It’s been over a year that I came back from studying abroad. I first studied in Bali for three months and continued to study abroad in Thailand (Bangkok) for three months. A lot of people ask me which I liked better and what the differences are. Well the differences between these two countries during my abroad experience are insane, so I figured it would be nice to share my experiences with studying abroad in Bali in Bangkok. This post will be about my study abroad in Thailand and the one about Bali can be read here!
Where in Bali we lived in a nice hotel with king size beds, housekeeping and a swimming pool, well, in Bangkok we lived in an apartment complex. The complex was situated in a street pretty close to the campus and with just a few other big houses along the street, it was a very quiet area. The apartment complex was ok, we were very lucky to arrive there early and pick a room which was spacious and had a fridge. There were students who ended up a lot worse, they didn’t even had blankets..
Well, no housekeeping here so in the first week we went on the hunt for cleaning supplies and kept our rooms clean (which is perfectly normal of course, we just got a bit spoiled in Bali haha). Breakfast was served downstairs every morning, with just some toast, bananas and cornflakes.
The street we lived in was very quiet, but more towards the campus area the streets were packed with students. The Rangsit campus is very big and the students either live on the campus or in the surrounding area. Our first period in Thailand was in the Thai public holiday, but towards the end the academic year started again and there were students EVERYWHERE!
Along the very, very long street linear to the campus there were all sorts of shops and eating places and 15 (!) internet/game spots. It was a bit hard at the beginning to find a place to eat, since you have no idea what food is on your plate, but in the end we ate at the ‘yellow spoon’ everyday. (we have no idea if that is what the place was called, but their signs were yellow and had a spoon on it, so we just called it that haha) They served a lot of dishes, but most of the times we ate some rice or green curry.
The campus in Bali was very small, with basically two buildings. The campus in Thailand was massive! I’m not sure, but I think there were 14 buildings, all for different departments. There were also several buidlings where the local students had their dorms. There was a supermarket, a few coffee shops, a proper athletic field and even a medical department. We had to walk for about 10/15 minutes to get to campus, which isn’t that long except sometimes it was just too hot haha! On the campus itself golf carts were driving around bringing people to different buildings which was cool. Also, everything was very modern, a big difference to what we experienced in Bali!
When we first started school it was a public holiday for the Thai students, although we thought it was still pretty busy. At the end of our period, when the academic year started again the campus was full of students. People moving in their dorms and preparations for the introduction week. The drum band was practicing every day on the sports field haha! It was funny to see that with all these students people were so polite with the elevators. Everybody would just wait in one single line, which sometimes was meters long haha.
The university is a private university, so basically only rich kids study there. We even saw students coming to school in a Ferrari 😯 . The same as in Bali, we didn’t had any classes with the local students, only with our group of people.
golf carts for the win!
Our life in Thailand was pretty different than our life in Bali. Bali is way smaller of course and with our scooters we were able to get everywhere within just a few hours. Well, this wasn’t the case in Thailand. The campus area was pretty far out of Bangkok so sometimes it would take around three hours to get into the city, not something you do on just a free afternoon. Also, we had more classes in Thailand that were often scheduled on monday’s and Fridays, so we didn’t often had a long weekend off.
When we did had some longer weekends we went to some of the islands of Thailand. When we had a week of we went to Chiang Mai, where we did one of the best things ever! Close to were we lived was a very big shopping mall with a big super market and a cinema so we spent a few evenings there watching movies!
The thing with Thailand just was that the distances were so much further, which sometimes made it hard to travel somewhere. We did spent 10 hours in a minivan getting to one of the islands for just three days, but these occasions were pretty rare.
I guess that’s about it about study abroad in Thailand. If you read this part, as well as the part about Bali you can definitely tell that there were major differences which makes it so hard to compare both experiences. It was the best time I ever had and if I could go back I would go right away.
superstoer! Mijn neef studeert er ook en het lijkt me zo cool, zo’n immense grote stad!
Ja heel tof! Het is inderdaad een enorme stad, er wonen gewoon bijna evenveel mensen als in heel Nederland haha!