How to survive your weekend?

During the week you work from 8.00 AM until 17.00 PM so you don't have much time left to do a lot of stuff. Each day of work will become a routine. Your weekends, however, can get pretty boring or very awesome.

I am the only European guy that works in the office of Kaefer Engineering in Thailand. This makes it hard to communicate during the day, but also to organize something fun to do together with my colleagues. They all have a family, are married or live in a city far from the office. That is why, it can be tough to come through your weekends. There is just one thing I found out myself after the first 2 boring weekends; you really need to plan something fun for yourself.

I did not plan anything for my first 2 weekends. I just wanted to stay in town, read a book, watch some Netflix and just hang around. This sounded like a nice relaxing thing to do. However, when you are all alone it is not so funny and relaxing as you think it is. You get bored easily and after watching 6 consecutive episodes of Friends it might be not so much fun anymore. That is why I started to do stuff during the weekends. As I already told in my previous blogs, I met some American people with whom I can have some drinks and hang around. Besides that I did also plan to go golfing and seeing more of the city and its beach.

Last weekend, though, I planned a real trip to a beautiful island. I went to Ko Samet Island. At the beginning I thought that I would never get there because it was a journey itself to reach the island. I asked some colleagues and some friends of mine how to get to the island, but all told me a different story with different amounts of prices and time. I needed to go to a harbor to catch the ferry first. This was 25 KM away from my condo. This distance is just too much to ride with my motorbike, so I took a Song Thaew. This is a tiny buss where people can hop in and ring the bell if they want to get out, even when this is in the middle of the highway. Once in the Song Thaew I told the driver to go to Ban Phe harbor, he told me that this would be a 45 minutes drive which would cost me around 25 Baht (0.70 euro), or at least I think he tried to make this clear to me.

Start planning fun things to do, to survive your weekends

At the harbor I took a ferry for 50 Baht (1.10 euro) to Ko Samet Island. This island was beautiful. It had this blue ocean with white beaches where you could go snorkeling, swimming, parasailing and many more. On Saturday at 11.00 AM I arrived at the island and rent a motorbike for 400 Baht (10 euro) to explore the island. This was very easy, because it had only 2 main roads. After watching the sunset on Saturday evening I went to my hostel, which I booked with AirBNB for 15 euro, where I met some German travelers. They invited me to go have diner at a nice seafood restaurant. After diner we bought some booze to spend the night and having some fun. The next morning, a bit hung over, I went back to the beach for a couple of hours, eventually I went back home at 4.00 PM to arrive at 6.00 PM at my condo to make myself ready to start the next day of work again at 8.00 AM.

This is one example of how a weekend can go. I will plan a lot more fun things to do during the weekend and I will inform you about this. The tip of this blog is: You need to make it as fun as you want it yourself, so start planning!