Why does nobody talk about coworking spaces in Chiang Mai during burning season

I spent 3 weeks there last March thinking the air quality would be fine. Nope - had to buy a $200 air purifier for my rented desk and still got a headache every afternoon. Has anyone else dealt with this in a city they thought was safe?

3 comments

3 Comments

felix1471mo ago

Man, I feel you on that headache thing. I was in Chiang Mai two years ago during burning season and thought "hey, how bad can it be?" Real bad, turns out. I remember sitting in this coworking space called Punspace and the guy next to me had this little air quality monitor on his desk, like a little white box that glowed red when the PM2.5 went over 150. I didn't think much of it until I started getting this dull throb behind my eyes every afternoon around 2pm. I ended up buying a N95 mask and wearing it just to walk to 7-Eleven for water, which made me look like a lunatic but honestly I didn't care. The whole city feels like a snow globe that someone shook and forgot to set down, but with smoke instead of snow. It's wild how nobody puts a big warning on the tourism websites about it.

paul2511mo agoTop Commenter

I dunno man, I lived in Bangkok for three years and people acted like the smog was killing them but I barely noticed anything different. Half the time I think these air quality monitors are just making people paranoid, you know. If it was really that bad, they wouldn't have thousands of people walking around outside every day.

tyler_wilson1mo ago

That bit about the little white box glowing red really stuck with me. Nobody talks about how the coworking spaces themselves become little air quality bubbles, and the gap between them and outside is what messes with your head. You walk out of a place with an air purifier running and hit that wall of thick smoke, and your body just goes into shock. I swear the headaches came faster on days I moved between different spaces, like my sinuses couldn't settle on one bad air reading. The worst part is you start second-guessing every headache - is it the smoke, or is it just the regular work brain fog?