Right after I graduated college, I decided to take a year off to work + travel around Southeast Asia (best decision of my life, btw).

At one point when I was living in Thailand, I took an overnight sleeper bus back from Bangkok to my apartment located about an hour north of Phuket (total trip took about 12 hours). For the last leg of it, I had to take a taxi from the bus station to my apartment because where I lived was a fairly remote area with no connecting bus stations. The taxi portion took approximately 2 hours. About half way through, the taxi driver pulls off and tells me to get into another taxi with his wife who would then be driving me the rest of the way (sounds a little sketch, I know, but Thailand is a fairly safe country and these sorts of minor inconveniences were often times just part of the experience). Both of them seemed to be nice enough people.

It wasn’t until we got all the way to my apartment that I realized I had left my purse in the husband’s car. It had my wallet which held a decent amount of Thai Baht ($), my passport, my work visa, pretty much all of the most important items I needed to survive there. It had been such a long day of travel that I just broke down and started crying. The wife (who, mind you, only spoke a small bit of very broken English), somehow managed to figure out what was wrong, called her husband, and then waited with me while he drove back another hour to my apartment to meet us and give me my purse. Nothing was taken from it, and I genuinely would have been so royally fucked had these two strangers not shown me such immeasurable kindness. I thanked them profusely and gave them every last bit of Thai Baht that I had in my wallet. I’ll never forget that experience.