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“But really there is something about having your own place, about having a community that you’re really entrenched into and you actually contribute to. It’s a very hedonistic lifestyle which you start to feel a bit dirty about and something found quite difficult is that you’re not actually contributing you’re kind of just a tourist.”
– Sam, on the tradeoffs of digital nomading

Sam & Emma talk about their experiences as location independent digital nomads. Why they decided to stop and settle down and why after two years they are now thinking of becoming digital nomads again.

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Structure

01:00 – What is a digital nomad?
02:35 – What was it like to be a digital nomad?
05:44 – The perks of a coworking community
08:15 – Gran Canaria as a digital nomad hub
09:59 – How to build community when living transiently
11:29 – Loneliness as a digital nomad
17:29 – Discussing digital nomad expenses
22:44 – The importance of scalability in your business
25:27 – Finding structure on the road
27:27 – What will Sam and Emma miss if they go travelling again
34:05 – Perks of living in a small town and being known there
37:05 – Sam and Emma debate the scarcity of eggs benedict when travelling
38:12 – In summary

Transcript

Sam: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the lazy entrepreneur I’m your host Sam Priestley and we’re here as always with my lovely wife Emma say hello
Emma: Hello
S: Today we’re going to be having another discussion style episode and we’re going to be talking about the pros and cons of the digital nomad lifestyle it’s something that we’ve lived at one point we spent from March 2015 to July 2017 so about a year and a half and it’s something we’re thinking about actually doing again maybe in July and it’s also one of the lifestyles that I think people see as the end goal of starting your own business becoming like a lifestyle entrepreneur the kind of entrepreneurship I’d like to talk about in these podcasts. A digital nomad is someone who doesn’t have a base kind of lives out of a suitcase and travels the world working online or experience life online basically it’s not just limited to people who are working it’s also for retirees but the main thing is not having a base, the traveling aspect of it and and being able to live a normal life through online means
E: yeah
S: travelling the world full time as a sustainable lifestyle sounds great it’s not quite as good as it sounds and there are some pros and cons to it which will hopefully cover today. Why are we talking about this? well most of these podcasts so far have been about starting a business when really I want to talk about lifestyle entrepreneurship as a whole and the digital nomad lifestyle is a kind of a big example of that and a bigger thing people might strive towards. so let’s dive in. so we went off we went off in March 2015 we first of all went to South America or spent three months traveling around there in Argentina, Chile and Brazil and then for the remaining year we went around Europe pretty much and we did that because of a few reasons and the main one was that it was easier to get back to England for kind of emergencies or just to visit people. my dad has Parkinson’s which was getting worse at the time so it was quite good to be able to come back and then a bit later on we got engaged and say for organizing a wedding required us to kind of pop into the country every now and again
E: yeah
S: so what did what do we like about it so what was it like so we went off without really a plan we just took a suitcase each
E: and a one-way ticket
S: And a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina we actually had a return but we never used to return
E: yeah because it was cheaper to get well
S: well it was also because to get into the country they have rules you need to have an outgoing
E: yeah yeah
S: and we kind of thought we might use it but then we didn’t. what we did is we started off by staying in a hostel for a few days with all the other travelers then we would see if we like the area if we like the city we might try and find sort of accommodation for a bit longer for a week or two weeks or a month if we really liked it and if not we move on and generally so we stayed a couple of weeks in Buenos Aires and then we hopped a lot for for quite a while and then in Brazil we spent a few weeks in each place there
E: yeah
S: then when in Europe we slowed down quite a bit because that got quite tiring kind of moving all the time. We also downsized we went from a big suitcase each
E: Yeah like a normal size you take for two weeks
S: yeah and then around Europe we downsized to just hand luggage each
E: yeah
S: and there we generally spent probably about a month in each place maybe a little bit some of them were a lot less some were a couple of days but generally about a month and as we came to Europe we started hunting out places had a bit more of a digital nomad community already built so one problem we found with traveling around South America was finding other people who would be doing a similar thing to us they’re really the kind of communities we’d bump into on the traveler circuits, wordy moving every couple of days
E: yeah did we go to any workspaces in South America? we did maybe in Brazil we discovered the workspaces properly in Europe
S: then after that we then went to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria for that exact reason yeah
E: I just wonder why didn’t we seek out more workspaces or were there not in South America
S: no no I felt like a lot of places didn’t have them but Buenos Aires probably did. We did go to a few kinds of places like that in Buenos Aires
E: maybe there where the workspaces but they didn’t really have the community so we would go for one day do a bit of work not really talk to anyone and then not really return
S: yeah so what we’re talking about is a lot of cities now have co-working spaces where you kind of rent a desk by the day or by the week or a month and they often have ready built communities of people doing similar things and we find that quite a good way to to meet people and also be a bit more productive we’re kind of like we’re kind of starting over fear of the negatives here because probably the biggest negative of traveling is the community side of it where as I said you’ll never a local you don’t know the local customs and you don’t know the local language and that does start grating after a while and become quite difficult I remember the first time we came back after three months in South America I just felt like a weight come off me from this kind of like underlying level of stress that was always there and I hadn’t really noticed because everything you do just has a slight bit more hassle if you’re going shopping you know you’ve got a try and communicate when you can’t speak the language or if you’ve got to get a bus ticket you’ve got to go work out how to do that and you’re always you know your accommodations only last for a few days so you’re always kind of on the lookout for where next and that does have kind of an underlying stress and it kind of grates on you a little bit and yeah and also the communities because either you’ve got the very transient communities of travelers who are gone every couple of days and they’re great fun but you don’t make any lasting friendships there well you do actually we got some friends who we still meet up with again or talk to quite a bit we’ve only met for a few days but that’s not what you want when you’re there we wanted people here we can meet and then go out for dinner regularly with a bit more bit more like community like you’d have at home
E: yeah but also people that you could talk about work to so many people that we meet in the co-working spaces wouldn’t necessarily be doing the same business as us but we would have a lot in common with them
S: yeah yeah the by the time we got to South America and then went to Gran Canaria Las Palmas which is kind of known as being one of the biggest digital nomad hubs in the world it’s a little Americanized a little island it’s officially part of Spain but it’s kind of further south off the coast of Africa and it’s the weather’s kind of very stable all year round it’s often sunny there’s lots of beaches and surf spots and it’s quite cheap and affordable and a lot of digital nomads and it’s got very good tax system so a lot of digital nomads are kind of based out there and will hop from there to different places E: yeah we’d really recommend going it was a good place
S: and there’s loads of workspaces every night you could go along to a different event a different networking or social then we made a lot of good friends I think we went like wine tasting on our first night there and then we kind of regularly meet up with people and you pop into the co-working space the next day and see them which was which was really good but it also had a few problems as well because you make these good friends and then they leave or you leave. rarely are people around for more than a few weeks when we were there there was a digital nomad cruised that was about to head off from Gran Canaria to somewhere in the Caribbean so there were loads of people there for that
E: we really wanted to go on it
S: yeah it’s just before Christmas and it tugged on my heart I thought could we just bug off Christmas hop on this cruise on the Caribbean with all these friends we’ve made interestingly enough that cruise didn’t have any Wi-Fi on it so these digital nomads who kind of the whole point in our lifestyle was being connected and they were disconnecting on purpose which is kind of bizarre but community was a big thing we did find ways around it so you know digital Nomad communities were one of them I’m quite into Brazilian jiu-jitsu so everywhere we go I’d find a club which I quite a good community we’d also hunt out the the english-speaking churches in the place and join there which kind of plugged us into another community which was quite good that kind of expat but living there a long time community
E: It was more the families
S: families and people who’d moved there for work so places like Rio we’d built a really good group of friends there who we around our age and they were just kind of living there yeah yeah a lot of international people I think that’s probably best in big cities really we found that a bit less is more kind of families wasn’t it in some of the smaller communities we went to
E: but that was still nice because when we’re away from home it was nice on a Sunday to have that group of people that you went to meet that did feel like a temporary family yeah
S: yeah yeah definitely but you don’t have you don’t have your family don’t have those long-term friends that we both really missed and was something that was really nice about coming back but when we were going around Europe I kind of felt like I’ve seen some of my friends more regularly than I did when I lived in London and we were only an hour away from each other because by coming back to London every month for every well probably along that maybe a couple of months I felt like I needed to make the most of it and would book up meeting up with all these different people
E: which is the kind of stuff I love doing not so much yeah
S: yeah yeah I’m perfectly happy just to play things by the day and then weeks drive into months and months into years and then I don’t meet up with people who I really enjoy spending time with we see about community I mean you can imagine what that’s like we were traveling as a pair which I do think makes things a lot easier you have each other I know a lot of digital nomads struggle with loneliness yeah if you’re traveling on your own which most of them are to be honest most people who are digital nomads are on their own and I’m on there’s a few communities on Facebook and stuff which I’m still a member of and have people asking questions and I think loneliness is the biggest one that people bring up how do you how do you get around that I don’t think that there’s a good answer to that people do find ways there’s there are groups that kind of group you together and take you around sort of stuff like Nomad year where you kind of pay a set fee and they’ll take you to a different month a different place every month but there’s a group there’s like 50 of you all together and so you’ve got that kind of community you’re with long term as well as also doing the travelling there’s pros and cons to that as well you lose a lot of the freedom someone’s choosing everything for you
E: well it was really funny because then we actually bumped into like a remote year group in our first destination in Buenos Aires and it was one of our first weeks and then we were able to actually meet up with them when we’re in Europe kind of six months later or was it near the end of their year I can’t remember but it was really interesting for us because we could kind of get an update of what it’s been like for them because actually we were interested in booking on one of those well you pay a set fee for your accommodation and your work space each month you have to get to the first destination but then they cover the travel and you’re locked in for a year with the same people it was quite interesting
S: I think the way it works is you paid half up front and then you could leave any time but you’d kind of forfeit that deposit a big deposit and by the time we met up quite a few people, not quite half but a lot of people had dropped out
E: yeah and it seemed it had split the thing that surprised us was thought that most people becoming digital nomads would already have a business some way of supporting themselves but that didn’t that wasn’t actually the case is I’d say to most people we met had like quit their job saved a bit money left and then tried to build a business on the road which is so hard and we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a second but what that ended up meaning for the nomad year or so you ended up six months in with this divided of people who made it and were making good money and the people who hadn’t had just turned it into a holiday and I think now was it was a bit of bitterness there it reminded me of being in university but in university everyone has the same money everyone gets the same student loans and have all the same spending power whereas on this you got people who are making potentially millions yeah living with people who’s living on their savings and they’re going out and getting bought service in the club because they just completed a big contract or whatever with their their business and the other people are trying to live up to the level and that created quite a strange dynamic which they love to bitch about
E: And we love to hear about
S: but I do feel like they are the people who are left by that point were loving it and will remember it forever basically
E: yeah I think the route that they went on in terms of the cities and the countries was a really good mix and I think it was a really good opportunity to travel with people that you wouldn’t normally meet day to day say you’ve got the kind of travel element and the culture element but also pushing you out of your comfort zone and they’re getting to know meet people you wouldn’t normally meet
S: which brings me on to one of the things that are good about being a digital nomad which the digital nomad year didn’t have which was how cheap it is
E: yeah
S: so you actually paid a premium I can’t remember how much it was but it was something like 20 grand for the year for the digital nomad where they would do your flights and accommodation there’s quite a lot more than what you would pay if you’re just doing it yourself and for yourself planning and so these people on this were paying what they probably would to live in London or somewhere like that maybe a bit more for this year experience whereas a lot of people go digital nomading for the cheapness one of the biggest communities of digital nomads is in our Chiang Mai in Thailand and the reason it’s there is because you can live pretty well on about a thousand dollars a month we actually spent pretty much the same amount being a digital nomad as we did living in London in flat shares in central London partly because we were moving quite a lot and we weren’t particularly staying in the cheapest places so even in South America we stayed in the three most expensive countries pretty much in South America E: and we like to eat out and drink and we did lots of touristy things we didn’t hold back yeah we did a lot more
S: yeah we didn’t hold back at all I think we spent I worked it out to about 2,500 a month each pounds is what we were spending while we were away and that was a mix of sometimes we’d be somewhere quite cheap the other time you know where we were rented accommodation short-term accommodation London which is very expensive and then we’d be off somewhere where it was really cheap again and it was but it did even out similar to what we were spending just living in flat shares but one bit that was better was that we would always be in the best place of wherever we were so if we were in Lisbon we wouldn’t be living in a place where anyone who lives in Lisbon lives we wouldn’t be commuting in we were living in walking distance from the central square and everywhere we went on in Rio we were in an email at the best place possible right by the beach like everywhere we went we were living yeah
E: somewhere we’d never be able to afford in London
S: somewhere we’d never be able to afford in London exactly we mean the equivalent of just next to Trafalgar Square
E: yeah it was amazing
S: and although the prices end up being comparable it was the quality we had was a lot better most of the time that’s one of the other things about being digital Nomad is that there’s a lot of variance yes you book somewhere and you don’t really know what it’s gonna be like it might be amazing or it might be rubbish and we had our fair share of rubbish and we had more than our fair share of amazing
E: yeah I mean that’s kind of the fun of it and the fact that is temporary I mean if we moved somewhere and it was really that bad, we could have moved out again pretty quickly
S: yeah
E: with the exception of Lisbon there was a lot of choice most places had a lot of choice and the economy of short-term accommodation was a bit strange so some places actually in London we got very nice accommodation in London quite cheaply compared to what you’d spend renting whereas in Lisbon the opposite was true short term accommodations was very expensive whereas long term accommodations were very cheap yeah same was true in Malta short term accommodations were pretty cheap
S: yeah we had a lovely flat
E: yeah other places were so it really varied and you kind of didn’t really appreciate that until you went because you look up the cost of living somewhere and I’ll tell you it’s this amount but actually short term living there might not be anywhere near that cheap yeah we’re kind of like flicking around all over the place but let’s go back slightly still on the cost to places like Asia and Chaing Mai were a lot digital nomads go yeah something we bumped into quite a lot was both people who went because of the cheapness without a business already set up with the plan of living cheaply and building a business
E: what do you think about that think
S: What do I think that that is a good question
E: Would you recommend people do that
S: I mean I think I mean one problem we had with the traveling was the productivity wasn’t very good yeah so I think like working on the beach isn’t practical yeah you don’t have any Wi-Fi your battery runs out all that kind of stuff and a lot of places you know if you have a workspace that’s great but also whenever you’re in a new place you want to do all the touristy stuff there’s always more fun things to do when you meet new people you want to go out drinking with them and having fun
E: but isn’t someone like Chaing Mai or Bali they have lots of cafes that have got good internet and they’ve got lots of workspaces that you can pick into so you’re not kind of on the beach working
S: yeah so what I think is that if that’s what you want to do you need to make that like the explicit plan so you’re not going to be a traveler you’re going to like if you bet it’d be better to move to one of these places like we saw people doing in Las Palmas where they’re not planning on travelling. They’re moving there to start a business because of the cost of living and taxes and I think if you’re moving somewhere like Chiang Mai to do that can work out yes but what we found was people were trying to have the best everything and were getting trapped basically where they would get a one-way ticket to Chiang Mai they would spend their time there working on the business maybe working quite hard maybe working a bit half-assedly, having a great time and then slowly new reality starts to set in
E: They’re earning enough to live
S: And then they always say one more month and then they run out of money and then they can’t afford to move home maybe they can afford the flight but they can’t afford the rent when they get there they got used to living in this cheap cost of living place and they can’t save up and acclimatize and it’s not just people who have failed its people who have kind of made it so there’s a whole bunch of people who are working very hard for around whatever 12 thousand dollars a month an amount they can’t live on in somewhere like the US or the UK but they can live on in in Thailand yeah and they’re a bit trapped. I’d been trying to write a blog post about this yesterday about scalability and the importance of scalability of the business because a lot of people are doing kind of gig economy stole jobs on things like fiver or upwork where they’re earning a very small hourly wage and it’s very competitive to get the work and you’re competing with all all the third world economies charging half what you are even in your cheap place of living yeah and they they it’s not like they can take on more work and make more money yeah because it’s not scalable and that’s something you need to be very careful about when you plan out to begin with and yeah that’s something I’m able do podcasts on that next kind of planning that out bit as a blog post and it is important and it’s something people kind of assume they’ll be able to sort out later but they don’t they end up trapping themselves and you know getting to the mindset where they can’t afford to give up the income they’re earning in order to take risk and try and like take that scale
E: Because they’re using all their time
S: if they could really put their price they’d lose all their current clients because all their current clients using them for the value anyway we’ll talk about that another time so let me let me try and like kind of summarize some of the good and bad stuff so good you know you’re traveling the world that’s pretty self-explanatory you’re staying in amazing places you can Instagram everything show off for your friends you’re living in the best places in each place by being a short-term resident each place you’re kind of forced to make the most of it which you do you do a lot more stuff than you would
E: When you live in a place
S: When you live in a place and you take it for granted it can be cheap depending on where you are maybe not as cheap as everyone pretends it is and all the sales brochures will tell you but it’s cheap it’s cheaper than living in London it might not be cheaper if you live in an even the country or in a smaller city in the UK most definitely cheaper than London and it is very durable there’s good Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere there’s good short-term accommodation options with hostel world and Airbnb and all that kind of stuff and there are digital Nomad communities set up in a lot of places and probably since we did it which was
E: a few years ago now
S: back in we left in a yeah by a year and a half ago now so it’s probably a lot more these places and you might think the last thing you want to do is go to an office when travelling but actually it does is good because there’s a community there and it does give you that kind of place to work
E: gives you structure is your bit structure and they are open quite often 24 hours so if your structure is working in the middle of the night it works quite
S: well yeah the bad is the main bad is community you know you don’t really have those long-term friends you can make friends as you’re doing it but you’re always having to make new friends. I know it’s quite tiring
E: always saying goodbye
S: which gets a bit draining yeah there’s a comfort being at home there’s there’s a there’s an ease with having your own house having your own apartment long-term that I think we take for granted and when you’re transient and always moving you do feel it and also about not being in with the local customs and language problems there’s a reason why a lot of people end up in places like Australia which is different but kind of similar in some ways
E: And doesn’t appeal because
S: it’s just as expensive as here but in other ways you know we don’t speak the language everyone you go to now something that’s quite nice about someone like motor where everyone spoke the language because English is a main language there or somewhere like Budapest where their language is so complicated that pretty much everybody speaks English and often it’s not very productive because you’re making the most of living this amazing traveling life and working on a beach isn’t particularly practical or you might be in an accommodation with bad Wi-Fi there’s loads of little things where we might spend a day traveling those little things are why it’s not as productive as just having your head down working at home and that’s my little list the good and the bad, let’s talk a little bit about what we’re gonna miss if we’re gonna go I’ve dropped down a couple of things while Emma was getting her coffee I’m thinking what am I gonna find it really difficult to leave if we go off
E: In Tunbridge Wells
S: yeah so our current living situation as we live in Tunbridge Wells which is a very nice town we’re right in the center we can walk everywhere we have a car a local business in Pipe house Gin which means we know a lot of the business owners and we know a lot of people around town we’re pretty embedded in a few kind of local communities where we we go along to church with a regular and a lot of friends at I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which I do four or five times a week and I do that quite and meet the same people every time we also have kind of business community we’re kind of involved with and Emma does her supper clubs where kind of every couple of weeks a bit longer at the moment we we host strangers in our house where they pay and Emma cooks kind of a four course three courses with canapes and sweets and things afterwards meal so we got a lot to leave you know we’ve got a nice house we’ve got a super king beds with a very expensive mattress I’ve got my little podcasting and office studio here
E: we have a lovely sofa
S: I have a games room we have you got your dining room and all your
E: kitchen appliances
S: your expensive kitchen appliances we have a lot of possessions we have a convertible we can whiz around in with our hair whizzing
E: We have a very comfortable life
S: We have a very nice comfortable life which we’d have to give up to get rid of most of our possessions get rid of most of our clothes drop down but what would we miss I think I’d miss the comfort for one I’d missed being able to come home flop on our sofa put on netflix whatever and just kind of chill yeah I’ll miss that quite a lot I don’t think we ever stayed anywhere with a nice sofa you know whole year and a half that’s definitely not a priority with short term accommodation
E: yeah some of the worst sofas
S: yeah I’ll miss our bed that’s for sure in the house that’s probably what you know I’m gonna miss I’m gonna miss video games I miss my desktop computer where I can play all my high-performance team games
E: you always used to say that when we were traveling I miss my computer to play computer games which I never understood because you always playing games on your phone
S: yeah it’s not the same cuz I have my laptop there’s not that much you can do on there got my little games room and my playstation which was like the first thing I bought when moving in
E: Give you an idea of Sam’s priorities
S: I’ll miss jujitsu yes traveling I could move to new jiu jitsu place every time but it’s not the same especially as jujitsu is often about lineage and loyalty so moving up the ranks on the one instructor is quite a big part of it and something I’d like to do and if we leave gotta start again or just end up being this transient person never belonging to any club which is a bit sad and something I will miss and miss a lot
E: but I think it is good for your development I don’t think it’s bad to be constantly moving
S: there is good stuff about it there is good about being in different places trying out so many people E: Going with people that have completely different skills and different way of thinking
S: yeah yeah it is good it’s also a bit hard I’d be training a lot less probably because places we go might not have as Brazilian jiu-jitsu or the time tables might be a lot more limited
E: but going to Asia it’s quite likely that’s we’re gonna go in really good gyms yeah if we go team yeah
S: especially in Thailand yes they got a big MMA community there should be a lot gyms there
E: Maybe you’ll turn into a professional MMA fighter
S: maybe unlikely but maybe those are the things I probably miss the most friends yeah miss them but I’m also quite happy being doing my own thing and which is probably gonna be a bigger bigger hurt for you
E: yeah I think you’ll probably miss family more than friends
S: yeah maybe I don’t know I miss my friends but I’m also a lot more in the moment and then when I come back home me up and it we like I never left and have kind of what we were almost more fun and more to catch up on because of it
E: Yeah you’ll have all these stories to tell them
S: yeah whereas you you like to see your friends may regularly yeah here you can pop into London quite a lot and see all your friends from there you can pop home to you today you’re going home to see celebrate our friends 30th yeah taking her out for lunch last weekend we saw family your family and went back to my homes for my cousin’s 31st yeah there’s loads of little things like that that you’d miss out on it’s kind of something we talk about is you miss out on a lot of stuff like weddings special birthday special events just cuz you’re not in the country which is a bit painful and it’s a bit sad I think you’ll really miss so on Saturday we went we just went for a wander around Tunbridge Wells we went to a local market where we got some cakes and things and chat to all the business owners present and we went up to a cheese pop-up so you can order some of your favorite cheese’s for Christmas then we went to somewhere else where we had some beer and then went somewhere else with some coffee this little tour and and you loved it because you got some free cakes because you know the business owner you got a discount on that on a present for someone yeah that’s something you’re really gonna miss being able to like wander around and just know everyone
E: yeah and I’ve never really had that before I didn’t have that in my hometown we didn’t really have a small business community like that didn’t have at uni definitely didn’t have it in London even if I did go to the same person for coffee every day at work they would have no idea who I was whereas yeah living in a small town it’s a lovely feeling people greeting you by name and asking you how you make this holiday was or how’s the gin going whatever it is it was up for a chat
S: I definitely think that I’ll be quite different I think we over we underestimate how nice is here yeah how good we got it basically yeah even the stuff like having a butcher with good quality meat who you know quite well yeah and you want to experiment yeah whatever cooked goat in hay and you can go and put an order in and they’ll source it for you all that kind of stuff which you just don’t know like the quality of eating for instance like home cooking we have here it’s really good we can get all the good ingredients stuff you have it is a bit more tough
E: but travelling one of the big things travelling for me is experiencing different cuisines going on different cooking lessons and going to the local markets and having lots of different experiences whereas the food culture in Tunbridge Wells is quite one thing it’s quite good quality meat
S: English pub yeah
E: yeah and they do it well but there’s a point where I get a bit bored and hence why I go to London so much for the food scene because it’s so good is
S: like one thing we miss about travelling which is really simple is like good quality coffee yeah because most places just don’t have it a thing with like good-quality international food London food is one of the best in the world
E: It is the best in the world
S: and if you’re going to a place like Lisbon obviously have really good food but somewhere like Las Palmas doesn’t if you’re eating out you don’t have any good choices
E: there’s only so much tapas you can eat in six weeks yeah
S: and that’s okay I see somewhere like Bangkok we’ll have a really good international food so lovely amazing yeah the street foods but we don’t wanna live in Bangkok we’ll go to Chiang Mai probably have a quite good but not amazing and then if we go further if we go into Bali or somewhere like it’s gonna be a step down again
E: I don’t agree gonna be amazing
S: they’ll be amazing in what they do the Thai food will be amazing but you’re not gonna get any eggs benedict
E: well we have heard you can go to cafes and get eggs benedict but you spend like four times the amount that you would for a local breakfast just for the privilege
S: and it won’t be very good yeah
E: but I can make you eggs benedict
S: Well you can’t because you can’t get smoked salmon you may be able to get the same type of eggs well you have to make the hollandaise
E: I’d be able to make the poached eggs but yeah in terms of bread and their salmon yeah it’ll be different I won’t be asking to have good sausages no
S: yeah sorry this has been a bit of a waffley episode just to summarize let me quickly go through the pros and cons again you know Instagramable, living the best places is cheap maybe not as cheap as you want it to be but it is cheap you get to see the world you get to travel different communities all that kind of stuff bad is it’s not comfortable it’s not the same as been at home me there’s an underlying level of stress you don’t speak local language you don’t know the local customs you’re always kind of having to work a bit it’s not as productive and you just don’t have those long-term friendships and family that you do at home that’s kind of it like there’s they’re just different lifestyles I don’t think either one of them either one type of life is good if we’re talking about becoming digital nomads again but it’s not gonna be forever you can’t have a family while traveling there are digital Nomad schools that can travel the world and I think as time goes on they’re gonna get more and more set up for that kind of thing but really there is something about having your own place about having a community that you’re really entrenched into and you and you actually contribute to you know actually something we didn’t talk about is it’s a very hedonistic lifestyle which you start to feel a bit dirty about and I found quite difficult is that you’re not actually contributing you’re kind of just yeah you’re a tourist in your countries economy maybe or not you know actually building anything for that where you are you just live in a very holiday lifestyle all the time which feels a little bit a bit wrong maybe that’s maybe it’s wrong to feel wrong about it but that’s something that we were really keen on moving back here and having spare rooms in our house and being able to host people who can’t for whatever reason just like need the space whether that’s family or sort of members of the community and that was like something that we really looked forward to about moving back here
E: yes
S: just randomly well anyway on that night I feel it has been longer than I had planned hopefully found it interesting it’s giving you a bit of insight into what it’s like kind of traveling and stuff like goodbye