Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  A week into my visit, I found myself wandering the city, on one of those night walks that leads you to places that either leave indelible marks on your memory or feel fuzzy years later, like you may have imagined them. I wanted something more than just another coffee shop. On this walk, I found myself standing in front of the city’s casino. Though I was on a traveler’s budget, playing some poker appealed to me more than getting high. After graduating college, my friends and I started a weekly poker game and became hooked on the game. I loved the psychology of reading people and played poker to fund some of my trip.

  I sat down at a full table of locals playing 2-5 No-Limit. I was on the end and, when I finally decided to join a hand, the dealer said something to me in Dutch. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that in English,” I meekly said, embarrassed that I had used the most tourist of expressions.

  I had outed myself as a foreigner, which is always a dicey gamble when you’re outside the tourist zones. Fortunately, it turned out to be a good thing because it gave the locals something to ask me about: how I ended up at the poker table and not in the coffee shops where the other tourists seemed to go.

  I told them the truth: I was curious about life in Amsterdam, and smoking endless amounts of pot had lost its luster for me. They appreciated my curiosity and we talked through the night.

  The two nearest to me and I bonded the most. There was Greg, who was older, tall, of African descent, with bright smile, warm laugh, and, to my advantage, shitty at poker. The other was Marteen, young, tall (like most Dutch men), bald, slightly brooding, drank like a fish, and smoked like chimney.

  I had so much fun listening to their stories I went back to the casino the next few nights, because I knew they would be there. Along with the other players at our table, they made me feel like I was part of something more. I wasn’t just a backpacker getting high in hostel bars and walking around taking pictures of museums. I was a traveler getting under the skin of the place and getting to know the people who lived there. I was endeavoring to understand the culture and the players were my guides the way Hannah had been in Vienna.

  They told me about life in the city and restaurants and bars to visit that tourists didn’t know about. Poker was our bond and, for those brief hours we were together each night, I felt like I, too, was a local.

  I had left to travel the world in order to learn about it, and as much as I loved seeing museums, taking walking tours, and having short conversations with the people I crossed paths with, none of that really gave me a deep understanding of the places I visited. I felt like I had learned more about Amsterdam in those few nights than I had for all of the first week I’d been in the city. And I don’t think I would have learned half of it had the guys at my poker table looked at me as some kind of rubbernecker or interloper or worst, a pest.

  As a traveler, this is something you always need to be mindful of. If you fall into the tourist traps, or even follow the well-worn paths of hostel-living backpackers, you can appear to the local population kind of like locusts. You arrive seasonally in a swarm, create long lines and overtake once quiet streets, and when you leave everything is a mess and you’ve left nothing positive behind (besides tourist dollars) from your visit. You’ve only consumed. You’ve only taken from them. When you stay awhile, you balance those scales. Your relationship with the locals becomes more symbiotic, and you even have a chance to make a few honest-to-goodness friends.

  As the days passed, I kept delaying my departure from Amsterdam. I had found local friends. Friends I didn’t need to say good-bye to after a few nights. These folks were staying around and, for the second time in my trip, I felt like a traveler. Someone who was doing more than scratching the surface of a place behind my camera but getting to know a place deeper and learning how the world and its people worked.

  They showed me Oosterpark, on the eastern side of the city. It was a small quiet square park, lined with willow trees and small ponds with ducks, where seniors sat around feeding the birds. It was a place locals like because they could avoid all the tourists and stoners who litter Vondelpark.

  They introduced me to bitterballen, the bite-sized, deep fried Dutch meatball snack that looks like falafel on the outside but tastes like Sunday pot roast on the inside.

  Weeks passed. I fell into a routine. I learned basic Dutch phrases from the other players at the casino, slept late, and used my winnings to finance an endless supply of nice meals, museum trips, and cannabis. I walked for hours upon hours reaching the city’s fringes, trying to get lost in the canals and tiny streets that make Amsterdam so famous. The kind of thing you might do when, in the back of your head, you keep saying “I could live here,” and you suddenly find yourself comparing all the neighborhoods.

  But all good things come to an end, including my European visa, and it was soon time to head to Southeast Asia. After close to two months in Amsterdam, I couldn’t stay in Europe any longer.

  On my last night in Amsterdam, my new friends and I went out for dinner, played some poker, and went for a final round of drinks. I told them where I was headed and how much longer I planned to be on the road. We reminisced—something you can’t really do when you don’t spend more than a couple days in one place, or with one group of people. They appreciated that I appreciated the fact that Amsterdam is more than the red light district and tulips and windmills and coffee shops. That’s all tourists and backpackers think of when they come to Amsterdam, they said. Though, by their own admission, they were only guessing. They’d never actually met a backpacker, let alone had conversations with one. And why would they have? Backpackers never strayed this far off the beaten path. And how many tourists do you go out of the way to meet in your home? None, right? There’s no reason to do so.

  If there were merit badges given out for nomads, I felt like I would have earned one for being the first traveler these guys ever talked to and got to know. When we parted ways at the end of the night, they invited me down to Utrecht on my next trip through the Continent. Amsterdam is great, they said, but it’s not the real Netherlands. There is so much more to the country.

  As a person, you know that intellectually. All it takes is one look at a map to know that Amsterdam is just a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often get tunnel vision about a country. The walls of which are defined by the material in your guidebook and the tips from fellow travelers who came before you.

  Only the locals know what the real story is, and until you know them, you will never know it.

  * * *

  IN EARLY 2007 I moved to Bangkok for a month. I use that word specifically—moved—not traveled or visited, because I came to Bangkok this time with a purpose: to learn Thai before I visited Thailand’s rural north. After spending close to five months roaming the tourist areas of Southeast Asia, I wanted something that felt a little more authentic, away from the backpackers and endless parties, and off the beaten path. An area with little development and few visitors, Isaan fit the bill. I figured learning Thai would help me get around and get to know the locals more. Bangkok was to be my base of operations.

  And though I hated Bangkok since my first visit years ago with Scott, the capital with its proper “King’s Thai” seemed like the best place to learn the language. Thailand has a bunch of regional dialects that, to the beginner, blend into each other. It’s also a tonal language, so unless you hit the right tone in the right dialect exactly, it’s often hard to make yourself understood. The good news is that “Bangkok Thai” is something of a universal currency in the country—even if it’s not a local’s “first language” way out in the provinces, chances are that you can make yourself understood.

  Maybe I would grow to love Bangkok, I thought. There had to be something more than the pollution, traffic, and chaos I had seen as a tourist. The city had tens of millions of people. My first impressions of Prague had turned out to be wrong. Maybe I had just never seen the “real” Bangkok. My hope was that, as I learned more of the language and was be
tter able to communicate, I could repeat my Amsterdam experience as well: I’d quickly find a place to live, make some local friends, get to know the city, and then, when the time came, move on, leaving behind a network of friends and acquaintances and local haunts to visit again.

  Yet, over a week into my stay, I hadn’t found my hook into the network I created in Amsterdam. There was no serendipity in Bangkok. No casino to find poker lovers. No other students in my class. I found little to do in the ways of tourist activities like museums, parks, or theater and the sprawl, heat, and pollution made it hard to just walk around and get lost. Each day, I’d wake up, go to class, look for new food vendors to try, visit some temples, and then go back to my guesthouse to play Warcraft. It was as close as I’d ever come in my time on the road to the dog days of the work grind in my life back in Boston that I was doing my damnedest never to go back to.

  Nothing seemed to just “happen” the way it had in Amsterdam. No matter what I did or how hard I tried, Bangkok wasn’t giving up its mysteries to me, and I was starting to give up on it.

  As I became more bored and melancholy, I eventually decided to extend my travels and return to Europe the following year. Travel was always the best escape from my boredom. I knew the road, what to expect, how it worked, and how to make friends on it. There I was never bored, never alone. And if I wasn’t going to get out of Bangkok all that I was looking for or hoping for, I would move on to another of the world’s amazing cities and try to find it there.

  There was only one problem: I didn’t have the savings to spend another summer in Europe.

  I needed a job.

  * * *

  IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, teaching English is one of the easiest jobs to get. Locals in the region want to learn the language in order to compete in the global market, and such demand meant anyone who grew up speaking the language (and a lot of those who didn’t) are basically guaranteed a job.

  Companies that sold English instruction to adults tended to pay well. If I taught for a few months and saved all my money (I had plenty of practice living cheaply), I could replenish my travel fund quickly and be back out on the road again in no time. It was the perfect plan.

  I got a job at one of the larger language schools in the city. The school was on the complete other side of town, across the river in Pinklao. I moved into a closer guesthouse off of Khao San Road. The backpacker haven was only about thirty minutes from my school in heavy traffic and I hoped closer proximity to other travelers might lift my spirits (and help me make some friends) while work filled my coffers.

  But being closer to Khao San didn’t change my situation. Each night I went out for a few hours and talked to people at the bars. But things were different now. Unlike them, I had work in the morning. I had responsibilities. I couldn’t sleep late or be hungover. I wasn’t in their world anymore. I had left the travel bubble. When I woke up in the morning, they would be onto their next destination.

  While I was making countless five-hour friends, what I really wanted was something permanent since I was now permanent. I was trying to fill a void that was unfillable. For the first time, I understood why locals have no interest or patience for tourists and why they didn’t want to spend their time getting to know them. Why would they give of themselves something they assumed I, as a traveler, wouldn’t be able to give in return?

  As one month blended into the next, and I made very little headway toward sinking roots into the Southeast Asian soil, a traveling friend of mine told me to contact her friend Zrs, a Filipino living in Thailand, who was also a teacher. “Maybe you two should meet, because I’m tired of hearing you complain about being bored,” she said to me on Facebook. “You need to get out of your rut.”

  Zrs was short with cropped spiky hair and wore colorful printed shirts and jeans. When we finally met, we spent the entire night talking about girls, gaming (he, too, loved video games and had even custom-built a high-powered computer just to play them on), and the idiosyncrasies of life in Bangkok.

  He quickly became my gatekeeper to life in Bangkok. Zrs introduced me to a variety of local bars I had no idea existed. I met his friends, a mix of Thais and expats in the city. Together, these new figures quickly changed my life in Bangkok. The city opened up to me as if there was a secret code to the door that Zrs had entered on my behalf. Like one of those clubs you need to be sponsored by another member to join. His friends took me out to parties and a seemingly endless string of nightly networking events, dinners, and weekend outings.

  My friend group expanded commensurately. There was Linda, an older American lady whose family owned a tourist map company and was sort of like the elder stateswoman of the city. There was Ryan, a flamboyantly gay Canadian whose job I never figured out. There was Katherine, an Australian who knew everyone; Laura, an American who always seemed to be planning a party; Florian, my German club promoter friend; and a string of others who all held day jobs at major corporations. Around all of them was a rotating cast of seemingly endless characters on the periphery.

  Bangkok’s expat community was incredibly intertwined. Meeting one person quickly led to meeting three others. It reminded me of the travelers network I’d been a part of as a backpacker moving from city to city, country to country, hostel to hostel. They were all strangers in a strange land, seeking out others like them to form a community—theirs more permanent than the backpackers’—of mutual support and understanding.

  With all these events and new friends, living in Khao San was no longer a good option, because the longer I stayed the more I drifted from traveler to expat. Expat life is real life. And real life happened downtown.

  I had to move.

  * * *

  EXPAT LIFE IS WEIRD. It has all the trappings of real life back home—responsibilities, routine, a desire for upward mobility, relationships, commitments—but with a layer of impermanence baked into it that is hard to ignore. Everyone here is doing a stint they don’t know how long will last like soldiers on a tour of duty. A year? Two? A decade? Who knows! Maybe they will marry a local. Maybe work will take them somewhere else. Maybe they’ll burn out and head home. Maybe they will stay forever. You never knew—and so everyone kept living as if they were on a long workcation. Never fully jumping into the deep end of settling down.

  When I decided to move off Khao San Road to downtown Bangkok, I lucked out and found a cheap, furnished apartment in the same building Zrs lived in. The owners were friendly, offered laundry service, and taught me Thai. Even better the building was near my favorite bars and my new job at a company that taught high school kids how to game the SAT and other standardized tests as well as employees at large multinational companies how to write emails in English. I’m not sure what you call that kind of business, but it was the perfect job for an expat native English speaker with an MBA and no other immediately transferrable skills.

  I worked there for the next few months, and though I essentially worked and lived the same 9-to-5 life I would have back in Boston, there was an excitement to life in Bangkok. Whereas Boston felt stale and unchanging, Bangkok was never boring. With all the expats and tourists coming and going, with the city’s international vibe and revolving calendar of events, I found the constant flux and newness to everything the cure to failing into a rhythm that made me feel stale. It was actually the ideal combination of the working routine from my first weeks in Bangkok learning Thai and the friend-filled extracurricular routines I’d developed in Amsterdam and in Ko Lipe the year before that.

  After work, I’d go to Cheap Charlie’s, the local expat bar, and make new friends from places around the world. Charlie’s was an eclectic open-air bar on the side of one of the main streets, made from bamboo with a hodgepodge of phallic trinkets, weird toys, business cards from expats, and tables in front. At night, we’d clutter the sidewalks as the owner’s wife hopelessly tried to contain the ever growing crowds. When the place finally burst at its seams, we’d leave to snake through the chaos of the streets and the ever-changing city
landscape in search of Bangkok’s nooks and crannies. It was like our own Thai version of Shantaram.

  On weekends, we’d hit some of the big clubs. The clubs were one of the few places in Bangkok where locals, expats, and tourists mixed. One night, at a place called Bed, I met Justine. She was a journalist for the The Nation. Canadian born, half Chinese, Thai raised, Justine had cropped black hair and alabaster skin. She exuded confidence and intelligence. The gravity of her personality pulled everyone in and trapped me in her orbit like a moon around a planet. I was no exception.

  We spent the night talking about books, politics, and journalism. I was mesmerized by the depth of knowledge she had on a variety of subjects. This was not a woman from whose orbit I was looking to free myself.

  “I think I’m going to ask Justine out,” I told Linda a few nights later at Cheap Charlies.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but she is out of your league.”

  “Why? You don’t think I’m a catch?”

  “Well, she’s really classy and sophisticated and likes nice things. She’s not the kind to go backpack on Khao San with you. I just don’t think you’re the right match.”

  I had become accustomed back home to having limits placed on me, or being told what I could or couldn’t be, and I’d even fought that inner self-talk while on the road, but I’d never quite encountered it so bluntly from others in my travels. Maybe that’s one of the differences between spending time with travelers versus expats, I’m not sure.