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Apart from these monkeys (at the botanical garden), all our Penang photos are of us pulling silly faces

We had a bit of a not-so-great experience this week.

It all started because we’re idiots and booked a 66-day trip on a 60-day Thai visa. Then, because we can’t just be like any normal people and get the bus to hop over the border and back, we decided to make a week of it.

We ended up (after a few days in Bangkok) in Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia – a place that Wikitravel states “does not offer that much to the adventurous tourist”. Great! We’re the last people to self-identify as “adventurous tourists”. It went on to talk about the beautiful old town and the unbeatable food, and we were sold.

Turned out that we and Penang didn’t get along. The food was fine (although massively overhyped), but the coffee – our main vice – sucked. The architecture was nice, but as it’s colonial British style we’re kinda used to it. Walking anywhere was terrifying, the people were moody, and coffee shops with wifi just weren’t happening.

We still had a good time, because we always do. But landing back in Chiang Mai and being “wai”‘d at by the girl in the 7-11 felt like coming home.

This is weird for us. This past year we’ve lived in a lot of different places, and we’ve always felt at home – so we assumed that as long as we had our laptops and each other, we’d be sorted.

Now that we’ve found somewhere we couldn’t imagine staying for more than a week, it’s clear we must’ve just got lucky so far.

So this raises a question: how do you work out in advance whether somewhere will be right for you? Is there a framework for making decisions about where to live? It doesn’t matter so much for us because we have plenty of time to try everywhere (especially if we keep cocking up our travel dates and need to make visa runs every five minutes), but what if you need to choose just one of several competing places to settle in for a year or more?

It’s clear you can’t rely too much on other people’s opinions, because everyone has their own priorities. But more troublingly, we’ve now realised it’s not always possible to know your own priorities.

For example, we thought we were so unadventurous we’d want to live somewhere where English was widely understood. But really, we get sniffy about hearing too much English around us and always seek out the most “local” spots where we can point and smile our way through. We also thought we’d only be happy in bustling, dynamic cities, but it turns out we loved laid-back places just as much.

After thinking about it a lot, we’ve isolated a few things that do seem to matter to us:

• Interesting daily life to observe. We like walking around and being amused by an entire family – including pets – on a moped (Chiang Mai) and spontaneous sidewalk dance parties (New York).
• Prettiness. Both architectural (Chiang Mai) and natural (Vancouver).
• People who make us feel welcome. Hence loving Berlin, Vancouver, and…Paris (yep, the stereotype has gone wrong there).
• Cafe culture. We like to sit and work, or read our books, or just chat. When we’ve got lots of options to do that (Boulder, Colorado, New York), we’re happy.

Now we think we’ve got a handle on what matters, we’re going to use these criteria when choosing where to go on our Eastern European trip this spring – so there’ll be less relying on the general impression we get on Wikitravel, and more reading between the lines to see whether it’ll tick our personal, slightly strange boxes.

But we’re still none the wiser about how you can know what matters to you in advance, and make more permanent choices with confidence (or even just decide where to go for your annual two weeks off). If you’ve got any tips that work for you, reply and let us know.

So screw you Penang and your massive holes in the pavement for no reason, yourcoffee shops that aren’t and your “eclectic” food which is all basically noodles in soup. But thank you for making us realise how lucky we’ve been.

On the blog this week

• WE DID IT! We travelled to Penang using ONLY backpacks! Yep, the kettle, the porridge oats, the mugs… they all got left behind. So here’s the obligatory digital nomad packing list (every blog has one, apparently) – along with confessions of the bizarre things we did and didn’t decide to take.
• Mish is the type of person to wake Rob in the middle of the night, yelling “I’ve just had the BEST idea. Let’s open an Indian restaurant run by Argentinians and call it ‘Argy Bhaji.’” And Rob’s the type of person to create a flowchart around how our restaurant/cat shelter/ping-pong hall will generate profit. Between us, we have quite a lot of ideas. Some of them aren’t half bad actually, but we just don’t have any time to do anything with them. So take them! Steal our ideas, run with them and give us a shout-out when you make your millions.

What we’ve been reading

• We have no idea what Game of Thrones is about, because we’re in an entirely different field of geek. But when our behavioural economist hero (see?) Dan Ariely interviewed the GOT actor Peter Dinklage, we just had to take a read. Now we’re definitely not going to bother tuning into the show, because Mr Dinklage is a right annoying plonker - although maybe we’re just biased.
• If you have the world’s dullest job description and you can’t be arsed to get the company director to liven it up a bit, we suggest you take a leaf out of Penelope Trunk’s book and find a different approach to answering “What do you do?”.
• Talking of livening up a dull company, just check out what this gas station does in Texas.
• “Hold still while I bitchslap your face” is a proven golden way to answer a Quora question and get heaps of upvotes. Get all the strategies and insights on how to become a Quora-answering master… from a Quora-answering master.

(You can now view our entire week’s reading list – including a load of extra links we can’t be bothered to write up – at Readlists.com - where you can easily send the entire collection of posts to your Kindle.)