Adapting to Life as an Expat Wife

I have to admit, my first few days in Pattaya were hard. Don’t get me wrong, we were put up in a very nice hotel and given a generous living allowance to provide for daily meals out – a necessity when we were in the hotel (my spendthrift nature ensured that I stuffed myself at the hotel’s huge buffet breakfast each morning so that I didn’t need to eat lunch. That saved, well, probably a couple of pounds a day. Unfortunately, it also meant that I gained quite a few pounds in weight during the two weeks we were there!) – but it took a while to get used to the city. Not just because it was new and I didn’t know my way around but because I had never been anywhere where the sex industry is thrust in your face quite so often or so openly. Go-go bars line most streets and even the seemingly innocuous beer bars are staffed by scantily dressed women who expect any man that enters to buy them drinks. Down the infamous Walking Street, to which we ventured one night, menus were shoved at us by skinny Thai men with shrewd faces – not menus for food or drink but sex shows. Judging by what was advertised on those laminated pieces of card, you’d be amazed (or perhaps shocked) at what some of these girls can do! Even walking down streets away from the bars, it is impossible to forget where you are as old men with ruddy complexions hold the hands of young, slim, pretty Thai women everywhere.

I barely notice all this now, and I gradually realised that it is easy to avoid that whole scene if you want to, but to the uninitiated it is quite a shock. It didn’t seem like a very female-friendly place at all. Back then, I wondered again and again how I was ever going to be able to feel at home here. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that I was doing most of this exploring on my own, as The Husband was, of course, at work – our entire reason for being here. I worried that I was never going to get used to the sight of half-naked women dancing around poles in clear view of anyone walking past on the pavement, but I also worried about the things all expats must upon first arriving in a new and strange country. How was I ever going to know my way around all these streets? Would I be able to pick up any of the language? Would I be understood if I spoke English? Would I be able to find the foods that I was used to back home? Would I fit in here? I had that horrible feeling of being twelve again, having just moved to Hong Kong with my family, walking into my new school for the first time. I had left the top year at primary school to start in the third year at secondary school in Hong Kong – the school seemed huge to me, everyone was already in tight friendship groups and I fretted that I would forever be the outsider that didn’t know her way around. Of course, I made friends and learned to navigate my way around, but on that first day I was petrified. It was odd to realise that, however old you are, you can still feel like a child when encountering the new and unfamiliar.

Those first two weeks were spent trawling the streets of Pattaya, trying to get my bearings. I was convinced that it would be easier for me to start to remember where things were if I shunned the baht buses (sort of semi-covered pick-up trucks that operate a circular route of Pattaya) that tootled past me every few seconds and walked everywhere. That was a good idea in theory, anyway. What I came to realise pretty quickly however, was that no-one walked anywhere in Pattaya, and for good reason. 1: Pavements don’t really exist. They either end abruptly and for no reason after a few feet or they have been appropriated by street sellers and their carts, forcing you to walk in the road to avoid them. 2: You don’t really appreciate just how hot and humid it is until you start to put one foot in front of the other. Unless you’re Thai, in which case you will be able to wear jeans and jackets and still be perfectly comfortable, you will start to sweat after a mere few minutes. My reward after every exploration was therefore a swim in the hotel pool... and perhaps just a quick spot of sunbathing... ok, maybe I’ll just have a cool drink... and get to the end of the chapter of my book. And therein lies the biggest draw of living abroad in a tropical country. You may encounter language barriers, homesickness, and difficulty adapting to the different cultural and societal mores but you have the sun, the sea, and, for an expat wife, the time to enjoy it all.