My Digital Nomad Year 2022/2023

I lived as a digital nomad for almost a year. I was working online as a teacher and lived in 3 different countries: Turkey, Vietnam, and Thailand.

When I first thought of working online, I wanted to write blogs but it was hard for me to find something, so I decided to teach again which I had been doing for years already. I started working for two different German companies. One was a tutoring company where I was tutoring school children in Math, German, English, Spanish, French, and Italian. The other one was a company that helped Latin American people to come to Germany, so we had to teach them German first. Both jobs were really nice as I enjoy teaching a lot. They also paid well which meant that I could afford to work part-time and have time for other things like watching the sunset every day, reading, working out, and still earning enough money to have a good life in the countries I worked in. The only difficult thing was the timing. If you have a job where you are on call with someone who lives in a different time zone than you, you have to calculate that as well. I had clients in Europe who wanted classes in the afternoon (afternoon/night for me) and clients in Mexico who wanted classes in the evening (morning for me). That’s why in Turkey I used to work one hour in the morning (8-9am) and then every day from 4pm to 8pm meanwhile in Vietnam I worked two hours in the morning (10am-12pm) and then from 7 or 8pm to 12am and sometimes even 1am. In Thailand, I was only working in the morning from 8am-12pm. I enjoyed the working hours because I was free for most of the day.

For this year I had planned to live in different Airbnbs which was a really good idea. My Airbnb in Turkey was really in the center (near Taksim Square) and I had two Russian girls as roommates. We became friends and went out together sometimes. In Vietnam, I lived in another Airbnb. Although I didn’t make many friends there, I always had someone to talk to (there were 3 other Airbnb rooms). In Thailand, I rented two different Airbnb's – both of them were not shared apartments. For the first time in my life, I was living alone. Some years ago, I would have been scared to do so. I like to live with people so this would have been the worst for me. But now that I am older, I felt like it was the right choice. And it was. Of course, I didn’t meet as many people in Thailand as I met in Vietnam (because I was living completely on my own) but still, I enjoyed having my own flat. On top of that both flats were super nice with a common pool area, gym, etc. 

course, the entire year felt like a vacation but not completely. In Turkey, I saw a few important places, but I definitely wanna go back to travel in the summer (I was there in winter so for many things the weather was just too bad). I had already extensively traveled in Vietnam and Thailand so I just went to a few places, like Sapa in Vietnam and Pattaya in Thailand. I also went to Laos for a week (for my first visa run) and to Cambodia for some days (for my second visa run and mainly for shopping).

• Living with my Turkish friend Nurbanu whom I met in Pakistan and her lovely family  
• Going for breakfast in Turkey with a friend I hadn’t seen since 2017
• Visiting Istanbul with my best friend Sophie
• Shootings in Afghan and Turkish traditional clothes
• Celebrating New Year in Istanbul
• Experiencing Tet Fest (Vietnamese/Chinese New Year) in Hanoi
• Traveling to Sapa with one of my old university friends
• Visiting Laos and watching many sunsets there (over the Mekong)
• Going shopping in Cambodia
• Meeting my boyfriend Ibrahim after 14 months in Thailand
• Living in a luxury apartment on the 17th floor with a sky pool on the 50th floor
• Experiencing Songkran in (Thai New Year)
• Going on a dinner cruise in Bangkok
• Having a drink at a sky bar in Bangkok
• Shooting in Thai traditional clothes

I would like to end this blog post with a small paragraph on manifestation. Manifestation has become a widely used word in the mindset community these days (maybe over-used). For me, it’s not the word that is important, it’s the meaning. Manifestation means that you turn a thought into reality. I have been manifesting and creating my own life since I was 17 years old (probably even before that – I would guess around 6-10 years old). I could give you numerous examples of ideas that I had and turned into reality. 

I wanted to live in Thailand since I started studying in 2017 because, during my time at university, I was learning the Thai language. During my studies, I went to Myanmar for one semester (December 2019 to March 2020) and after that, I had already gotten an internship in Thailand from April 2020 to July 2020. The contract was already signed, and I visited the apartment in January 2020 when I was in Bangkok for New Year because one of my classmates from my Thai class was doing the same internship before me. But as you all know Covid happened, so it got cancelled. In 2021 I asked for the internship in Thailand again, but the country wasn’t open yet. So, I went to Pakistan instead. In 2022 I tried again for another internship which didn’t happen, so I decided to travel Southeast Asia for 4 months. Finally, in 2023 my dream became a reality. And instead of sitting 8 hours in an office for 300€ a month I was working on my own and earning the triple by working half of what I would have. And even though the apartment I saw in January 2020 was nice, nothing beats the apartment I stayed in at the end. This story shows me that it’s always important to do everything possible to get what you want, be patient, and never give up, and at the same time leave space for the universe to guide you and maybe give you something even better.