What do you do all day when you’re unemployed, have zero commute, rarely cook your own lunch or dinner, and don’t even have to clean your own apartment? In Seattle, we filled our time with 40-hour-per-week jobs, gardening, cleaning, cooking, running, and home maintenance. While we miss some of those activities (especially gardening and running at Greenlake), it’s nice to have so much time on our hands here in Chiang Mai. Some of our family and friends have been curious what we with ourselves all day. Here’s how we choose to spend our time:
Wake up naturally (we’ve nixed the alarm clock) and have breakfast.
If it’s a market day (every 3 days or so), we walk 10 minutes to the Ton Payom Market to get a fresh supply of fruit, veggies, eggs, and coconut milk.
If it’s a gym day, we’ll hit the gym to run a 5k and do some weightlifting.
Before leaving the house, slather Melanie with sunblock.
SPF 50+, a necessity in Chiang Mai
If it’s not a gym day, you can probably find us at Kaweh Coffee all morning, where drinks are discounted until 11am. (News flash: living in an inexpensive country hasn’t made us any less frugal.)
6 days a week, we have a delicious Lunch at Pun Pun, which is right by our apartment. We walk around aimlessly on Wednesdays when they’re closed and try to find something that is lives up to their tasty standard. Nothing ever does.
If it’s not a gym day, we hit the pool after lunch for some sun and swimming.
On gym days, we spend our afternoons out at coffee shops. Kevin has been going through the latest iOS book, and I’ve been working through an online Ruby on Rails tutorial. Usually, we spend a few hours having iced coffees at one cafe, then move to a second cafe mid-afternoon for a bubble tea or a cheap can of Leo beer.
When we’re hungry for dinner, we walk around until we find something that looks tasty.
After dinner, we head back to the condo for some reading and maybe a Game of Thrones episode.
We are usually asleep by 10pm here. (I know I know, this is super lame, we go to bed SO EARLY over here. I’m slowly chipping away at the sleep deficit caused by 6 years at Boeing, I should be good in about 6 months. At least now that there has been a military coup and a curfew is being enforced from 10pm-5am, I have a legitimate excuse for going to bed early.)
We shake things up every now and then. Sometimes, we’ll go the Saturday or Sunday evening markets for some shopping and dinner.
Sometimes, we head to Vigie Sist cafe in the Old City so I can play their piano while we have fresh fruit smoothies.
Playing Piano at Vigie Sist
Every other week, we head into the Old City to get 1-hour Traditional Thai Massages at Green Bamboo for 200 Baht (about $6).
This is our life now in a nutshell! Now that we don’t have any daily commitments or responsibilities, it’s become important to us to end the day feeling like we accomplished something, learned something new, or made progress in some way. It’s liberating to be able to fully control our daily schedule, but boredom has become our worst enemy. Our advice to others thinking about taking a mini-retirement like this is to figure out what you’ll accomplish each day if your trip won’t be packed full of activities. If you’re not into software development, maybe you’ll spend your days learning about the local culture, visiting temples and talking to monks. Perhaps you’ve racked up a lot of books on your reading list and will chip away at those. Or maybe you’ll enroll in a language class or take frequent cooking classes.
We love to hear from folks reading our blog. This week, we want to know where you’d go if you took a months-long mini-retirement. How would you fill your newfound spare time? Leave us a comment to let us know!
