So I've left Germany and moved to Thailand. This is a very subjective summary of my thoughts which led to this.

I did the typical "backpacker traveling thing" back in 2013, during medical school, and traveled through Thailand for 3 weeks. I really liked it, but at the time, "I liked it" was more like "it was a nice warm country with friendly people, but now I'm looking forward to going back home to Germany".

Then, in 2015, I remembered that nice warm country with friendly people and chose a University hospital in Bangkok for my 4-month medical elective in surgery. I didn't put too much thought into this decision as my main motivation wasn't about "working in surgery in Bangkok" - my main objective was "to not do surgery in Germany" because med student interns are usually used as cheap labor there. Especially in surgery, where your main job usually consists of functioning a bit like an "adjustable mechanical arm in the operating theater", i.e. you'd be scrubbed in and your task would be to hold up a patient's leg for 2 hours. Or maybe 6 hours.

All of this might be fine, too, if your tolerance for mind-numbing work was high enough (and, to be fair, medical school indeed builds your tolerance for that), and if you'd be interested in surgery. I was not. I knew I didn't want to go into surgery. So my main motivation was to do surgery in a country where being an intern in surgery wouldn't be a miserable experience. Thailand sounded great. Maybe I could also take some time off and travel a bit!

But boy, what a surprise that internship was. Many crazy things happened. The doctors and medical students actually talked to me after work and we hung out together (this is extremely unlikely in Germany, where interns, especially foreigners, are just left to cope on their own). Students, doctors and professors were genuinely interested in actually teaching students stuff, this was amazing. You weren't cheap labor, as cheap labor was readily available and students didn't have to be used for this. All of this wasn't limited to me as a foreigner, as I saw Thai interns get pretty much the same treatment. Like, you enter an operating room, and the operating professor would not shout at you (unlike in Germany), but actually greet you and give you a brief explanation of what's happening, and then often invite you to scrub it to take a better look. All of this is completely unheard of in Germany. And no need to hold up a leg for 2-6 hours!

I was blown away. What could have been an internship of "I come into the hospital from time to time" turned into "I'm at the hospital every day because there's so much cool stuff to learn and the doctors have become my friends". An amazing time, and a memory I will never forget.

(I still wouldn't want to become a surgeon though)

Next, in 2022, after Covid, I had founded my own software company in the area of medical device compliance, was in Berlin, and I was bored. I remembered my great memories of Thailand. Could I try working remotely?

So I traveled to Thailand again and, shortly later, met my girlfriend of now almost 4 years. Since then, I've been spending quite some time in Thailand, while still living the majority of each year in Germany, long-distance relationship and everything. I still kept my Berlin flat, to which I returned to each time, but I also rented a flat in Thailand now.

As a couple, we were of course starting to think about where to settle. The choices boiled down to Germany or Thailand. We had some good data for Thailand, as I had been spending many months there after 2022, but less so for Germany, because my girlfriend was less flexible when it came to traveling and working remotely. But, in 2025, she visited me in Berlin for 3 months, where we finally could try out the whole "living in Germany" thing.

After which we decided to move to Thailand, chuckle..

So yeah, that's the background. Next, I'll try to walk you through our/my reasons.

The #1 reason, I think, is about the people and the general experience of living in a society. I like to summarize this as "I don't get annoyed during my day when taking public transport". In Berlin I would get annoyed quite often. But it's a bit more than that. 

People are nice and respectful
The people are just nice, and really respectful. This has many flavors, but my favorite one is on the subway (the BTS/MRT in Bangkok): People queue up very orderly. There's no rush. People let passengers exit the train first before boarding themselves. People walk all the way into the train to make space for passengers behind them. People tend to stay close to each other, but just not too close to still respect everyone's personal space. It's awesome to experience.

But it gets even better. If people are standing in front of you when it's your turn to exit the train, you don't have to actively proclaim that you're exiting and tell everyone "please get out of the way". No. People cautiously look around themselves on each exit, and they usually spot you if you've displayed one of the telltale signs of "I'm in Thailand and about to exit this subway carriage". That's usually moving a tiny step forward, or stowing your phone in your pocket very demonstratively, getting ready to walk. People understand these signs, and they move aside as soon as the doors open. It is truly amazing.

Contrast this with Berlin: People don't queue. People tend to stand in the entrance of the carriage until someone shouts at them to move further into the train. Hearing people shout or complain is quite a normal occurrence.

But there's more: People use their phones on speaker mode, letting everyone partake in whatever weird music they're listening to. People are thinking alcohol. Empty bottles are rolling on the floor. Drinks are spilling, the floor is sticky. People are eating kebabs. The floor is even more sticky.

When I try to reverse-engineer what I like so much about Thailand, it's probably the people, as described above. Like, I'd probably be fine living in a country with a broken real estate market like Germany, if the day-to-day life and interactions with people would be genuinely enjoyable.

I think. It's hard to say. Then again, all the other points below to add up and contribute quite a bit, too.

Also, people smile. I walked to the gym this morning and saw a fully-loaded garbage truck pass by. At the top, in front of the massive pile of trash bags, a dude was standing (yes, on the back of the truck) and smoking a cigarette. I looked at him, my German mind trying to comprehend that there was a human passenger standing on a truck, not wearing a TÜV-approved seatbelt and all. He saw me. Apparently quite surprised that someone was looking at him so intently, he slowly started smiling. He put his cigarette back in his mouth so his hand was free. In the meantime, he was beaming with a massive smile! And he used is now-free hand to wave at me with a grand gesture, his whole arm swinging upwards! Wow. I was speechless and before I even tried to smile back, the truck had turned the corner (bummer). My German mind was still catching up with this.

There's a high likelihood that people here might smile at you - employees at a cafe when taking your order, or even just a cleaning lady walking out of the men's bathroom when I'm trying to enter and nearly bump into her.

The usual German counter-argument here of course is "it's all fake", "they are actually poor and unhappy", "they should make German minimum wages" and "the garbage truck man should wear a TÜV-approved seatbelt", but those are besides the point.

You can smile at people regardless of what your economic situation is, even regardless how you feel that day. If I have a mediocre day, nothing forces me to broadcast this to everyone around me and make people feel similarly miserable. No, I can try my best, have some decency, be kind to people and smile. It costs me nothing, and it makes people around me happy. I appreciate it when people around me try to do the same.

In Germany, not so much. Day to day, you get the impression that people are genuinely miserable, all the time. It is an extremely rare occurrence that anyone is going to smile at you. They give you the feeling that you are the reason they're having a bad day, when, say, you take 10 subjective milliseconds too long at the supermarket self-checkout or when you dare request tap water in a restaurant instead of paying.

It's clean
Thailand is clean. Berlin is probably one of the worst German cities in this regard, but then again, it is the capital of Germany. So it's fair to compare Bangkok to Berlin.

In the Bangkok BTS/MRT, eating and drinking is not allowed. And man, it is clean. The BTS above-ground train, which is slightly older, recently celebrated its 25-year anniversary. This boggled my mind, because the inside of the trains looks newer than any subway in Berlin, including the new U2 carriages which were just recently brought into service and have already been vandalized (scratched windows, graffiti, etc.). This is on top of the usual mixture of spilled drinks (sticky floors) and kebab leftovers.

Where it gets even more mind-blowing is the public toilet infrastructure. You might think that in a civilized country, civilized people might be able to build public toilets, and other civilized people might use those public toilets without vandalizing them. This is true for Thailand.

Not so in Berlin. There is some sort of reinforcing feedback loop here: First off, there are hardly any public toilets; and if there are some, there's a high chance they'll be vandalized and destroyed within days (or hours?). This leads to even fewer public toilets in the future, and the feedback loop continues.

In Thailand, vandalizing things just.. doesn't seem to be much of a thing? You could have a random remote temple on the top of a mountain. You walk into the bathrooms, expecting the worst. But they are.. totally clean? It's amazing.

What happened to Germany here?

Of course, this isn't limited to Germany, as many other Western countries seem to experience this problem. What happened? Was it always like this?

The usual counter-argument here is, people might say might say "but individual freedom and innovation is higher in the West!" - yeah maybe, but how does this relate to vandalizing toilets? As a society, do we need to vandalize toilets to foster innovation?

Stuff just doesn't get stolen
When friends from Germany visit me, here's what blows their mind every time: We go to a cafe somewhere, I bring my ridiculously-overspecced 16" Macbook Pro, we sit down, open our laptops, and then.. we go for a walk around the area, leave our stuff on the table, come back, and no one was stolen our stuff.

In shopping mall food courts, my girlfriend would place her hand bag and phone on a table to "reserve a spot" and then walk off to order food.

Day to day, stuff doesn't just get stolen here.

Sure, there is "crime" in the sense of "there are crime statistics and stuff is happening", but it's not something a normal person experiences day to day.

The second-order effects of "stuff just doesn't get stolen" are amazing:

While in Berlin, my Thai girlfriend still hadn't adjusted to this German reality of "stuff gets stolen": The day we left my Berlin flat behind for good, we managed to pack all our things into two suitcases per person (can not recommend). While I was upstairs locking up my flat, my girlfriend placed the suitcases on the side walk and came back upstairs to help me. What an insane idea! From experience, placing anything on a Berlin sidewalk incurs a risk that someone just takes it with them. You could probably plot that as a function of time, and it's exponential - anything on a Berlin sidewalk for longer than 15 minutes has a high likelihood of just being "gone".

So I ran down to "save" the suitcases by moving them back inside the house. Luckily I was successful. But it's an interesting reminder what sort of "stress tax" we're paying when we just assume that having out stuff outside is not safe, and stuff just gets stolen.

Life is so much better and more relaxed when you can let go of the assumption that your stuff is going to get stolen all the time.

I've split this whole "leaving Germany, moving to Thailand" post into multiple sub-posts due to human's diminishing attention span and all.

In the next post, I'll talk about the German vs. Thai property market, which also played a significant role in the decision to move to Thailand.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading!