annum.

The visa entitles you to breathe and enjoy the weather, but everything else costs, including health care. The citizens of most countries would expect this, but Brits are used to health care being free at the point of delivery. The annual insurance premium will set you back another £500-£600 p.a. which compares well with Western countries.

By the way, health insurance is not a legal requirement, but treatment in a hospital without it or a Thai spouse to stand up for you can be expensive.

All the best,

Owen

Please visit my book list

Podcast: Being an Expat – The Legal Aspect

Filed under: , , and Tagged: , , , , ,

Being An Expat: Cultural Aspect

Published by Owen Jones on 21 July 2015
Being An Expat: Cultural Aspect

Being An Expat: Cultural Aspect

Being An Expat (part two).

The Cultural Aspect

The holidaymaker is probably not always as aware of the vast cultural differences that exist between Asia and, let’s say, Britain or the West in general, whereas the expat is obliged to learn as much as he can as soon as he can. This is more important in rural areas than in the cities, because many country folk don’t know anything about foreigners and have probably never met one.

The cultural differences between us are masked, or played down, to a large extent in the cities for the sake of the holidaymaker, but in the villages it’s all they know. This doesn’t mean that they take offense easily, but as an expat, you don’t want to be the constant cause of uneasiness either.

I could give you many examples of cultural differences, but here are a few.

While learning Thai, I discovered that different ranks of people sometimes have special words. This alone is truly alien to us, but ordinary people ‘keen khao’, monks ‘chan khao’ and the king ‘savoy khao’ – all mean ‘eat rice’. So one night before a load of guests, I said: ‘Jao mai keen khao’ (the king doesn’t eat rice). No reaction, just a stony glare, so I repeated it.

‘Oh, yes, he does,’ challenged one old man, ‘he eats it every day!’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘jao savoy khao!’

The only reaction I got was a kick in the shin under the table from my wife. ‘Don’t ever talk about the king like that in public again,’ she warned.’ If these weren’t friends, they might have beaten you up for saying that’. It is much safer not to talk about the king.

I know a guy who stopped a coin that someone had dropped by stepping on it, and instead of gratitude got a slap for stamping on the king’s head.

Most people say I speak Thai reasonably well (except my wife who tells the truth, because most Thais are flatterers), but that respect soon dissipates when I say I’ve been here ten years. That alone proves that we expats are expected to try to learn, whereas holidaymakers are not.

Westerners often offend the dress cultural code too. Young men are the worst, walking around shirtless just because it’s hot (but really to try to impress the girls). T-shirts with short arms are OK, but vests (singlets) are not. In general, the less skin you expose the better in nice Thai society.

And last but not least, food. While it is culturally acceptable to leave the rice in a restaurant, doing so in someone’s home is like taking the filling out of a plate of sandwiches and sending the bread back – imagine if one of your guests ever did that to you 🙂

All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Being An Expat (part two): Cultural Aspect

Filed under: , , and Tagged: , , , , ,

Being An Expat: Personal Aspect

Published by Owen Jones on 20 July 2015
Being An Expat

Being An Expat

Being An Expat (part one)

 The Personal Aspect

Being an expat is a strange feeling.

I have lived here in northern Thailand for eleven years and I lived in The Netherlands for nine years until 1982, so I have been an expat in two countries on two continents in two radically different parts of the world. The first thing is that being an expat is not like being on a very long holiday.

Food is something I have always missed living abroad. When I live in Britain, there aren’t many British meals I’d pay a lot for except maybe a good full English breakfast, or Shepherd’s or Cottage Pie with all the trimmings and a traditional pudding like Spotted Dick, Steam Pudding, or Roly-poly Pudding and Custard. All the old school dinners I had as a pre-teen, as it happens.

All the expats I have ever talked to say the same. This may sound strange, but when I first went to live in the city of Den Bosch in Noord Brabant, The Netherlands, you couldn’t get bacon the way we like it in the UK. They sold it to the UK, but there was no call for it at home. The same is now true of Thailand, although they don’t export bacon to Britain.

I also miss pies, pasties, pizzas and most of all cheese – white cheese like Caerphilly or Cheshire, but my wife sometimes makes the 150km (90 mile) round trip to get me a 250g block of Australian Cheddar. It’s not the same though, but I wouldn’t tell her that

I also miss some drinks, like Guinness. You can get a lot of these items in touristic cities, but the nearest of those to me is Chiang Mai, 300km away.

After food and drink its communication. No matter how well you speak the local language (my Dutch was fluent, but my Thai is not), you will crave to speak to someone who is also a native English speaker. I know of no Thais where I live who speak English well, but even if there were any, they would not have the same mindset, so it is not just a question of speaking English. Perhaps a lot of expats phone home often because VOIP makes it cheap now, but I don’t have anyone ‘back home’ to call. (Thanks, but there’s no need to feel sorry for me. I knew what would happen; I’d already had a dose of it when I lived in Den Bosch).

While on the subject of communication, I am reminded that the Amazon Prime package I was talking about yesterday, of 1,000,000 songs; 500,000 books; 60,000 films and unlimited storage of and worldwide access to photos for $99 a year is a great way of overcoming the feeling of isolation that inevitably creeps into expats from time to time.

If you would like to read more about the package, please click here or if you would like to gift it to an expat you know (or someone at home), click here.

All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Being An Expat

 

Filed under: , , , and Tagged: , , , , ,