Apartment

This month was by far our nicest accommodations yet. We all had our own apartment: either a studio or one bedroom, and we were spread between three buildings in the same complex.

Minutes to the workspace: 14
Style: one bedroom apartment
Roommates: none
Bathrooms: 1, with a proper shower (including shower doors) and a rainfall showerhead!
Neighborhood: Nimman
Best thing: Decor I would purchase myself, a nice desk to work from home, and I can run the AC as cold as I’d like with no roommates!
Worst thing: no real complaints about this apartment – it was great. If I were being nitpicky, it would have been nice to have more people in my building/on my floor – living alone can be isolating (especially when you work opposite hours from half the group).

This month we stayed in an apartment complex called Palm Springs, in the Nimman area of Chiang Mai. We were divided amongst three buildings, which were all connected by walking paths / gates. The buildings are some of the newest in the area, and the apartments definitely looked nice, new, and modern. This was the first apartment on Remote Year that I would have lived in had I selected something for myself. I really liked the aesthetic of my apartment, and for being a tiny space it actually had quite a bit of storage.

The apartment buildings also each had their own gym and pool, which I was super excited about and then never even used once.

Workspace

We were at The Brick Startup for our workspace this month, and it was shared with other locals. I don’t really like workspaces that are shared, especially when Remote Year does not have dedicated space. I guess we have been spoiled with some of our others either being dedicated solely to RY, or having dedicated space for RY.

This one was fine, they had a decent number of tables, and given that I’m working nights for half my hours, I really didn’t have any problems taking calls in private rooms since most locals worked during the day.

The conference rooms were nice to work from at night when no one else was around – they had more comfortable office style chairs, individual AC units, and one even had a large TV screen.

The workspace had bottled water available, and it was always cold (which was nice). I’m not actually sure if there was coffee/tea available – I never tried it or it wasn’t obvious if it was there.

My biggest issue with this workspace was the bathrooms – they were, for some reason, located outside and were often covered in mosquitos.

Summary

Overall, I really liked the apartments and thought the workspace was acceptable. I was really sad to leave my Chiang Mai apartment, especially knowing that Japan would be vastly different from it. The workspace wasn’t bad, and it also wasn’t anything to write home about. It was perfectly acceptable, and I had no real problems working from it for the month. I loved the apartments though!