I lived there for a few years.
The problem with Thailand is that it sucks you in. Going back to the "real world" gets increasingly difficult the longer you stay unless you find a way to avoid all of the pitfalls of living in a place where people show up at 10pm for a 7pm meeting and blame it on traffic (and then 10 minutes later they slip and admit they took the BTS skytrain).
Besides the women and everything, the real danger is settling for mediocrity. That really started getting to me while I was there. You go to a dive bar that's the size of my living room and have to put up with poor service, demands to buy the staff drinks, etc and the beer isn't any cheaper than it is in a proper sports bar back home.
Or you go to a nice restaurant (with western food) and the staff are horrible. The food is so-so and when the bill comes it's nearly as much as eating at a nice restaurant in the US.
Both the expats and the Thais who hang around westerners are heavily weighted with con-men/women, thieves, liars, and sociopaths. So you tend to accept that friends will f**K you over. Again, you just accept mediocrity in your day to day relationships because the other choice is locking yourself in your room and never going anywhere.
Seriously, I had a good friend who I had known for several years go off the deep end there. He ran out of money and stole some girl's life savings. That was after borrowing money from everyone he could until word got around to how deep in a hole he was. He eventually got deported for overstaying his visa.
Or another friend of mine just recently took a dive out of his apartment building window. He literally only had 20 baht left to his name. In fact, a friend of mine saw him at a food stall ordering noodles about an hour before he jumped and he was short 15 baht that she lent to him.
It just nibbles at you bit by bit until you just start seeing this stuff as normal. You don't even notice it until you get back on a plane and land someplace where common sense and common courtesy mean the same thing you faintly remember them meaning.
But, I still love the place. I just can't take it full-time anymore. It's too much of a grind. It's too depressing.
And no, I'm not just bashing them because I'm a stupid American who expects everyone to be like us. I've lived all over the world. My last passport was starting to look like a phone book it had so many page inserts in there.
