Someone asked me recently how many countries I’ve been to, and I actually had to stop and think about it — and still didn’t land on an exact number. That’s not a brag. It’s just where I’m at after doing this for long enough. At some point the count stops being the interesting part.
Thailand is where I’m based. It’s not the whole story.
I want to be clear about that, because it’s easy to look at where someone’s currently posted up and assume that’s the extent of it. Thailand’s my current chapter — it’s where I live, where my routine’s built around, where a lot of my recent writing is coming from. But it’s one stop in a much longer run, not the destination that finally happened after years of talking about it.
What actually changes after enough of this
The first few trips, everything’s novel. Every country feels like a completely different planet, and you notice everything because you have nothing to compare it to yet. That wears off eventually — not in a jaded way, more like your radar recalibrates. You stop noticing the surface-level differences as much and start noticing the more interesting stuff underneath: how people structure a day, what a “normal” week actually looks like somewhere else, what people worry about when they’re not performing “local culture” for a visitor.
You also get a lot faster at telling the difference between what’s actually different about a place and what’s just different about being a tourist in it. Those get confused constantly, and it took me a long time to reliably separate the two.
The unglamorous part nobody mentions
Every move, even a good one, comes with a full rebuild — routine, sleep, logistics, all the invisible infrastructure that just runs quietly when you’re not moving. That never fully goes away no matter how many times you’ve done it. You get faster at the rebuild. You don’t get to skip it.
Why I keep doing it anyway
Because the version of a place you get from actually living inside it for a while is a completely different thing than the version you get passing through. I’ve been chasing that difference for a long time now, and Thailand’s the current place I’m chasing it from — not the finish line, just where the count currently stands, if I were still counting.