Money, Transportation, and Household Help

Our move to Thailand is going to involve a HUGE lifestyle change.  For starters, we're going to be living in a four bedroom, five bathroom single family home in a gated expat community.  One of the great things about this is that the international school is right there, and Vivi could probably walk or bike to school on wide, even roads.  Some of the crazy stuff is that the house also has "maid's quarters" which we will probably use for live-in help, and most people drive around the community in gas powered golf carts.

While you're visualizing me speeding down a palm tree lined road in a golf cart, add this thought.  In Thailand they drive on the left hand side of the road, so we have purchased a Honda CRV with the steering wheel on the right.  Golf carts, however, have the steering wheel on the left.  I don't want to even think about how often I'm going to try to get into the wrong side of either vehicle.

You may be wondering how one can purchase vehicles on the other side of the world.  The short answer is awesome people.  In an embassy community, you may not be the new kid this month, but you probably were just a few months ago, so everyone is very willing to help out relative strangers.  For example, to get ready for moving overseas, Jeff and I took some classes where we met another couple who was moving to Thailand.  They moved out in April, so compared to us they are now highly knowledgeable veterans.  They live in downtown Bangkok, so they haven't needed a car so far, but they get a parking space with their apartment.  Our Honda CRV, purchased from another embassy employee we have never met, is now sitting in that spot.  Oh, and how did we pay for it? That gets trickier.

Before this week, I had never tried to transfer a large sum of cash from my bank account to another person's bank account.  I know that criminals and business people have very efficient systems for this, but for the lay person it is a highly convoluted process.  As soon as you go over the $2,000 line, you get into all kinds of interesting regulations about how much money you can move and how often you can move it.  The truly frightening part though is that even though there are tons of restrictions on moving my own money out of my own checking account, it is relatively easy to get a large cash advance on my credit card and transfer that money to someone else.  Paying bills is hard, but getting into debt is easy.  Oh America, what will you think of next?

I haven't tried to pay for a golf cart yet, but I have another embassy friend (who I met through Facebook) scouting that one out for me, and if I find one I like, then she'll store it at her house until I get there.  I have to admit that I fought the idea of a golf cart pretty hard, because it seems so counter intuitive to have an open vehicle in a country where it's always hot, usually humid, and occasionally monsoon season.  But apparently there are certain places that you can only get to with a golf cart.  Plus the mall has a special golf cart parking section (yes, I'm giggling as I write that, but I'm going to live it!).

Even more important than transportation though, is the idea that a new person is going to become a part of our family's daily lives for the next three years.  It sounds like everyone in the area we're moving to has at least part time household help, and some people have a full staff.  If you're living in a house with five toilets, having someone to help clean makes sense to me, but household help services can also include shopping, laundry, cooking, and child care.

A friend put us in touch with a family that is currently in Virginia, but used to live in Thailand and had such a great housekeeper that they brought her back here with them.  It's time for her to go back to Thailand now, so we're going to meet with her today and hopefully she will end up being our household goddess of everything.

It's nerve wracking, and I'm not sleeping much, but I feel like we're making a lot of progress.  Hopefully by the time we leave the U.S. we'll have two vehicles and a housekeeper, and I will be experienced at wiring money around the world.