As I walk my path, realizations come to me one after another.
The adventures, joys and hardships I have lived through come together and continue to exist as experiences.
I believe that these experiences are essential components of the digital nomad lifestyle.
Or are they inherent?
Whatever. I don’t want to get lost in the details.
9 months
266 days. 9 months in 1 week. Three quarters of a year.
That’s how long it’s been since I left for Southeast Asia.
Besides the dirt, something else stuck to me.
This time was enough for me to move from the initial state – resulting from inexperience – to a different way of functioning.
This time was enough for me to no longer be the junior in a company. Nine months also have weight among travelers. Sometimes I don’t just keep quiet about the trip, but I tell others new information based on specific experiences.
As I think back on these few months, I don’t remember feeling lost once. Yet something has changed in me, I just have a hard time finding the right words. What and how.
I don’t know this even as I write these words, but I’m sure I will find it. If this post appears, then I have found it. If I don’t find it, I will be the only one reading this.
I will start taking stock of the individual travel areas, in case the changes in each area finally show the right idea.
The countries
Thailand, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
4 countries, 5 border crossings.
When I arrived in Thailand, I only had ideas about Southeast Asia. I read, watched videos, analyzed lists of good advice. And of course, there were the ideas that had reached me in the previous decades.
But all knowledge was just an idea. In reality, I only started to get to know this continent when I stepped out of the Koh Samui airport. I had been to Bangkok before, but there I only saw an international and then a domestic airport. Asia, but still not. A neutral area, the same everywhere.
I remember the first days. When I stated – both silently and aloud – that if I looked out the window of my accommodation, I really wouldn’t be able to tell whether I was in a Hungarian room or a Thai one.
Walking the streets (yes, in most cases there are no streets) it was nice to discover how much everything is similar and what the differences are.
The grass is the same (or very similar) as in Europe. The bitumen and concrete are no different. There are palm trees and exotic plants, but the similarity is not always and not everywhere very sharp.
The discarded garbage is like anywhere. The dust on the roadside is no different. There are also electricity poles next to the road. The traffic signs are 95% the same. The layout of the shops is no different than anywhere else.
I am not looking for more similarities, I am rather saying that in many aspects there is no difference between Asia and Europe.
Parenthetical note: I have just reached this point in the writing when something happened to me that has never happened before. While I was doing something that I have never done before. I happened to be sitting on a sun lounger on the beach. Sea, waves, sand. The only thing missing was the sunlight, because it was already evening.
I had never written while sitting on the beach before. I had been spending my days sitting in cafes for days, and I felt like it would be nice to relax on the beach. Then I felt so relaxed that I took out my laptop and started writing.
After 15 minutes, a guy stopped by me and said – at 7:40 PM – that it would cost me 50,000 to sit here. I didn’t ask him if this was a serious thing or just a joke. I told him that in that case I would leave.
This is how it happened that during an activity I had never tried, an experience I had never ordered came to me.
Returning to my original thought process: There are the differences.
There are different goods in the stores, and what is the same, is sold under different brands. There are different kinds of vegetables and fruits on the shelves. The beer is different. The bread is different.
There are more dogs on the streets. The traffic is different. The houses are sometimes very different in shape. They are arranged differently
Parenthetic note: This is one of those evenings. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten very far from the previous part in parentheses. Not in writing either. Not far either, because the beach is about 800 meters from here. But in the meantime I came home to the hostel. I bought myself two cans of beer so that I could continue writing while sitting peacefully in the garden.
At 20:05 the karaoke night started. Actually, now I only mention one name frequently while writing. Jesus Christ!
The girl who opened the night sings so fucking badly that all I can think – without judgment – is that if the others become like this, and the volume doesn’t decrease either, then a) my brain will burn out, b) I’ll go up to my room and sit in my bed and write.
I’m drinking a little beer now to find out how much danger my brain is in. I’ll continue from there. Sometime and somewhere. (The second song has started. Two young girls are trying. Jesus Christ is still my most used phrase tonight. But I definitely feel like my brain is going to explode. This will be another departure. I don’t think I would stay even if they paid me 50,000. LOL.)
Well, okay! I’m not going anywhere. I’m turning off my hearing among my senses. If I hear something good, at most… Fuck, the third girl is good. She can sing! And she sings well. Very well!
I hope I don’t have to go back to writing again. I mean, it would be nice if nothing happened today.
Well, jumping in again, pretending like nothing happened.
There are also differences between Thailand and – let’s say – Hungary. But it’s not even close to saying that they are the same because of the similarities, just as differences don’t mean that everything is incomprehensibly different.
This was Thailand. There were new things in Bali too, but compared to Thailand it was a much smoother transition.
Naturally – I wrote this at the time – I returned to Thailand as a familiar person.
Then came Laos. Here I recognized the differences more clearly and with much more character, faster. The similarities in this case meant that very, very many things were exactly the same as in Thailand.
And although I have only been here in Vietnam for two weeks, the familiarity of familiar things already surrounds me very naturally, and it almost immediately dawned on me how different this country is.
To sum up this part, I think that I was over the cardinal differences at the beginning, and the smaller – although not insignificant – differences are much more noticeable to me.
Maybe there was no change in me, but I simply had a reference point. In the first country, everything was one big first impression. Now I automatically compare new experiences with previous ones. My curiosity is no less, but my impressions come to me in a more orderly way.
Other aspects
I wanted to continue with the locals.
I think it’s unnecessary.
I wanted to write more about the trip. The accommodations. The food. My workplaces. The tables and chairs. My encounters with other travelers.
But by the end of the previous paragraph, I realized that I had found the explanation for why I am more experienced. I think it is likely that this would be the explanation I could be satisfied with, even if I delved deeper into other areas.
It was as if gaining points of reference and interpreting impressions differently created my own internal “Asia operating system.”
I had trouble at the beginning of this article because there were certain terms that would have been easier to use.
“Culture shock.” “It takes less energy.” “Relearning and its difficulties.” “Without a handhold.” “The dynamics of arrival.” “Fine-tuning.” “I have to put myself together.”
These thoughts came to me, but I had to immediately dismiss them because I couldn’t identify with them.
At the beginning of this post I wrote: As I look back on these past few months, I don’t think I’ve ever felt lost. Yet something has changed inside me, but I’m having a hard time finding the right words. What and how.
I enjoyed figuring myself out tonight. Despite the terrible karaoke!
Buy me a coffee?
If you enjoyed this story, you can buy me a coffee. You don’t have to – but it means a lot and I always turn it into a new adventure.
Buy a coffee for Steve
Linktree
Short introduction