“Going Bamboo”

My wife and I are “going bamboo.”

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for at least the last 25 years.

A month from now, our lease ends on our apartment here in Cascais, Portugal. We thought we’d buy an apartment in Lisbon and transition into that new place and a new urban life (Cascais is great, but it’s too small and too quiet for us).

Problem is: Lisbon real estate has gone street-rat crazy in recent years. I totally get why locals protested Portugal’s now-defunct “Golden Visa” program that offered instant residency to foreigners who bought real estate. Even though Brits and Yanks and others are buying higher-value properties, prices have been pushed up across the board.

In the nice areas of Lisbon, we were looking at about $540,000 for a nicely renovated three-bedroom apartment… or about $380,000 for an apartment that was last stylish in the 1950s or ’60s, meaning you’d need to sink $75,000 to $100,000 into remodels and repairs.

We grew frustrated with the apartment-hunting process.

And, so, we gave up.

One Sunday afternoon, I was telling my wife, Yulia, that I’m heading to Singapore and Cambodia in September for work and a crypto conference and was wondering what our son’s schedule was like at the new school he’ll attend in the fall.

“I can’t take him out that long at the beginning of the year,” she told me. “I wish I could. I really—really—want to see Asia with you.”

The epiphany struck…

If she can’t go with me to Asia in September, let’s go this summer, since we have no place to live yet.

Thus… we’re “going bamboo.”

We’ve rented a really cool, Balinese-style house on the Thai island of Koh Samui. We’ll spend the entire month of July eating Pad Thai, swimming in the Gulf of Thailand, and tooling around the island in a car I’ve rented for little adventures in the jungle and small villages.

For August, we’re heading into Vietnam—probably Hanoi or Da Nang, on the beach. Not sure yet.

Point is, we’re doing something I’ve dreamed about doing for a very long time.

I love Asia, particularly Thailand, which I’ve traveled to several times for work.

So tropical, so exotic, so relaxing.

Fantastic food!

I’ve long wanted to just pick up and move there for a month because the few days here and there that I’ve had in Thailand—and particularly Koh Samui—were never, ever enough. Just as you get settled into the sultry and languid contentment that is life on a tropical island, your email alerts you to the fact that your return flight is ready for check-in.

I always hate that email.

I’m sure I’ll hate a similar email after a month on Koh Samui, but at least I’ll have had a month there creating a highlight reel of my life with Yulia. I get to show her one of my favorite corners of Asia.

And then I get to add Vietnam to my list of the 80-ish countries I’ve visited.

Vietnam has long been high up on my list of countries to see, so I’m excited to check off that one. With luck, I’ll find a little old Vietnamese cook who can teach me the secrets of making a legitimately authentic pot of pho bo, beef noodle soup, and bahn mi, a pate-and-pork sandwich on a proper French baguette—two of the greatest culinary inventions the world has ever known.

This ability to pick up and go wherever is one of the great joys of living and working on your own as a self-employed digital nomad. Whether it’s writing, or graphic arts, or teaching English, or consulting for the profession you spent your career perfecting, there’s no better life.

The freedom is incredible.

But more than that, it’s a salve for the soul.

I’ve never been happier in my life than I have been over the last five-plus years of living and working on my own terms in Europe.

If I decide I want to go to Dubai for a week (as I did recently for a crypto conference), I go. I tell my editors, “Hey, I’m heading to Dubai. You want a story on X?” Very often the answer is, “Yes!”

The point is, they really don’t care where I go. As long as I meet my contractual obligations to write what I need to write, they’re happy whether I’m in Cascais or Casablanca… or Koh Samui.

I realize not everyone has the freedom to say, “Let’s go spend the summer in Southeast Asia.” But I also know from numerous conversations I’ve had at International Living conferences that a lot of people can do what I do but are frozen by the unknowns that arise after you take that first step.

And I get that, too. Leaving a life you know for one that you don’t can be unsettling.

All I can offer you is: You’re going to love it out here in the expat world.

What you think is hard becomes easy. What you fear you don’t know, you will learn. The worry that you won’t be able to communicate will vanish when you realize just how universal English really is (even if it’s not spoken to the same degree everywhere).

The nervousness you initially feel—and I certainly felt it moving to Europe in 2018—fades within a week as you learn to fit into your new surroundings.

It’s all very exciting, actually. Heightened senses, and all that…

Suddenly, you’ll realize you’re a citizen of the world. Your passport might say United States of America, but your lifestyle disagrees with that.

And one day you’re going to be chatting with your partner in crime and you’re going to decide you want to spend the summer living on a Thai island and learning to make pho bo in Hanoi… and you go.

Because that is what life is really all about: The highlight reel.