From One Expat to Another: Go Home!

Posted by Multilingual Mama

It’s hard enough trying to integrate into a different culture, especially if you barely get by in the language, and particularly if the city is rife with expats, some of whom are often living in fairly luxurious conditions and may have slightly lost touch with reality, as well as others who aren’t living la-vida-expat, and yet, have still lost touch with reality. Can we keep that farang sense of entitlement in check please?

I am no Thai political expert so I won’t go into details. Thailand has been through a number of political upheavals over the years. The country is experiencing one now, with the supporters of the two major parties clashing over the political future of the country. We have faced months of on again, off again protests and road blocks. The violence has been mostly sparse and contained. As far as having to experience political upheaval, we foreigners –a.k.a. Farangs– have had it pretty easy here.

Last week, the country’s supreme court ruled that the current prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, had to step down due to an abuse of power. I have no comment on these charges. I neither read nor write Thai and I don’t pass judgment on here-say. This ruling led to an announcements by both groups to march and protest. It was called the ‘final battle’. One should note, if these last few months are anything to go by that Thais like using the word ‘final’ and this battle will likely continue to drag on for some time.

In any event, public transport was packed with people getting to their rally sites. I brilliantly chose this day to head into town to run errands. All the protesters I came across were in good spirits, donning their ‘colours’ . As I squeezed into the BTS – also called the sky train- I heard a fellow farang with a very sour face say

For f*ck’s sake get a job!

I wanted to go all bat-poop crazy on him but I didn’t. Because culturally, it would have been inappropriate. So here’s my open letter to the guy riding the BTS around Noon on Friday, who said those words as the train filled with passengers at the Sala Daeng station:

Dear Farang man, dressed all in black and sporting, in my opinion, way too much jewelry,

Excuse me? Get a job? Who the f#%k are you? What do you know about these people? Really? Can you tell me that you know for sure these people don’t work nights, or took off for the long weekend, or took a personal day? Do you know how many of them may be teachers and currently on summer break? What right do you have as a GUEST in this country to pass such judgement based on absolutely ZERO FACTS –though I understand this is all the rage in the US where you, like me, are from.

And on the topic of the US, aren’t we the first to support free speech and people’s right to protest? Where the f*%k do you get off being so rude?

Oh I am so sorry, did these actual citizens of the country you are temporarily living in get in your way? Were you late for an appointment for yet another piercing? Is that a problem for you, that nationals of their country are using the public transport system put in place for them? If so, may I suggest, from one farang to another: GO THE F*%K HOME.

You give the rest of us a bad name and you don’t deserve the visa you were issued to be here -if you even have a valid visa.

Oh, and one last thing, the only person who should wear a ring that size -let alone three of them- is the Pope.

Sincerely,

A fed up farang.

Bangkok Living: 20 Ways You Know You’re Embracing Your Inner Thai

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I’d like to thank the many readers and friends who helped me win the Thailand category and made me one of the top commented on blogs during this year’s expat blog’s competition.

Here’s the winning post, in case you missed it first time around!

If you had told me two years ago that I’d eat in the gutter off plates washed in a plastic basin, filled by a garden pipe, and prefer it to most restaurant meals, I’d have called you as mad as the hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Yet Thailand is just that, a country as wonderful and beguiling as it is perplexing. No sooner do you think you’ve cracked the code that another contradiction presents itself to figure out.

So here I am, squatting on a plastic stool, finally ordering things other than Pad Thai and Thai Green Curry and loving every second of it. This is my attempt to create a list of my experiences that encapsulates the tell-tale signs that I’ve finally acclimatized to my new home.

Drumroll please!

20. You no longer bat an eyelash when seeing a man riding on a pink bicycle or a python slithering across your garden.

19. Friends are chosen less by chemistry and more by the number of miles of traffic between your homes.

18. When you talk about a white Christmas, you are referring to a white sandy beach.

17. You stop wondering if you’ve found yourself on the set of Charmed when everyone suddenly freezes in a public place to that lovely tune in the background (aka the national anthem.)

16. TukTuks are for tourists unless you are trying to transport a dining table or 15 friends to a party.

15. You can finally use a squat toilet without peeing on your ankles.

14. You automatically switch between mouth and nose breathing as you walk by sewers and street food, respectively.

13. Sidewalks are for street vendors and open-air eating, not pedestrians.

12. You think it’s weird when you don’t find sugar as a condiment.

11. You don’t think twice of riding amazon (for us ladies) on a motorbike taxi while texting on your phone.

10. You loose your wallet more often than you loose face.

9. You cringe when new arrivals do the Wai (hands together in a prayer-like position) in stores and restaurants.

8.You’ve accepted that YES, means ‘yes’, ‘no’, & ‘ I don’t understand a word you’ve just said’

7. You aren’t surprised that your waitress, with full foundation and red nails, is sporting a three-day beard stubble.

6. You eat all baked goods, including chocolate chip cookies, muffins, and –as a New Yorker this last one pains me– bagels with a fork and knife.

5. Seventy-Five degrees Fahrenheit (24C∘) feels like jeans and sweater weather.

4. You finally stop trying to shop for booze between two and five in the afternoon.

3. You eat by pushing food onto a spoon with the back of your fork and your knives haven’t seen the light of day in months.

2. You can’t bear to flush toilet paper and keep reaching for the ‘spray’ when back home.

1. You no longer wonder if that’s his niece.

Sawatdee khaa Y’all!

P.S. Feel free to share any examples you think should have made the top twenty!

To read other amazing entries including my favorite: N is for Nomads, an A-Z on why Mongolian living is awesome. Click here!

Deciphering Glyphs and my Journey Locating Conditioner.

Posted by Multilingual Mama

I should probably start by acknowledging that Thai characters are not glyphs. Thai has forty-four consonants (Thai: พยัญชนะ, phayanchaná), fifteen vowel symbols (Thai: สระ, sàrà) that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks. (Pilfered from Wikipedia)

It turns out it isn’t exactly an alphabet but an abugida or a system in which ‘a consonant-vowel sequence are written as a unit.’ And I am not entirely sure what that means.

Now back to the point of this post.

Desperate not to use too much of my kids’ extortionate fragrance-free shampoo, and in desperate need of conditioner, I thought picking up a couple of bottles at our local Tesco Lotus would be relatively easy. Silly me.

I get to the hair care aisle only to face hundreds of bottles of different products, all in Thai. Had there only been two options, I could have just grabbed a bottle of each and figured it out through trial and error; sadly a variety of different hair treatments were added into the mix.

Twenty minutes later, after carefully studying a large section of bottles -and wandering through a few alternative aisles in the hopes of finding an expat-friendly section with things in English- I found pieces of my Rosetta Stone and I was able to figure out that the bottle on the left with the shorter text and letter resembling a ‘W’ at the end is the shampoo while the one on the right is the conditioner.

This is the hardest I’ve ever had to work for clean hair and apart from an immense sense of satisfaction at locating what I needed, it dawned on me that there are different types of reading. Of course, if you take it out of context such as letters printed on a white piece of paper, I probably could not pick out ‘shampoo’ or ‘conditioner’. Well maybe after the time spent tweaking the pictures I could make an educated guess but that is neither here nor there. However, if I had to run into a shop and quickly grab a bottle of one or the other, I’d have no trouble now that I have a block image of what each word looks like.

How ever tenuous the strand (pun intended), I am going to believe that I’m one step closer to reading Thai.

P.S. I am going to ignore the fact that if I plug both shampoo and conditioner into google translate, it gives me an entirely different set of characters… Boo.

Old Dog, New Tricks? My Journey Learning a Tonal Language Just Shy of 40.

Posted by Multilingual Mama

It’s official. Our family unit is relocating to Bangkok. The idea may have been floated around for quite some time, but the journey from ephemeral scenario, to signed contract and booked shippers took no more than a fortnight.

There is much that can and will be written about this new adventure but right now I am trying to get my head around the idea of learning Thai. Having spent about 17 months in Asia for Starters -read Singapore- where everyone speaks English or some form of it, it is easy to forget that once upon a time, living in another country meant learning a language or having your country colonize it so you could speak yours. (The latter a clear favorite with us Europeans). Thanks to that fact, when traveling around South East Asia, it is generally easy enough to get by with English or French. So why is Thailand different?

Don’t let this land of a thousand smiles fool you, the Thai people are FIERCE. Thailand is the only South East Asian country that was not colonized; that should tell you something. Don’t imagine that everyone you meet will speak some English. They won’t. And for the time being, even those who do are utterly incomprehensible to me and most people I know who have traveled there. And I have a very good ear for languages and deciphering what people are trying to say.

Even if it may be possible to survive by always printing the address in Thai for a cab driver or pointing to what I want to eat to get by, that’s really not the experience I want. I may be moving into an expat enclave for starters, but I don’t want my life there to be entirely sheltered from the real life taking place in the streets around me.

My father, who once owned a travel agency, told an American couple who wanted him to book them a trip through Europe staying only at American hotels that served American food that they might as well save their money and stay at home or find another agent. I couldn’t agree more. Our choice to live in Asia was never about pretending I am at home with better weather and cheaper help.

What I know about the Thai language so far:

It is tonal with low tones, high tones, mid-range, rising and falling.
There are no conjugations. (HOURAH)
There is no standard romanization. Actually this isn’t entirely true. A standard guide was created primarily for Academia but no one uses it at all. What does this mean? You really need to learn how to read Thai.
They do not put spaces in between words. This is something I am really going to have to get my head around.