At last, the post about my side hustling and income schemes that I have been promising!

Now to preface this, I do not have a work visa. No one will hire me to give me a work visa. Wages here are low. A Google search shows that the average Thai person makes roughly a little over $20 a day. Of course there are those you more much more and those who make much less. I don’t have a lot of hours to work.

Once I fell into a routine with my Muay Thai training I started to see several hours in my day that would get chalked up to whatever leisure I fancied. Normally my time is spent reading, watching Netflix, or purusing the local mall (for the AC on hot days). It can be stressful to watch the money slowly wither away with no income coming in. So I started thinking there has to be some opportunities for me to work online and earn a decent wage. Realistically, $10 a day would cover my bases expenses of food and my apartment here. So my goal was to earn $20 a day if I could. I was hoping for a system to work for 2 hours a day earning $10 an hour. That was the hope.

First Attempt

My first thoughts were to look online for opportunities. There is a whole culture of people who live here, since the cost of living is low, and then make their money working online. They are called “digital nomads.” They typically already have a business set up and then travel around once they know their model is sustainable. There are a lot of different methods to this, but none of them are really that appealing to me. It also seemed like a lot of work to get the ball rolling maybe only to see the fruits of my labor in the last month of my three month stint here. Really I just wasn’t in a place where I wanted to commit to anything because my focus was obviously on Muay Thai.

I looked for relance opportunities for short time gigs and even survey and data entry type positions. As an American, my problem was I have been to spoiled by our great economy. In all these freelance gigs there is always an Indian or an African willing to work for less than you. So it’s a race to the bottom and you end up making maybe $3 an hour if that on some of these platforms.

Second Attempt

The best and most popular option I found through my Google research was teach English online. There are so many promises of $15 an hour and guaranteed flexible hours. They may be true, but a lot of companies, understandly, wanted a 6 month commitment minimum. That doesn’t really work well with my situation so I looked for more casual English learners. What I found was opportunities as English conversation partners mostly for Chinese people.

Essentially, I downloaded an app on my smart phone and after a demo audio conversation I got approved to be a conversation partner. Then I switched my “status” to online and waited for interested students to give me a call. In my first week using the app I was able to earn $70. But it was a lot of work! The system works where you set your own rate, usually based on your teaching experience and seniority on the platform. Being brand new my rate worked out to around $5 an hour which isn’t terrible.

The problem I found with the platform was that in order to make that $70 I had to be available any opportunity I got. The students call when they want. So I can be online for 3 hours and maybe only get one 20 minute call. So it became extremely frustrating as it wasn’t a consistent stream. After a while on the platform I decide to raise rate. I raised to a level where I would make roughly $7 an hour. Even doing this killed the amount of calls I was able to receive.

Overall, I just decided it wasn’t worth the effort. It was so inconsistent and hard to plan ahead for. I ended up putting in about 20 hours on the platform and had some great conversations with Chinese professors, Chinese students, and even little kids. Some people already had a great level of speaking while others were not near as good. The bad students could be pretty frustrating and there aren’t many resources on the app to help teach. It wasn’t worth it to me to develop a curriculum to help these people since I really don’t have the patience. I still have the option of teaching, but for the time being I’m over the experience.

Third Attempt

This attempt isn’t a conventional approach, but it made for some fun and interesting memories! The story starts when I found a Craigslist ad looking for an “interesting foreign person” for a guest appearance on a YouTube video. I sent in my info and a couple of pictures and forgot about it. I cast my line out on a lot of opportunities like this so I didn’t expect to here back. A couple of weeks later, however, I got an email back and they decided to go with me! Then after we organized a shooting time and location I got down to business!

The premise of the video is that the star of the YouTube channel sets up her best friend on a blind date. I’m that blind date… So we went from the mall to a nice dinner date to ice cream. We even went to the market where I played some carnival game to win her a stuffed animal. Pretty cheesy stuff. Oh, I forgot to mention the girl I was on the date with didn’t speak English…

It has been a week since the video has been published and it already has over a half a million views. Even my trainer at the Muay Thai gym saw it. He got a picture with me to show his daughter who is a fan of the YouTube channel. You can watch the video below! I am now told that it has English subtitles available, but it’s pretty comical without them!

The job took around 3 hours and paid 1000 baht (about $30). Best of all I have this awesome YouTube video as a momento of my adventures and time here! Good news too, I the rating on the video we’re good so I’ve been asked back for s second date. We’ll see how many videos I ended up appearing in atthe end of this!

Fourth Attempt

This opportunity came to me by pure luck. One of the days training a lady came by the gym to scout out guys she thought would be good bartenders. The day after she did her scouting the gym manager stopped me on my way in and asked if I would be interested in a bartending gig. I was kind of surprised especially since I have absolutely no bartending experience. But I got in touch with her on Facebook and she asked me a couple of questions and that was it.

The event was a Thanksgiving party on Saturday and Sunday night for the local expat crowd. A lot of the people were English teachers for workers for NGOs and non profits. Since it was Thanksgiving the majority of the guests were Americans with their British and Australian friends sprinkled in. It was the largest group of white people I’ve seen in Asia actually!

I was a little nervous having never bartended before, but luckily the menu was simple. There were only two cocktails on the menu. I was there with another fighter from the gym. He would make the one cocktail and I would make the other. So really it was pretty simple! There were probably only about 60 people each night so it really was only busy when they all first showed up and attacked the bar.

The job actually became pretty fun once I got the hang of it. I found people love to talk to bartenders and be friends with them because they probably think we will make their drinks better or make them extra strong. I met a lot of really interesting people doing cool things in Thailand. Overall it was another great experience and another thing to pin up in my adventure journal.

That’s it for this post! On Saturday the church is having an adventure out with camping and special celebrations near a waterfall so I will likely do a write up about that! If anyone reading has any online gigs or knows of any opportunity for me, I’m all ears!

Been back at it in the gym training Must Thai twice a day, but tonight was a special occasion and I took training off during the evening session. Instead, I did what a true blooded American is supposed to do. I ate turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pie until I felt incapacitated. I barely made it out of the restuarant before succombing to a food coma.

The Thanksgiving celebration this year had a different feel than my other Thanksgiving celebrations of years past. The main component missing is simple. FOOTBALL. How’s a guy supposed to recharge for round two without watching some good ‘ol fashioned football? Also looking forward to a solid post meal nap isn’t the same when you have to do it at a restaurant dining table. Oh yea, another big thing missing was family…

My day began in it’s usual way with a morning Muay Thai training session. After the session I made myself a light lunch to safe room for the collasal dinner I was imagining. Since I didn’t have to be ready for training session two I had a lot more flexibility in my afternoon. I decided to take a long walk and do some exploring on my way to the Thanksgiving meal. That’s when things got interesting.

I left on my journey at about 3pm and dinner was planned for 6:30pm. So needless to say I had some time to kill. My first stop took me on an adventure into the Thai equivalent of thrift stores. Let me tell you, it was truly incredible. To find the place I simply googled “thrift stores near me” and this location popped up decently close to me and near enough to my walking route. The real draw to me was that the place was called “Clothes Dumpster.”

After entering this large shack like compound, where you had to duck your head under the caved sheet metal roof to get from section to section, I witnessed mass amount of clothing literally sprawled out in mounds of different categories like pants, shirts, or shorts all acrossed the floor. I even saw a worker poring out new, giant bags of clothes into these mounds, as pictured above. I had come on a mission to buy a single black T-shirt that I needed for little gig I picked up (it will get explained in another post). Curiosity took over and soon I found myself sifting through heaps of shirts and other clothing.

To the best of my reckoning I figure a lot of the clothes start out as “donations” and eventually get sent down distribution channels either by rejection or just lack of turnover on store shelves. Then all they a get piled together and bundled up to be sent to a foreitn country where there is a greater “need” and where they would accept the quality of clothes that hadn’t sold in other places. My guess is that the owners of the Clothes Dumpster buy these gisnt bags of clothes for super cheap bulk rates and then just let people do the scavenging themselves. Seems like a cool business model to me.

After that stop, I had another thrift store encounter at a higher end shop. You could tell that the management here made an effort to curate a collection of higher quality products. The prices, reflectively, were a lot higher. They did a good job of sticking to the retro, hipster theme I have to say. If I didn’t have to haul around the thing I buy in a backpack for the next who knows how long I might have made some purchases there.

I don’t know if going to thrift stores in Thailand on Thanksgiving and seeing the surplus of American consumerism has any implications or special meaning, but it does seem like a good opportunity for a warning. Believe it or not the fashion industry is the second most detrimental industry to the environment only behind the gas/oil industry. I’ve been through some countries where a main source of employment is the garment industry. Admittedly, I’ve been through some of the better off ones. In some of the worst ones the pressure put on these sweat shops by Western fashion causes the owners to forgo factory safety measures and continually lower wages. It’s a race to the bottom in countries like Bangladesh and India, and the people making these products are the real ones suffering.

So before you think you need another outfit or you think your current clothes are “out or fashion” remember that purchase comes at a cost. Though it seems so far removed and it’s hard to even connect the dots, there is someone, likely on the other side of the world, who is supporting our shopping habits with their lives in horrible living conditions. Our unconscious purchases only serve to further fuel the fashion industry to continue doing what they’re doing. So this Black Friday please think about whether you, family, or friends really need that item and instead think about the consequences that purchase may have on someone you’ve never met on the other side of the world. Sorry for preaching! I’m done now..

I finally made it to the mall where we planned our Thanksgiving feast! I got there an hour early so I got out onto the roof and was able to do some reading and enjoy the views. Just being alone and looking out over the city gave me some good time to reflect about all I have to be thankful for this past year and couple of months for that matter. I’ve been incredibly blessed with the opportunity to travel. It is something that I wake up every morning thankful for. I am blessed to have been able to learn more lessons than I thought possible on this journey as well. One of the greatest blessings I’ve experienced is the ability to see the work of God’s word in the lives of people here. I see this through the mission work of the people I, again, was so incredibly blessed to meet and be in fellowship with. They truly have become my family here and that is something I am so so greatful for.

Of course, I’m thankful for pie! Seriously though, I started traveling thinking I already knew myself pretty well and was confident in who I was, but everyday I am learning lessons about myself that I never thought I would have learned at the start of this journey. I am really starting to realize what is most important in my life. I have been given some crazy perspective and it makes me excited to see what my future back home has in store.

I want to say a quick thank you to everyone who has been supportive of me doing my own thing and going off and explore the world for a while. I know it is going to be tough on my family, and mom especially, not to have me around for the holidays, but just know I miss you just as much, if not more, than you miss me! Thanks to all my friends who make an effort to keep in touch with me and are always there if I need a friend to talk to!

Now if I could, I just want to ask that everyone reading this say a prayer for all the called workers, their families, and all others involved int their ministires. They are truly trailblazers and real life, present day apostles. They sacrifice so much for the sake of evangelism. I am so thankful for the ability to see the work they do just so I can appreciate their dedication and love for God and hopefully reflect it in my own life.

I’ll be posting again soon about my side income hustles and how I have attempted to make some adventure money here in Thailand. Until then!