4 year is a long time to be spent abroad. 4 years time can get you a university degree. I stayed 3.5 year in Japan, 1.5 year in Singapore. 4 years is more than 10% of the number of years since I was born. I think it’s a sufficient time to learn something serious.
5 years ago when I joined T-Hive. I couldn’t even locate the Netherlands on the map. I came a small town Heeze for the company meeting and returned home with a lot of good memories. When the opportunity raised to move here - I immediately decide to come without thinking too much how long I would be living abroad. I wanted to know Europe more.
The first couple of months went very quickly with building furniture, making the new apartment home. Buying a second hand VW Polo Mark 4 was a great decision. Car brought me freedom to explore. I enjoyed cycling 7km to the office day-in-day-out. Winter came and I experience the cold and dark that Dutch likes to complained about. It was a real deal. Immediately, around the middle of January we decided to take a break and return home to escape the harsh winter
The second year was eventful with close friends Tum and Ann came to Europe for long trip. We got to travel on the countless trip like never done before. Explore Europe to the maximum for every weekend for 3 months. Without them, we would have never to so many places. Together we visited Germany (Luneburg, Hamburg, Berlin), Copenhagen, Goteburg, Norway, Iceland, Barcelona, Dolomite, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium. I started to recognize the similarities & different in languages, cultures, way of life among these European countries / town we visited. I started to remember maps of those towns and roughly guess the distances between towns, geographical features. I could see housing architecture / food as gradient that slowly changing from one country in contrast to clear lines of country borders. We drove the Polo to Slovenia and Italy in two occasions to attend PI meetings.
The third and fourth year - half a year on each year we spent in Japan. I was really happy to go back to Japan this time for working. Not only that, I worked to a Toyota company. What a dream came true. I got to experience Toyota principles in the first hand - Gemba, Monodukuri, Jidoka. I have a lot of good Japanese mentors - Inagaki, Nakamura. The first trip was really fun. I worked long hours trying to hack the system to work, established a new way of working with Japanese engineers who are very hardworking and motivated to get the system to run. I felt like it was the opportunity to really collab with Japanese with wasn’t exists when I was studying and also my communication skills was sub-par back then. I relearnt the Japanese language, the cultures. I thought I saw so many part of Japan in 3.5 years as a student but no Japan has so much more to offer. These 6+6 months in Japan proved to me that there are more lessons to be learnt from Japan.
Just like any other years, we escaped dutch winter (1 or 2 months) to Thailand. On the fourth year after we decided to move back to Thailand. I was surprised that my parents wanted to come visit us just right before we leave. I was glad to hear that and the timing was so perfect that I quitted the job and took them to see Europe for 3 weeks. It was a treat for me be with the family again who don’t really like traveling.
4 year has passed and I