I didn’t expect to find myself standing at the front of a crowded convention centre, addressing a 500-strong crowd of Secondary School teachers. As I meandered my way to The Land of Smiles, a fresh faced graduate with a taste for adventure, MCing a higher education conference had not exactly featured on the agenda. A cocktail bucket at a full moon party, perhaps. Definitely a sunrise temple trek, and at least one elephant ride. But this? This was absolutely not part of the plan. But, here I found myself. I centred my attention on the platters of Sap Blah Rod and Khao Paht Gai adorning each attentive table. Breathed deeply. And launched into my shaky Thai language introduction, stumbling through my phonetically written cue cards and hoping that at least a percentage of the words were recognised by my expectant audience. So how had I got here? That’s the thing about Thailand; it’s a magical land of opportunity. A place where wild animals from the pages of your childhood wander unexpectedly into frame. Elephants at the local food trucks, Gibbons in Phuket’s vibrant red light district. I even bumped into a water buffalo in my apartment complex parking lot one morning. Beyond mere opportunity, there’s an openness about Thai culture which lends itself to the incredible unanticipated. Every night bus from my comfortable Isaan hometown, Mukdahan, took a different route, and a different amount of time, to reach the bustle of Bangkok. None of my Thai travel companions seemed to notice or be at all perturbed - “Mai Pen Rai”, they shrugged, employing their language’s ‘hakuna matata’ equivalent in response to pretty much anything that happened on the road. Thai people roll with the punches like no other culture I’ve encountered. Welcoming and hospitable to a fault, even dire circumstances which would certainly have left me stranded in any other nation turned into fantastic anecdotes to share with part-horrified part-mystified friends back home. Take for instance, arriving at a Khon Kaen hotel to find our booking inexplicably nonexistent, and every other hotel, hostel and guesthouse fully occupied for the holiday weekend. A single phone call from a kindly acquaintance (if that’s appropriate nomenclature to classify the person who sat behind you on the bus), and we found ourselves bedding down on the pull out sofa of someone’s Mother-in-Law’s Thai dessert factory. Did I eat pandan coconut jelly for breakfast? Absolutely, I did. This attitude, this approach, to living in the moment, knows no Thai geographical bounds. A trip to Chiang Mai drove home my fledgling suspicions that I had landed in the world’s most hospitable nation. A lazy jog around a local park - an attempt to combat head-on the trays of steaming Muu Ping and Khao Neow I’d been consuming almost every evening - drew puzzled attention, I steadily gathered a support crew as I lapped the Frangipani trees. “Speak English?”, One of my new companions enquired, and through broken dialect and awkward hand gestures I determined I was being invited on yet another adventure. Pulling up to a non-descript, bureaucratic-looking squat brick building behind the gardens, I was handed a piece of paper and ushered towards a recording booth with studio quality microphone. Unfurling the page in my hand, I realised I had accepted a role as the new face of Sriphat Hospital, and was about to voice a television commercial encouraging my expat compatriots to visit therein case of medical emergency. I was overwhelmed and humbled by the connections I made and the experiences I collected, navigating this extraordinary country. The salty shores of Koh Phi Phi, adorned by beaches of such quality that they’ve been immortalised by Leo DiCaprio, proved home to lifelong friends and lifetime memories. Even drunken Australian tourists, glowing with sunburn and the excitement of the Island’s barely concealed illicit underbelly, couldn’t distract me from the local and foreign workers converging in beachside bars, to share a cold Chang and lament the crazy farangs they’d all encountered. The true magic of that holiday was the sensation of feeling so comfortable, yet so completely uncertain of what the next moment might bring. I went to Thailand, looking for an adventure. I didn’t expect to find a home.