Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the camaraderie of expat life. What are we talking about here? Well, I was talking to somebody the other day who was relatively new to living in Thailand and by relatively new, been here about a year full time; been here before a few times back and forth. Been here about a year, we were talking and it is always a little bit surreal to me that I am talking to people that are quite a bit older than me, oftentimes a couple of decades of age and experience on me and I am sitting here explaining something to them. It is an odd feeling, it is kind of surreal a little bit especially because I have got a lot of respect for all the folks, especially a lot of the older expats out here. They have got a lot of Life experience, a lot of interesting things that they talk about just from their jobs. The veterans that are out here are interesting folks; folks that work in offshore oil and gas have got a ton of great stories and then folks that were in different aspects of business just around Asia oftentimes end up or it is not unheard of I should say that they end up trying to be expats down here in Thailand, becoming expats here in Thailand. 

One thing that we both were talking about, me with 15 years in, this person with a year in, was it is just so much easier the sort of camaraderie of Expat life. In our home countries, the notion of just sitting down next to somebody at a McDonald's and just striking up a conversation just randomly, 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, it is not going to happen very often especially in the post- smartphone era, people are always in their phones or whatever but in the expat world, that's not quite the same. People are kind of on their own journey, they see another person that's clearly here in Thailand a Farang, a foreigner and oftentimes they want to strike up conversation, have a little chat. That is so, that is a real benefit in my opinion; that's something that few people ever bring up about living the Expat life is look it is a little different. Now I think that some expats sometimes presume a lot more camaraderie out there than there is, especially when you see, I haven't seen this in years but I remember it used to be kind of a running thing. There would be these guys that would go from like bar to bar, this is years ago, 12, 13 years ago, would walk around from bar to bar, "oh I lost all my money” or “I got mugged, can you give me 1,000 Baht or something." It was like "uh huh!" and you started to realize that was a bit of a con but that is taking things a little bit too far. I am simply talking about just living as an Expat here in Thailand or I had the same experience in Korea as well as Japan where it was just a lot easier to just strike up a rapport with somebody who was clearly not from Asia and that is just something that maybe in the West, back in the United States, just doesn't quite exist anymore and I think it is something that is often overlooked both by folks that actually become expats, as well as folks that are looking to move abroad.