Before moving to Kuala Lumpur, I lived in Bangkok.

January 2024.

My wife and I moved there from Japan.

We had traveled abroad many times before, but this was different from booking a hotel, sightseeing, buying souvenirs, and going home.

We were going to live there.

That felt a little strange.

We rented a condominium in Bangkok.

The first time I looked out the window, the city seemed unbelievably vast.

There were buildings everywhere.

There were roads stretching in every direction.

But I had absolutely no idea what was out there.

To me, it was almost completely unexplored territory.

Then I heard a rooster crowing.

“Is it normal for people to keep chickens in Bangkok?”

I seriously wondered.（笑）

Later, I found out that there was a school next to our condominium.

The chickens were being kept at the school.

So no, keeping chickens wasn’t just a normal Bangkok thing.

That was how my life in Bangkok began.

Every day, I explored the neighborhood a little more.

“Oh, there’s a supermarket here.”

“So if I follow this road, I end up over there.”

“Ah, this connects to the place I walked yesterday.”

Little by little, the places I knew increased.

Dots became lines.

And the lines began connecting to each other.

As that happened, the enormous, unfamiliar view from my window started to change too.

“That road is over there.”

“That shop must be somewhere around there.”

The view itself hadn’t changed at all.

What had changed was the map inside my head.

It reminded me of being a child.

At first, you only know the area around your home.

Then you learn to ride a bicycle and suddenly you can go a little farther.

Unknown roads begin to connect.

Your world gets bigger.

And here I was, in my fifties, experiencing that all over again in another country.

I bought groceries at the local supermarket.

I took the train.

I wondered what to eat for dinner.

And as I went about my ordinary daily life,

Bangkok slowly changed from

“a foreign city I didn’t know”

into

“the city where I live.”

Looking back, that feeling may have been one of the most interesting parts of my first experience living abroad.