Surprising Reasons to Reject Countries X, Y and Z

Like Dom, I used to travel to Thailand.

Deal-breakers included the long distance from Thailand to North America .. and the fact that everywhere in Thailand (including the North) is too darned hot at least nine or ten months out of the year.

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This thread invites Expats to share what brought them to decide on living where they are now .. after considering and deciding not to remain in one or more other countries.

cccmedia

cccmedia wrote:

Like Dom, I used to travel to Thailand.

I visited Phuket - It was terrible. The western food was very good but the number of all varieties of prostitutes pestering me put me off ever going near the place again.
Bangkok is an interesting city but not very much fun.
However, the deep south of Thailand is beautiful.

Saying that, I can't stand actual Thai food and that's a deal breaker.

Funny reading Fred's remarks about Thailand, I used to live in Nonthaburi Bangkok. I used to visit Phuket and many times used to sit on the beach or beach bar and just talk to the LADIES OF ILL REPUT, found if you chat with one the rest used to keep well away, But i also could not stand the food, i used to look for Chinese food instead.

The food in Thailand is notoriously spicy.

The solution is to order it not spicy.  The phrase, in Thai,
is pronounced "my ped."

cccmedia

martinodessa wrote:

LADIES OF ILL REPUT

As a greasy, leather clad biker in my old life I have no actual objection to such ladies - but I was rather used to horizontal experiences costing me beers and a kebab rather than cash.
Also, with biker chicks of the time, finding a hot dog where the bun should be wasn't even a thought.

It wasn't the ladies / men / whatever of ill repute as such, more the pestering. For those unfamiliar with the place, imaging a town populated with Jehovah's witnesses who have an unlimited supply of Watchtower magazines for sale.
One walk down the beach front and you'll want to find the first flight out.

cccmedia wrote:

The food in Thailand is notoriously spicy.

The solution is to order it not spicy.  The phrase, in Thai,
is pronounced "my ped."

cccmedia

I can't stand that Thai version of Ginger but it's in everything. I love spicy but that stuff taste yukky

I agree wholeheartedly to Fred’s description of pestering in Thai touristy places. Prostitution exists everywhere in the country (it’s a Thai thing!), but in the boring suburb of Bangkok, where I lived for a year, they left me alone.
On the other hand, nobody else of the Thais befriended me either - not a place to integrate into the neighbourhood.
But the food was glorious, not least because we (I lived and worked with a Chinese and a Malaysian who spoke Thai) checked many eating places recommended by the Thais and let the Malaysian chap do the ordering (we all shared a dislike for chillies but were otherwise adventurous enough to try everything - just short of she crispy-fried maggots our secretary brought one day!).

Oh, and I love tropical heat and humidity. I lived 12 years in Singapore without ever using the aircon at home.
(Writing this from a European winter with nostalgia!)

beppi wrote:

Oh, and I love tropical heat and humidity. I lived 12 years in Singapore without ever using the aircon at home.

I'm a fan

Yes, it was

Laos -- when I went there, there was a rule against foreign men dating a Lao female.

When I violated the rule, the assistant manager of my hotel in Vientiane came upstairs and started banging on my guest room door.

Brazil, Portugal....

It's challenging enough to master Spanish.  Who needs to take on Portuguese when there are so many Spanish-speaking countries here in South America!

cccmedia in Bucaramanga, Colombia

Israel, Cambodia, Panama...

Who likes it hot?!

Exceptions in Panama for higher-elevation locations in Chiriquí/Boquete, El Valle de Antón and a couple of mountainside villages.

cccmedia wrote:

Laos -- when I went there, there was a rule against foreign men dating a Lao female.
When I violated the rule, the assistant manager of my hotel in Vientiane came upstairs and started banging on my guest room door.

A foreign visitor in a poor country bringing a local lady to his hotel room is not dating, but prostitution - and thus forbidden in many places.

12/25/21

beppi wrote:

Oh, and I love tropical heat and humidity. I lived 12 years in Singapore without ever using the aircon at home.
(Writing this from a European winter with nostalgia!)

Same here!  July twelve times a year is my idea of heaven, and I'm lucky enough to be living that life.

The average high in Manaus is 31.9°C/89.4°F; average low is 23.4°C/74.1°F.  Not much to complain about there, except by the "I love the change of seasons!" people.  And being only three degrees south of the Equator, there's 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness every day, all year. 

I lived in Belize for a while.  I still recall on the day I flew over, I had the seat by the mid-door on the aircraft which in those days was where they took the passengers off the aircraft at Belize International.  I sat in the centre seat as they opened the door and the heat hit me like a wet towel; I burst into a sweat that never really stopped for the 6 months I was there; it was the humidity.  I was wearing a leather jacket, by the time I came to leave, it had rotted to the extent that I threw it away when I got back to the UK.

Cynic wrote:

I lived in Belize for a while.  I still recall on the day I flew over... I burst into a sweat that never really stopped for the 6 months I was there; it was the humidity.

Belize has the distinction of a Central American country where English is the official language.

However, I have seen reports that the sort of spoken English there is broken English not easy to understand.

What did you discover about spoken English in Belize during your six months there?

cccmedia

beppi wrote:

cccmedia wrote:

Laos -- when I went there, there was a rule against foreign men dating a Lao female.
When I violated the rule, the assistant manager of my hotel in Vientiane came upstairs and started banging on my guest room door.

A foreign visitor in a poor country bringing a local lady to his hotel room is not dating, but prostitution - and thus forbidden in many places.

Don't implicate a member of the Experts team when you don't have full knowledge of the situation and are assuming facts not in evidence.

cccmedia

cccmedia wrote:

The food in Thailand is notoriously spicy.

The solution is to order it not spicy.  The phrase, in Thai,
is pronounced "my ped."

cccmedia

Love spicy.

beppi wrote:

foreign visitor in a poor country bringing a local lady to his hotel room is not dating, but prostitution - and thus forbidden in many places.

Ner, I've taken plenty of non-professional local ladies back to hotels for lust without wages.
Admittedly only on two continents and one Boeing 747 over Afghanistan (but that was a aft toilet not a room) so not as much experience as some, but I try.

cccmedia wrote:

Belize has the distinction of a Central American country where English is the official language. However, I have seen reports that the sort of spoken English there is broken English not easy to understand.

We have quite a few Belizeans here in Cayman. They speak proper English. I'm sure there's plenty of broken-English and out-and-out patois spoken among the uneducated, but that applies throughout the West Indies.

My largest deal breaker for most of Europe is reserved societies that rarely smile and rampant xenophobia. Latin America and Africa have friendlier people that are more welcoming. Even if you know 0 words in their language and they don't know yours and English they'll invite you to their home and smile at you.

Western and Northern Europeans particularly dislike my ethnicity and any Eastern European. My British host family told me "Your people will take our jobs next year" in 2006. Lol. That was my first time abroad, so welcoming... not!

The Netherlands was more of this but even worse. Terrible food, only the ethnic ones from the countries they have enslaved & pillaged was edible. I knew it was flat but I expected Hungary-like flat, not that flat. It doesn't even have enough forests.

Slovakia was the nicest indeed. In fact I dated more there than in Bulgaria... people can be a bit too reserved at times which I guess comes with Central European cultures. Great, small-knit expat community for the most part. A very walkable capital where you can walk everywhere and constantly run into people you know. Very good for trips to Austria, Hungary and even Czechia.

Czech Republic or more specifically Prague. It is a beautiful city but it's also too crowded, too fast-paced. Back then it was overran with expats and tourists and the locals are too stoic, moody and reserved. The expat community there sucked, too. People wearing guns like it's Texas, a Disney-land feel and too many Russian businesses and signs. Maybe another city like Brno or Ceske Budejovice would've been better but most of the jobs for foreigners are in Prague & I prefer the architecture of Budejovice and other towns to Brno which is a bit drab.

From the ones I've passed trough the nicest people were in Hungary I think (some small towns on the road from Bratislava to Balaton lake) but their language is impossible for me to pick up. The only place so far in Europe where a cashier didn't know any EN but wasn't nasty about it, we somehow managed communication by smiles and hands. Many don't know EN but do not expect you to have learned their extremely difficult language. Czechs and Slovaks actually gave me worse customer service when I spoke Czech or Slovak to them.

I visited Dresden for a day. Wish I didn't. People acted like biorobots. No emotions, stoic. Many acted so reserved and depressed, striked me as behaving like those cold-blooded reptilians in movies.

Vienna - too much ado but both Prague and Budapest are miles more beautiful.

Athens - winter is not as warm as it should be that far south, beautiful ancient ruins but ugly modern architecture, earthquake-prone, summer heats are unbearable. and the language is too much of a fuss. Gibraltar has much better climate. That said it's one of the most gorgeous capitals in the whole of Europe.

Bitex: You sound like a really positive person ... not!
Good luck in finding more reasons for hating all the places you'll ever go to.

Mexico -- too many cities are dangerous.  Dom shows a list of the world's most dangerous cities, listing six specific Mexican cities in the top 12 most dangerous.
CC. Some of the dismissals by this Dom character seem a bit too sweeping to be reasonable. One could list six specific US cities - hell, six thousand of them - that are desperately dangerous, but that's never a reason to dismiss a whole nation! The same could be said of a lot of countries - and a lot of Caribbean islands, too. 

If there's one thing one should learn as a traveler, it is that people are people - some friendly, some not. I have been in 70 nations in my long life, and would never dismiss one of them as a place worth living. Okay, Iraq: I'll give you Iraq. But no more.

01/17/22

Gordon Barlow wrote:

Mexico -- too many cities are dangerous.  Dom shows a list of the world's most dangerous cities, listing six specific Mexican cities in the top 12 most dangerous.
CC. Some of the dismissals by this Dom character seem a bit too sweeping to be reasonable. One could list six specific US cities - hell, six thousand of them - that are desperately dangerous, but that's never a reason to dismiss a whole nation! The same could be said of a lot of countries - and a lot of Caribbean islands, too.

So true, Gordon.

There's no appreciation on the part of Mexico bashers just how big and diverse that country really is.  By some estimates, there are up to a million expat retirees living in Mexico from the United States alone.  Sure, Mexico has a lot of dangerous cities, like most big, complex countries -- but it obviously has plenty of safe, beautiful places, too, to attract and retain that kind of retirement population from abroad.

I've always been amazed by the extent of the victim-discourse spread all over the planet . They go to foreign countries, mainly bad European countries that pillaged and raped and whatever, to say how horrible and dull their food is, and how unsmiling people are. I am sure that if I go to Mali, a lot of people will smile at me and cover me in gold

bitex93 wrote:

My largest deal breaker for most of Europe is reserved societies that rarely smile and rampant xenophobia. Latin America and Africa have friendlier people that are more welcoming. Even if you know 0 words in their language and they don't know yours and English they'll invite you to their home and smile at you.

Western and Northern Europeans particularly dislike my ethnicity and any Eastern European. My British host family told me "Your people will take our jobs next year" in 2006. Lol. That was my first time abroad, so welcoming... not!

The Netherlands was more of this but even worse. Terrible food, only the ethnic ones from the countries they have enslaved & pillaged was edible. I knew it was flat but I expected Hungary-like flat, not that flat. It doesn't even have enough forests.

Slovakia was the nicest indeed. In fact I dated more there than in Bulgaria... people can be a bit too reserved at times which I guess comes with Central European cultures. Great, small-knit expat community for the most part. A very walkable capital where you can walk everywhere and constantly run into people you know. Very good for trips to Austria, Hungary and even Czechia.

Czech Republic or more specifically Prague. It is a beautiful city but it's also too crowded, too fast-paced. Back then it was overran with expats and tourists and the locals are too stoic, moody and reserved. The expat community there sucked, too. People wearing guns like it's Texas, a Disney-land feel and too many Russian businesses and signs. Maybe another city like Brno or Ceske Budejovice would've been better but most of the jobs for foreigners are in Prague & I prefer the architecture of Budejovice and other towns to Brno which is a bit drab.

From the ones I've passed trough the nicest people were in Hungary I think (some small towns on the road from Bratislava to Balaton lake) but their language is impossible for me to pick up. The only place so far in Europe where a cashier didn't know any EN but wasn't nasty about it, we somehow managed communication by smiles and hands. Many don't know EN but do not expect you to have learned their extremely difficult language. Czechs and Slovaks actually gave me worse customer service when I spoke Czech or Slovak to them.

I visited Dresden for a day. Wish I didn't. People acted like biorobots. No emotions, stoic. Many acted so reserved and depressed, striked me as behaving like those cold-blooded reptilians in movies.

Vienna - too much ado but both Prague and Budapest are miles more beautiful.

Athens - winter is not as warm as it should be that far south, beautiful ancient ruins but ugly modern architecture, earthquake-prone, summer heats are unbearable. and the language is too much of a fuss. Gibraltar has much better climate. That said it's one of the most gorgeous capitals in the whole of Europe.

For somebody so open-minded, saying "too many Russian signs" sounds racist to me...
If you don't like Europe, why don't you go elsewhere? Somewhere you feel better... Nobody asks you or forces you to come to Europe ... We already have our share of hatists here

Gordon Barlow wrote:

there are up to a million expat retirees living in Mexico from the United States alone.  Sure, Mexico has a lot of dangerous cities, like most big, complex countries -- but it obviously has plenty of safe, beautiful places, too, to attract and retain that kind of retirement population from abroad.

And how many million Mexicans are at the American borders trying to get the other way round?

beppi wrote:

Bitex: You sound like a really positive person ... not!
Good luck in finding more reasons for hating all the places you'll ever go to.

dorinaperrot wrote:

I am sure that if I go to Mali, a lot of people will smile at me and cover me in gold

Or, given the state of the civil war there, in lead.
(Bad example, perhaps, but THAT is really a reason for me to reject a country!)

01/18/22

dorinaperrot wrote:

Gordon Barlow wrote:

there are up to a million expat retirees living in Mexico from the United States alone.  Sure, Mexico has a lot of dangerous cities, like most big, complex countries -- but it obviously has plenty of safe, beautiful places, too, to attract and retain that kind of retirement population from abroad.

And how many million Mexicans are at the American borders trying to get the other way round?

That wasn't Gordon Barlow, that was me.

If you want to pick gratuitous, off-topic fights using quotes, you should at least learn to use the quote tool correctly, so that you can pick them with the right person. 

Oh, and those retirees are in Mexico legally, in compliance with Mexico's policy of attracting foreign retirees.

abthree wrote:

01/18/22

dorinaperrot wrote:

Gordon Barlow wrote:

there are up to a million expat retirees living in Mexico from the United States alone.  Sure, Mexico has a lot of dangerous cities, like most big, complex countries -- but it obviously has plenty of safe, beautiful places, too, to attract and retain that kind of retirement population from abroad.

And how many million Mexicans are at the American borders trying to get the other way round?

That wasn't Gordon Barlow, that was me.

If you want to pick gratuitous, off-topic fights using quotes, you should at least learn to use the quote tool correctly, so that you can pick them with the right person. 

Oh, and those retirees are in Mexico legally, in compliance with Mexico's policy of attracting foreign retirees.

I hope I am using the quote tool correctly this time
If millions of Mexicans take the risk to go to US illegally, that makes US even more attractive, and says a lot about how attractive Mexico is for Mexican people...

01/19/22

dorinaperrot wrote:

I hope I am using the quote tool correctly this time
If millions of Mexicans take the risk to go to US illegally, that makes US even more attractive, and says a lot about how attractive Mexico is for Mexican people...

Yes, you are!  Sorry to have been grumpy about it. 

The drivers behind legal and illegal immigration are complex and different; the drivers behind illegal immigration in Europe and North America are different from each other, as well.  Assumptions about the motives and opportunities of one group seldom transfer usefully to others.

The original point made, with which I was agreeing, that it's unfair and prejudiced for expats to dismiss Mexico out of hand because the international press sensationalizes crime statistics in some major metropolitan areas.  There's much more to the country than that.

One major factor for me is safety. I see threads asking if people can buy the penis extensions we know as guns for self defence.
I have to wonder why they want to move to a place they feel so unsafe in.

abthree wrote:

01/19/22

dorinaperrot wrote:

I hope I am using the quote tool correctly this time
If millions of Mexicans take the risk to go to US illegally, that makes US even more attractive, and says a lot about how attractive Mexico is for Mexican people...

Yes, you are!  Sorry to have been grumpy about it. 

The drivers behind legal and illegal immigration are complex and different; the drivers behind illegal immigration in Europe and North America are different from each other, as well.  Assumptions about the motives and opportunities of one group seldom transfer usefully to others.

The original point made, with which I was agreeing, that it's unfair and prejudiced for expats to dismiss Mexico out of hand because the international press sensationalizes crime statistics in some major metropolitan areas.  There's much more to the country than that.

I won't argue with you, I seem to know so much ...