Ursus Travel Origins: Part 3

So, where did we leave off? Oh yes, I had escaped South Korea from a bad situation. I'm in Beijing for Chinese New Year. I've got about $3,000 to my name and no idea how I'm going to survive in Asia alone without a job or a next paycheck. So I hit the ground running. Back in those days there were tons of ESL job websites focused on Asia. I spent my week enjoying Beijing for Chinese New Year with my former coworkers from South Korea, and I decided to purchase a ticket and head to Thailand. I was determined to get a job.

First stop Bangkok... Then I ended up in China

Chinese wet market near my house. Like fish heads?

Well, it didn't work out exactly as planned, but I landed in Bangkok and checked into a hostel called the Wanderlust Hostel. It was owned by a girl from Singapore who was half Thai, half Singaporean. We immediately hit it off, and I think she appreciated having someone who was a bit more grounded than the typical guests. Most people passing through Thailand and staying in that type of accommodation are there to party. I, on the other hand, had a mission: find a job and make it work.

Turns out I was in Thailand at the wrong time of year to find a teaching position. Teaching in Thailand operates on a completely different school calendar than most places. I arrived in early February, and the school year finishes in mid-March. I was told they'd be happy to give me a job — but it wouldn't start until mid-May. My heart sank. How was I supposed to survive with no income until the end of May, and even then it would only be a half paycheck?

I immediately went into panic mode — which, I've learned, is sometimes when I accomplish my most amazing things. I applied for anything and everything across Asia and eventually got lucky. I found a job that included an apartment and started immediately, but I had to fly to Hong Kong first to get the visa. To teach on the Chinese mainland, you have to obtain your visa from foreign soil. The instructions were simple: fly into Hong Kong, stay at a cheap hostel, go to the embassy, apply for a double-entry tourist visa, and once it's granted, hop on the train to Guangzhou.

So I did. The job was teaching kindergartners who were the children of Chinese military personnel — army, navy, and marines. In China, if you're part of the military, you drop your children off at these megaplex kindergartens on Monday morning and don't pick them up until Friday. The children sleep, eat, and learn in these compounds all week long. My job was to hop in a van, get driven to these compounds, teach five lessons, and then head back to my apartment each day.

The apartment I was given was a dream. A penthouse unit in a high-rise building right on the river in Guangzhou. One flight of stairs up and there was a rooftop garden with a panoramic view of the entire city. On top of that, it was a two-bedroom apartment, and for the first month I had it entirely to myself.

The view from my apartment window in Guangzhou

Why China went south FAST!

See the haze? Yea, I breathed that for two months

To be honest, I never really felt at home in China, especially in Guangzhou. It turns out Guangzhou is one of the cities with the worst air pollution in China — one of those places where you don't see blue skies or sunshine 365 days a year. Just a grey haze hanging in the air, and at night the light bounces off the pollution and the sky glows red. I should have seen it coming on the train ride from Hong Kong. Looking out the window, all you see are the factories that manufacture the products we consume in the West, billowing white smoke into the air. There were stretches of the journey where you couldn't see anything outside — like being in an airplane flying through clouds. That was Guangzhou in 2010. I've heard things have changed significantly since then, and the air is much cleaner now.

I had accepted the position because it started immediately and came with free housing. When I signed the one-year contract, I genuinely intended to stay. The problem was my lungs. They were not built for that level of pollution. I almost immediately developed an upper respiratory infection.

So there I was — living in a high-rise apartment in one of China's largest cities, battling a lung infection, and expected to teach children in a high-energy environment every day. My boss took me to every kind of doctor imaginable. I tried Western medicine and antibiotics. I tried a traditional Chinese medicine doctor with her herbs and snake bile. Nothing worked. After about a month, I slowly started accepting that this was not going to work. The question was how to get out gracefully.

By mid-March I knew. In the back of my mind I already knew what I wanted to do — I just didn't know how to make it happen. I reached out to one of the companies in Thailand that had previously offered me a contract and asked if the offer still stood. They wrote back almost immediately: yes. Come to Bangkok in mid-April, report to their head office, and they would put me up at a resort for a week of Thai cultural training.

Ronald McDonald in Thailand. This was taken on an OLD digital camera before phone cameras were really a thing.

And then there was Thailand

It turns out that teaching English in Thailand requires cultural training before you're permitted to work with public school students. You need to understand what's appropriate and what isn't, what can get you into trouble, how Thai society differs from Western culture. Honestly, it's a very good idea — and genuinely informative.

The only thing left was telling my boss in China. After South Korea, I wasn't sure how it would go. I'd already left one difficult situation there, and now here I was leaving another job just a couple of months later. This time I decided to simply tell the truth: I can't stay because I am physically sick. My body cannot handle this environment.

My boss was understanding. The only condition was that I reimburse the school for the fees they had covered — the visa, the medical appointment, and the HIV test required for a Chinese work visa. I took a $500 hit withheld from my final paycheck, gave 30 days' notice, and left on good terms. After how things ended in South Korea, that mattered to me.

They were even kind enough to give me a ride to the airport on my last day. I have nothing negative to say about the company or about China in general — other than that the air quality in 2010 was genuinely difficult for my body. I know things are very different now in 2026. I still work with Chinese students online to this day, and China has clearly turned things around.

So there I was, settled into a resort in Thailand, with no idea where any of this was heading. What I did know was that I loved Thailand. I loved the company I was about to work for. And I was finally about to live out a dream I'd carried since the day I earned my English teaching certificate — spending a year or two teaching in Thailand. Little did I know the adventures that lay ahead.

To be continued in Part 4…

Bangkok Thailand