Bali, Bangkok and bad behaviour

So yeah, so I just kind of wanted to talk about those and just it kind of, hit me in a way because I, not only am I, even though I have my citizenship here in Sweden, I am still very aware of the fact that I came in as a foreigner and I have a, like, a responsibility, just in general, as a nice human being to treat everybody kindly, but I also have even more of a responsibility to make sure that I am law-abiding and I am polite to all those who are polite to me and just, you know, live my life here in a respectful manner because if I was to do something that was inappropriate to the, you know, the wider population of Sweden at large, especially when it comes to, say, discrimination or like hate speech or hate hateful acts I honestly believe that Sweden would have every right to revoke my citizenship and send me back to England right because like why not if I've been a you know a really shitty person shall we say so anywho so I'm on Instagram doing my usual scrolling and I see this thing pop up about Bali and it's talking about this running club apparently long story short it's a running club that organizes different running events and one of their like main ones is this silent run so they all wear like the silent disco headphones and then they like run and it's maybe i don't know maybe 200 people could be a lot more two to three hundred people that are running in the streets of bali in kangoo at 5 30 in the morning Now, the reason why this is kind of blown up was because I believe this guy just posted to say, cool, this is annoying.

Like it wakes us up at 530 in the morning and they block the whole streets and everything.

Yes, they're doing a silent disco, but they're all singing along to it.

So it's actually not that silent.

And at that time, especially in Bali, that's when people are going to work.

That's when people are going to school or dropping their kids off to school.

So it's actually quite disruptive.

And apparently they didn't even have permits for it.

But in the... turn of events this guy then started getting inundated with screenshots saying that the club itself was excluding Indonesians so they had said that they are a group for digital nomads so at first I was like hmm okay so I Like to me, I was just like, why do you think it's OK to exclude the people whose country you're visiting? Right.

That to me sounds a little bit like off.

And then apparently sometimes they did accept them and sometimes they didn't.

But when I looked at what was happening, they said it was like they blamed the flaws in their automated approval system.

I then started looking at some of the screenshots and it was clear that that wasn't the case.

They were using things like the person's name.

Uh, if they had an Indonesian number, um, or if, and then they would ask them, are you Indonesian? And if they would say yes, they would say, oh, then you're unable to join this event.

Or we're afraid that, um, you're we're not taking applicants at this time.

So as I was going through and thinking about like, is this a bad thing? Is it actually that they just don't fit the criteria well.

If you think about it, a digital nomad is somebody who works online and therefore can be anywhere, right? But that doesn't mean that they are not from that country.

For example, I am a digital nomad in that my job is online.

My company that I work for is based in the Netherlands, but it also now has another section that's opened up in the UK.

And then I live in Sweden.

So if there was a digital nomad group here, i would expect to be able to join because i am a digital nomad and in actual fact it does say that um it like i was i was trying to look for like uh definitions of what people think digital nomad is or isn't and somebody uh quite rightly said i identify with the community because i work online and live a flexible lifestyle so People, you know, you could technically say that if a person posts online and posts it to everybody, they are influencing in some way, right? So aren't they then a digital nomad? So the lines are quite blurry, okay, for a start.

Now, my thing is, if you are building a community in another country that unintentionally or intentionally excludes locals, is that okay? Like, is creating a foreigner bubble harmful? My take on that is, I'm a member of what used to be the MWC, and it used to be the Malmo Women's Club, and it was actually for uh, expats, internationals, but women could join, uh, men could join, sorry, and Swedes could join.

And they actually got, get still to this day, get a discount, um, in comparison to anyone who is not a Swede.

And I think that's really important because it's basically saying, yes, we're, we're, we're trying to, we're building a community to help people you know, find commonality and kind of build their own village as they start a new life in a new country that's not their native country.