I consider myself fortunate to have travelled all my life. Firstly, accompanying my parents as a babe-in-arms, being schooled in Hong Kong and Cyprus, but always found it difficult to relate to my peer group in the UK who had not travelled.
I then joined the military, being based in Europe, Near and Far East, but my military specialisation required very frequent travel to many other countries for days, weeks or months at a time. After the military, I joined a multi-national company travelling the rest of the world. Much of the work was in Asia so I decided to use Thailand as a hub rather than returning to the UK every few weeks.
The upside of international travel, in my opinion, is that it broadens the mind but only for those who are curious and interested. The downside of a life time of travel is that you may not have any life-long friends or even roots to call home and I can only have real conversations with those who have had similar experiences.
Although I have lived and worked in more than 70 different countries, I found few that made me as comfortable than Thailand ...