Foreignisms

I’ve been a pretty bad tourist here in Thailand so far.

One of the basic courteous things you can try to do anywhere is pick up even a little bit of the local language, make an effort to meet the locals on their own turf. But the Thai language (actually, I understand that it’s more of a regional dialect that has spread nationally, but all that is more complicated than is worth getting into) is tonal, like Chinese… it’s not just the sounds that make the meaning of the word, but how those sounds are pitched. And anyone who has ever heard me try to sing (to whom I apologize now) knows that I am utterly tone deaf. So I’ve been leery of venturing even a simple “S̄wạs̄dī” to say “hello.” It might end up meaning “Your wife is a dung heap” or something if I butcher the sounds.

Part of the problem is that I hate to look like a fool (which, considering how life has gone over the past couple of years, is obviously a lost cause). So I spend a lot of time trying to figure things out before trying them, instead of just diving right in, getting it wrong, and learning from the experience. The guide books are not much help in these basic interactions. I smile and nod wherever I am, but I haven’t been able to determine what exactly is expected or customary yet. Do people say hello at the gym? To a clerk in 7/11? In the elevator? I don’t know if it’s just the presence of myself, an observer, affecting the experiment or not but I don’t see the customary small pleasantries that I am used to. Or maybe they are more subtle and I’m just missing them. Either way, I feel less a fish out of water when no one else seems inclined to converse, either.

There are many minor things that I have picked up fairly fast, though.

Something I learned quickly was that, if there is a clear bottle of water in the shower and you should like to brush your teeth there (the tap water being unhygienic for this purpose) and happen to take a swig of it, you may find that it is actually vinegar and rather unpleasant to fill your mouth with (although undoubtedly perfectly sanitary).

Then there are other little things, like the fact that all the light switches are upside down–you flick them down to turn them on, up for off, the opposite of the way I have been flipping switches for my entire life.

But something I haven’t been able to avoid diving into is the food… a man’s gotta eat!

I guess I could stick to Western foods easily enough. They are not rare here. There are McDonalds and KFCs and Pizza Huts all over the place. And some of the stuff in the grocery stores is recognizable to the Western eye. But I can get all that stuff at home. Might as well try some of the local delicacies while I’m here.

The biggest problem, for me, is fish, which I can’t have. But it’s a staple here, and while some of it is obvious (mostly because it is, in fact, just a whole fish), other stuff is ambiguous and the labels are impenetrable. So unless it’s clearly labeled otherwise, in English, I avoid most stuff that is in balls or sheets or is not obviously some recently detached part of swine or fowl. This rules out 90 percent of stuff on the street, unfortunately.

In other respects, I’m a little more adventurous. I decided some ice cream might be nice in this heat. They have mint chocolate chip, a wide variety of sherbets, everything you’d find in a Safeway at home. But they’ve also got stuff I’ve never seen before. One of these looked like a kind of vanilla that had some colorful chunks of unidentifiable fruit in it, lemons and limes maybe. The English part of the label just said “ruam mitr.”

It turns out that ruam mitr is usually what they call a vegetable stir fry here and so the colorful chunks were actually corn and green beans. But it tastes all right and I’m getting my roughage, I guess.

Apart from the weird vegetable ice cream, I’d heard a lot about how utterly foreign the culture here is, but so far I haven’t seen it. Riding the train into town from the airport reminded me of nothing so strongly as riding the streetcar through the International District in Seattle: a mixed crowd of multi-ethnic folks mostly busy staring at their cell phones.

People at malls and on the street chatter and smile and nod and do their daily things just like people everywhere. There are certainly unexpected sights: shrines tucked away in random corners and alleys, little old ladies praying on the sidewalk, a row of monks sitting in lawn chairs in the mall parking lot while people bring them bags of food. But it’s not objectively any nuttier than, say, crazy street people or drug dealers hanging out at Third and Pine in downtown Seattle. I certainly feel safer here than I do there.

Together with that sense is the lack of pervasive sirens you hear in Western cities. I’m only reminded of their absence by the rare occasion that I hear them, such as at this very moment, when an ambulance is flickering off into the distance on the nearby expressway. But I might hear one or two a day, at most. I don’t have an explanation for it; I’d think, considering the lack of building codes, high-risk traffic scenarios, and generally low importance that Thais seem to place on self-preservation that emergency responses would be rather more common here. But perhaps not.

Maybe because I just came from Phoenix, which has traffic accidents on an epic scale pretty much nightly, I haven’t found traffic here to be all that shocking. Yes, motorcyclists ride freely down the sidewalks, and it’s not unusual to see neatly dressed businesswomen perched precariously on the back, sidesaddle-style. And traffic signals, lanes, and street directions seem to be more or less optional. Theoretically, they are supposed to drive on the left, but mostly they will drive wherever there is open road.

But although the drivers are crazy, they’re not inconsiderate. There’s an uncontrolled pedestrian crossing between my condo and the nearest Big C grocery store and the rules for crossing there are really no different than jaywalking in the West… you look for a gap or make eye contact with oncoming traffic and then play chicken by edging out into the street to see if they’ll stop. Often they do. But I try to time my crossings together with a large herd or a little old lady who might, presumably, engender greater respect from oncoming traffic than some random farang.

Another interesting thing is that all this seems to translate into sidewalk protocol as well, in that there seems to be none. In the US, driving on the right seems to carry over into almost all situations where you are dealing with any oncoming traffic (and mariners will recognize this as part of an even more traditional stricture in the nautical rules of the road)–whether it’s going up an escalator or walking down the sidewalk, politeness dictates you stick to the right.

But there’s no pattern here that I’ve been able to discern. You might imagine keeping left, like traffic, would be natural, but it doesn’t seem to be. Even in malls and public places, the direction that escalators run seems to be more or less random.

These all seem like little things to me, minor oddities that aren’t necessarily even as pronounced as the differences within the U.S. between, say, the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South.

The random shanties erected in apparently random places, and the squalor that goes with them, are notable I suppose. But again, seeing makeshift living arrangements in odd urban spaces isn’t exactly a rarity in Seattle these days, either. It’s not as pervasive, but I can hardly claim to be shocked to find a family living under a tarp in an alley. And one thing I haven’t seen yet is anyone sleeping in a doorway with a shopping cart piled high with all their worldly possessions nearby. I’m sure there are homeless here, but their situation may be less onerous in some ways than those in Western cities. The climate, of course, is considerably more forgiving.

The most disconcerting thing that I have come across so far is the insistence of the gate guards at the condo where I am staying to come to attention, salute, and click their heels whenever I arrive. Whether I’m just generally uncomfortable with the implied servility or if I’m particularly worried about heel-clicking in light of recent political developments at home, I’m not sure.

I was warned about the stench, but honestly I haven’t found the smell of the place particularly awful. There are a LOT of aromas, some of them not so pleasant, in any given stretch of road, but it’s not a pervasive smell at all. And some of them, particularly the food, are actually quite pleasant. On the whole it’s on the level of, say, New Orleans.

There is a lot of trash, scattered everywhere despite the best efforts of an army of sweepers deployed each morning across the city. There are sweepers everywhere, and constantly. Right now, there is a guy sweeping the sheet metal roof of the building under construction next door.

But still, there are vast amounts of litter around. Much of that litter is composed of plastic bags, which Thais appear to have some national love affair with. You can’t get them to not give you a bag, no matter how minor the purchase or how unsuitable a bag might be for carrying it. For example, I bought a bubble tea the other day, and the girl at the counter promptly produced a cup-sized bag and bagged the drink up (with a straw) before sliding it over to me.

If you try to tell them you won’t be needing a bag they look at you as if you had just announced that you have no need of the doorway to exit the shop, but will instead be walking directly through the wall. Impossible! You must have a bag!

So, for all you plastic bag banning liberals back in the States, know that your efforts there to reduce the number of plastic bags clogging up our beaches and oceans, after accounting for rounding errors, amount to approximately nothing.

So I’ve been waiting for that big culture shock moment and have yet to find it. I’ve only been here a week so far, of course. Much of that has been spent sitting and writing, just as it would be at home. So perhaps the craziness is further around the corner somewhere. I’m keeping my eyes open for it.