Bildung & Zukunft

I worked in logistics in Hamburg for fourteen years. My partner got a posting to Hua Hin, we agreed on two years, and I used the time to retrain as a remote UX researcher. I want to write about the boring half of that, because the courses are the part everyone talks about and the setup is the part that actually decided whether it worked.

Studying at 41 with a time difference is a scheduling problem before it is an intellectual one. My cohort was mostly European, so my live sessions were evening here. That sounds fine until you realise it means the flat has to be usable at 21:00, quiet, with air conditioning you can run for four hours without the bill becoming a topic in the household.

Things I got wrong at first:

I took a place with the desk area open to the living room. Fine for…

I work in vocational training and moved to Dubai from Cairo three years ago with two children. Nobody told me that here the paperwork has an order, and if you get the order wrong you simply wait.

The centre of it is the registered tenancy contract. Not the paper you sign with the landlord, the registered one. Almost everything downstream asks for it: the electricity and water account, the internet, and the school registration.

So the sequence people actually need is residency, then the registered tenancy, then utilities, then the school. I did it in a different order because I assumed the school only needed proof that I existed. It needed proof of where I lived, registered, in the right format.

Two things that cost me real time.

The landlord is the one who registers it, and some are slow. Ask before signing how quickly they do it, and get…

We came from Mainz two years ago, my husband works for a medical device company on the west coast of Florida, and we have a nine year old. The company gave us a relocation allowance and a list of two cities. We spent three months deciding.

Naples: the school ratings people quote are genuinely high, the streets are clean, the medical infrastructure is excellent. Rent for a three bedroom near the good elementary schools was roughly a third above what we had budgeted, and in season the traffic on the main roads made a fifteen minute drive unpredictable.

Fort Myers: noticeably cheaper for the same square footage, more families with kids our daughter's age, and the drive to his office was shorter. The schools vary a lot street by street, which was the part we as Germans found hardest to accept. At home you go to the school in your…

I am from Hamburg. I came for a three month project with a small education NGO and had no plan for after. Four years later I am still near Ubud and last year we finally took a place long term.

The part I understood very slowly is that "buying" here is not the word I know from Germany. As a foreigner you do not get freehold. You get leasehold for a fixed number of years, or hak pakai if you have the right permit, and everybody in the groups says "buy" for all of it. So when someone tells you a villa costs X, ask X for how many years, what happens at the end, and whether the extension is written into the contract or only promised over coffee.

Second thing: the certificate and the person showing you the land are often two different stories. We paid a notary to…