This was our second, third and fourth time to visit Bangkok. Let me explain. We first came here in December 2013 and fell in love with this crazy metropolis. When we were planning a vague outline of our round-the-world trip, we knew we had to return to Bangkok. In fact, as the weeks became months, Thailand beckoned. I had taken a tumble in Singapore and we were both feeling a little worse for wear. How could we resist stopping in Bangkok for a while? 

The closer we got, the more we started to daydream about delicious Thai food, 7-Eleven convenience stores and washing machines. You wouldn't believe how much you crave a washer and dryer of your own, after a couple of months of washing clothes by hand and visiting random coin laundries. As for 7-Eleven, the convenience store is elevated to an art form in Bangkok. It seems that every block has its own Circle K, 7-Eleven and Family Mart. At least one… In addition to a wide array of drinks and foods artfully crammed into impossibly small spaces, they sell cold, scented towels to wipe away the grime and the heat. They also supply ready-made Thai meals and Japanese snacks that are perfect light food for hot weather.

There's no way to avoid the heat. A wise man in Indonesia told us: if you're not sweating, you're not in Southeast Asia. We've only visited in November and December, which is the moderately hot and humid season. I can't even begin to imagine the sticky summer months. If you want to survive in this region, you have to make your peace with being uncomfortable. Vanity falls by the wayside, as you have to be ruthless about the functionality of your clothes, rather than their appearance. Will they breathe? Can they be washed with relative ease? Do they dry quickly? Our rule quickly became: no cotton. It's heavy and high-maintenance. At this point, we're only wearing high-tech clothing, blends of artificial fabrics that meet the demands of the road.

The downside of dressing for long-term travel is that you feel very dull in a place like Thailand, which is bursting at the seams with bold, insistent colors. And gold. Everywhere. Thailand is a beautiful country with a rich heritage and history. When you visit for the first time, you can't help but be seduced by the Thais. We were completely hooked after our last visit, so the idea of spending a couple of weeks in Bangkok seemed appealing as we finalized our plans. We would rent an Airbnb, with a washer and dryer, and set up a basecamp—a home away from home.

We booked our first week in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Ari (pronounced Ah-Ree), north of the city center. This relatively quiet residential area has good, affordable restaurants that will please foodies of all stripes, as well as the conveniences of a working neighborhood. We loved our temporary home on the fifteenth floor of a modern apartment building. We did the kinds of things you normally take for granted: we went grocery shopping and to the movies. We watched TV (Doc Martin was strangely reassuring). We rode the metro, exploring new areas. We walked with no fixed itinerary, trying to get lost. I got my hair cut. Jona got a pedicure. We enjoyed lovely meals in neighborhood restaurants. In short, we became locals. 

It's funny how quickly human beings nest and make a home. As soon as we unpack our bags, we find a place for our things and develop small routines that create order in our daily lives. In Bangkok, we were greeting store owners like we were regulars. We had our favorite tea shops and restaurants. We returned to places we had already visited, like the Jim Thompson House and Century 21 mall. We had the luxury of having seemingly unlimited time. Accordingly, time started to fly. Before we knew it, the first week had vanished and we had to move to another apartment, this time in Thonburi, a less glamorous residential neighborhood. There too, time flew by. We were beginning to understand the correlation between routine and time. 

The more you settle down and develop habits, the faster the clock will seem to run. Conversely, it appears that, the more variety you can create in your life and the less structured it is, the more value you can derive from your life. However, and this is a big caveat, you can't live an unstructured life without routine for long. We all need structure in our lives. It creates the parameters of our daily existence. Our home is the place where we unpack our belongings, creating a web of routines and rituals around our safe space. Simply put, we need a home, wherever we might be.

For a couple of weeks, we called Bangkok our home. Things that had seemed wildly exotic on our last visit became commonplace. This city is not everyone's cup of bubble tea, but, for some reason, we love it. 

We didn't even make it out of Bangkok for two weeks. We went to see Fiddler on the Roof at the grand old Scala Theater, standing for the new king when they played the national anthem before the film started (it's a thing). We searched for and found a cool street art installation for the release of Stranger Things 2. We toured the achingly beautiful temples of Wat Po and Wat Arun. We visited the delightfully wacky 3D art museum, taking silly photos of each other. We explored the Chatuchak Market and the Night Train Market. We made it to the Erawan Museum and found heaven in the belly of a giant elephant statue. Mostly, though, we nested for a couple of weeks and it felt good. 

After a while, we realized that time was slipping away. Our precious travel time was fast disappearing and we had a date with Tokyo in December. We did what any reasonable traveler would do and booked bus tickets to Siem Reap in Cambodia to visit the magnificent Angkor Wat temples for a few days. The trip was a wonderful adventure unto itself, but by the time we returned, we knew what we wanted: our home in Ari with the washer and dryer. Thankfully, our old apartment was still available.

This time, we didn't rest on our laurels: we booked a trip to Myanmar, intent on visiting Yangon and Bagan. It seemed so close, the tickets so cheap and the eVisa so easy. You can read all about our time in Myanmar, which is a wonderful and complicated country. On the Thai side of the trip, we made it through Don Muang domestic airport, a chaotic sibling of high-end Suvarnabhumi International, with a Cambodian Buddha statue hidden in our backpack, as it's illegal to transport representations of Buddha out of Thailand. It's a long story that we'll have to discuss in person some day…

Upon our return to Bangkok, for our fourth visit, we felt like regulars who had outstayed our welcome a bit. We ran errands, looking for English Christmas presents for friends in Japan. At this point, we realized that Thailand had changed a lot since we first set foot there a few years ago. The prices were higher, the city was more developed and the Thais were less friendly with tourists. It's such a hotspot for foreign visitors that you can't blame them for becoming jaded. Bangkok is a truly cosmopolitan metropolis, with a huge expat community. Today, it's less of dreamy destination than a full-fledged working city. When I close my eyes and think of the future of Asia, it looks a lot like Bangkok.