A Desire to Return to (Thailand).

The other week my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker was saying that in a few years, she wants to move back to (Thailand), permanently, since she says that life is just so much easier there, and that I really have no idea.

Like, lately she's had to run around for immigration paperwork, including a two-hour one-way trip to a big city in a neighboring state.

In comparison, she said, you could just go to any government office in (Thailand) and do equivalent paperwork, and they even have locations in the mall and a bank there, too, and so you just drop your kids off at the playground in the mall, run your errands, and you're done.

She also said that even with more everyday things like banks, banking locations are everywhere, so it's not like here, where you're constantly traveling from one location for one errand to another location for another errand.

So, she said that she's dedicated to staying put for now until her oldest daughter graduates from high school -- several moves in several years have been hard on her -- but after that, back to (Thailand), no attempt made at acquiring U.S. citizenship at all.

She also said that it will be perfectly timed so her daughter can attend college in (Thailand), too, since it's so much less expensive there. 

. . .

(Pretty simultaneous with this conversation, my one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes was saying that he had had a nightmare of a time figuring out where he could get a Real ID to travel by plane to a wedding, since he had gone to one far-away DMV location but there was some hiccup, and a closer DMV location was closed and there was a temporary office across the street but it wasn't known or marked, etc., and when I told him what my coworker had just said about a lack of convenience in the U.S., he found it comforting, to know that it wasn't just him seeing and experiencing this... For years, though, he has said that life in the one city that I used to live in and that he still lives in is way, way harder than it needs to be or should be, like it's just surprisingly and constantly difficult in ways that make no sense and don't have to be that way.)