Please tell us more about living in thailand (not vacationing)
Where did u come from before and what made you decide to live there permanently?
I'm English, I was living in Japan working on a manufacturing software project & they sent me here to work on the implementation. When that finished, I figured I'd stay for a vacation and one thing led to another and now it's 14 years later. Finding work is hard here but if you have contacts back home, it's not that hard to take advantage of the labor rates here and make yourself a niche. Of course a lot of people come here and think that becoming a bar owner/pimp is a niche.
The hardest thing here is keeping your shit together. There is no-one here to tell you to slow down, no-one holding you back. You can find someone to party with every day. Whetever your vice, you will find it here and in quantity. As such, a lot of people fall off the rails.
Still - if you keep things in perspective, earn a good wage, don't get fucked up daily, then it's a nice place to live. Tropical beaches are well within reach, foods great, beers cold. The locals love kids, so it's a good place to raise a family. I think part of the attraction is living in a country with culture that is so different from your own. I still shake my head at some of the things I see on the streets of Bangkok. Perhaps the best thing about working with the locals here is they don't whine like English people do, they are an easy going lot.
You also need to have a pretty god bullshit detector here because there's a scam round every corner. Getting scammed a few times certainly hones that talent.
This is a Bangkok perspective, I imagine someone living in Pattaya will have a very different perspective. In either place, you will become jaded over time but that's not such a bad thing.