My Wife Longs for Thailand…

Autumn has come to Lisbon. Good bit of rain lately. Cloudy and overcast most days. The air bites with a newfound chill.

I love it.

My kinda weather.

Then again, my ideal environment is somewhere like coastal Ireland or the western shores of Scotland. Gray and gloomy North Atlantic, blowing storms across a uniquely picturesque landscape—a feeling like it’s just you against the world.

My wife, Yulia, looks at me like I have a head injury when I tell her that.

She’s a warm weather girl through and through.

Which is probably why she’s already hitting me up to go to Asia again next summer.

If you’ve been reading Field Notes for longer than a few months, you’ll likely remember that we spent most of the summer living in Koh Samui, the island off the east coast of Thailand. We were between rental contracts here in Portugal, and we saw living in Southeast Asia for the summer as a grand adventure.

And we were right.

After all these decades on the road, visiting nearly 80 countries so far, I can say that there’s nothing quite like spending months in a single place.

I’ve loved the days that I’ve spent in Zurich or Paris or Tokyo… or the week I spent in Punta del Este, Uruguay or London… or the two weeks we spent as a family along the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia.

But they felt temporary from the moment I arrived. It’s like even as I was unpacking I was already prepping for the day I would leave.

Not so when you know you’re going to be somewhere for a while.

You land, you make it to the hotel, or the Airbnb in our case, and leaving is so many tomorrows in the future that you really don’t think about it. At all.

When you know you’re going to live locally for longer than a few days, particularly when you’ve rented an Airbnb, you find that your brain is not really in vacation mode. You think more like you do at home: I gotta buy groceries; where’s the nearest gas station; if we need a medical clinic or a hospital, where is it…

Sure, you want to go visit this and that, and see the sights, and dine at certain restaurants you read about online or saw in a TikTok video, but your mind is engaged in an entirely different way. Your actions don’t reflect someone who’s in a rush to click through a checklist of must-see things to do and see in a week.

You’re unhurried. Relaxed. Way more casual.

It’s a very mañana approach to daily living.

You know you have time to do everything, so there’s no rush to do anything right now.

Which, I suspect, is precisely why Yulia is already planting the “Return to Asia” bug in my ear now—well, that and the fact that she’s already weary of gray and damp and wants to return to sun and sand.

Weather aside, she’s often feeling tense here in Lisbon because of managing our son’s school issues, or dealing with health matters that arise, or apartment issues, or figuring out what to feed the kid. When we’re driving around the city, she regularly has a death grip on the seatbelt strap that crosses her shoulder, fearful that a city bus or a car merging into traffic is certain to careen into us uncontrollably. (It’s almost comical.)

In Thailand, however, every stress in her life seemed to melt away.

I noticed it immediately when we were driving from the airport to the Airbnb on our first day in Samui. Even though the roads are crazy packed with traffic everywhere and cars coming out of weird parking spots into traffic, she never reached for the seatbeat as her magical shield against automotive death.

Her days were filled with hours of napping or reading or lounging in the oversized plunge pool at the villa we rented. She watched me grill chicken, smiled at me, and went back to reading on her phone or from a book she found at the villa.

When the mood struck, she asked me to drive her to the beach, where she replaced lounging in the plunge pool with lounging in the sea, only interrupted by her desire for lunch and a coconut smoothie at a beachside eatery she’d grown fond of because of the open-air, beachside ambiance and the pad Thai.

So I imagine we’ll be back in Asia next summer—or at least some place with sand and sea—and we’ll be there for the duration of the season. Months camped out in the same place really agreed with us in a way that our typical family vacations never have.

Those traditional vacations have been fun. Certainly enjoyable. We’ve seen lots of amazing sights in places like Greece, Latvia, Turkey, Croatia, et al.

But getting to know a place more intimately over a season-long stretch of time gives you a very different appreciation for global travel. You feel more like you’re a local and not a tourist stealing a piece of the soul of some place after experiencing it for just a few days.

So, as rain patters once again on our tiny balcony here in Lisbon, thoughts of another Thai summer (or maybe Vietnam?) are not far away.