Keeping Resolutions in Bangkok: A Fool's Errand? [S7.E52]

Greg and Ed ring in 2025 with a difficult look back at their New
Year's Resolutions from 2024. They recognize the obvious: if you
don't keep your resolutions, you only have yourself to blame. But
they try to answer the interesting question of whether Bangkok
itself might make keeping certain resolutions more
difficult. 


 


Ed begins with a confession that he mostly failed in his efforts
to improve his Thai. His plan was to study a well-regarded PDF of
common Thai expressions, and while he did succeed in having a
Thai friend make some recordings, he didn't spend much time
actually studying them. His second resolution was to watch the
top ten best Thai films of all time, and watch them in Thai with
Thai subtitles. Again, although he downloaded some of the films,
he blew off actually doing the hard work. Ugh. 


 


Greg fared somewhat better. Although he failed to watch a movie
and read a book about key figures in Thai history, he did manage
to spend more time at the Siam Society and develop a new hobby,
the Japanese art of archery known as kyudo. Yea Greg!


 


Ed's last resolution involved an effort to establish a new 'third
place.' In this case, some serious effort was put forth at a very
Thai local gym, but Ed failed to make any meaningful connections
and eventually couldn't muster the motivation to keep
going. 


 


Both guys conclude that expat life can make it difficult to keep
these types of 'self-improvement' resolutions: expats tend to
live in very self-contained bubbles that don't make it easy to
make significant changes to your life. Given this insight into
the expat situation, in the end, it's all on you to find a way to
get it done. :)



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