I’m gonna make a TL;DR of the experience in Europe last year:

• Italy (Perugia) - no, definitely no. People go there to visit, eat ice cream and lots of parmigiano in pasta

• The Netherlands (small country, so everywhere) - yes, sometimes even on the bike

• Spain (Barcelona) - not sure actually, we stopped at drinking Sangria

• Sweden (Stockholm) - yes, they don’t really care (in general) what you do

• Portugal (Lisbon) - good enough. We did not work that much from cafes there anyway, that trip was about hunting pastel de nata

• Czech Republic (Prague) - that is the realm of work friendly cafes. I might be biased since I loved the city and we stayed there for the longest time (2 months)

Ok, thanks, but what about Asia??

Since you are not a real digital nomad until you worked from the Southeast Asia for at least 6 months…you see where I’m going. I will share the experience from Thailand which was rather cool (so far). There are usually plenty of cafes (or at least in the places we visited) and the conditions are quite good. They have goodish WI-FI*, cheap* coffee, comfy seats mostly, what more can you wish for? (I’m telling you, a lot, you can wish for a lot more) *goodish Wi-FI = it all comes down to your standards. In Eastern Europe we might not be spoiled with a lot of things, but, man, there you will find the best WI-FI speed you can have *cheap = coffee is cheap, but the moment you turn the page to brunch section you’ll feel like in the West.

I’d give on average a good scoring to working from cafes in Thailand: 7/10 and I’m gonna break it down:

• Bangkok - there are so many cafes in this city that you can visit a new one each day of the year and still not get bored.
 Public transportation is quite efficient and most of the places are easily reachable. But were we smart enough to use it? Of course not. The week we stayed in Bangkok was way to chaotic for optimising routes. 
 In terms of prices we felt like home and that was not good in this particular situation. On average we paid 3-4 euro for a coffee and 10+ euros for a brunch per person.

  Fav cafes: → Starbucks at Iconisiam mall - the biggest Starbucks in Thailand with an amazing view, plenty of seats and reliable internet. This was the only Starbucks we liked and visited multiple times, in general we tried to go to small, local places.

• Chiang Mai - unexpectedly good. The city is rather small and it gets boring after a few days. I think this is how they came up with the idea of making awesome cafes.
 Public transport there is basically inexistent, but they have some sort of ride sharing that gets you anywhere you want (I’m gonna talk more about that in another piece). 
 Prices were definitely better than in the capital, we’d pay around 2 euros for a coffee and 7 euros for a brunch (although we skipped brunch and usually had breakfast at home and that turned out to be a very good trade). You can of course go extra and check the “instagramable” places, but those weren’t usually work friendly. 
 Fav cafes:

→ My Secret Cafe In Town - staff here was so nice and they were trying so hard to provide us with everything that we needed so we can work in good conditions that they deserve kudos! I wish they read my piece. It was the first cafe we visited and they set up a good mood for our time there.
→ Fresh&Mild - very nice staff, quiet, not too cold (they go crazy with the A/C) and it’s placed next to a nurses school, so everybody was studying there, which gave the place a calm vibe. → Sweet stories - great staff and don’t get my partner started about the desserts. Seats were not super comfortable tho’ and this is why we haven’t visited it as much as we wanted.

• Phuket (Patong) - definitely not one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Target audience seem to be the tourists (looking for Amsterdam vibes coffee shops, not cafes *wink) so there are not a whole lot of spots dedicated for working. If we were to choose again, we’d skip the Island, or at least we’d avoid Patong. You might have more chances in the Phuket Old Town, but we wished to live by the beach for a while. I guess you can’t always get everything right…right? 
 Fav cafes:

→ Baijai Thai cafe & restaurant - they have a dedicated table for working and still affordable prices compared with other places in Patong. The staff is nice as well and we always felt welcomed there. |→ Uncle Joe Breakfast and Coffee bar - there were always people working there so we felt “understood”, we didn’t have to feel bad for taking over one table for the whole afternoon. Coffee and sandwiches were awesome and not too pricy.

Currently we’re still living in Patong and we started to conserve some energy for the next country (and we’re already looking forward to that to be honest) which means that we just go to the cafes that we already know.

Thanks for making it to the end of this article. This means we’re good friends and I’m gonna ask you questions to test if you’ve read it or you’ve actually liked it. I’m happy either way, see you in the next one!

I spent roughly 1.5 months in Thailand as a digital nomad. And this, my friends, was my first time out of Europe.

The tour my partner and I have planned for the first country is: 1 Week in Bangkok, 3 weeks in Chiang Mai and 4 weeks in Phuket (currently here in the second week). These might be some of the most (or just the most) touristic places in Thailand. We chose these for 2 reasons: being for the first time in Asia we wanted to land in the most “developed” parts of the country as the tourism comes with a price and the second is that we looked for places where finding a cafe to work or reliable internet was among first priorities. Did we choose well? Did we choose poorly? I guess we’ll only know when we come back and visit other places. 

As I’m the biggest travel influencer in my family and my dad thinks I’m cool, I want to share some thoughts and break down this experience as I’ve lived it so far. There is so much to tell but hang in there, you’re just a few paragraphs away from my best joke in this article. 

Food

TL;DR: delicious but not sustainable. 

Everybody is going crazy about Thai food and I can understand why. The dishes are amazing! That Pad Thai or Pineapple rice hit differently here. When tasting the local food there’s like a rainbow of flavours, unless it’s spicy, then it’s just spicy. But that comes with a price: the amount of sugar they use, oil as most of the stuff are fried and the load of carbs. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks in when I realised my digestion was a mess and I started doing some adjustments. It’s a learning process, but it’s definitely worth it.

Cafes

Thailand is a coffee addict paradise! There are a lot, and I mean a lot of cafes! And that is something I loved! My partner and I preferred to work from cafes every day as a way of exploration, almost every day discovering a new place and taking the chance to get bits of culture from every interaction we have. Some cafes stuck on us and we’d get back every time we felt low energy or when days were announcing to be busier than usual with work. Internet was pretty good, and when it wasn’t we used the hotspot from our phones which is reliable (and definitely had never gone back to that place). On average a coffee is around 2 euros, but there are of course more expensive places. 

Pro tip: if you see selfie sticks and people taking pictures inside, it’s probably fancy enough for the coffee to be more expensive. 

Money makes the world go round

Despite hearing all stories about how cheap Thailand is, I’m gonna tell you…it depends. It is definitely less expensive than Europe. We managed to gradually lower our expenses after getting to know how life works around. Some tricks that we learnt:

• have breakfast at home: they’re gonna give you a full meal of noodles, beef, veggies and eggs for 2 euros, but if you order scrambled eggs with avocado it will be 6 times more expensive. They made their way to please the western people and they take a bit advantage of that :)

• eat at local restaurants where other locals eat - I got tired of hearing that from all the people traveling to Asia, but everyone says that for a reason: it is true. It’s way less expensive and the chances of getting food poisoning decrease dramatically (only got that once, I guess it’s a win). 

• use public transportation as much as possible, taxis can spike your budget when you draw the line at the end of the week.

Tourist attractions

For the first time visiting this part of the world, everything felt like a tourist attraction. But the tourist attractions are nothing more than…tourist attractions. I had the expectation to find lots of zen places and silent temples, but I guess the other hundreds of thousands of people visiting at the same time thought the same and we disappointed each other. In the end I think it’s the price you pay for living in the most popular places. For all that, every spot has it’s own vibe, and we enjoyed (almost) everything that we actively visited. 

I could go on forever about this new culture we’re embracing - but then the chances that you’ll read more decrease with the same speed like my patience for the drivers in Thailand who know a better route than Google. (Yes, this was the joke, hope it was worth it!)

See you in the next article where I’ll expand a bit on food…or on Bangkok? Never let them know your next move.