Thai Culture

Yeah, this is two back to back posts. Sorry.
I thought I'd give you a quick glimpse into what it might be like living here among the Thai people. I love the culture and the people are great, but there definitely is a different mentality towards life than there is back in America. It's a very "no worries" attitude out here, where there is no fear of the cold weather and food is cheap. Thai people have a lot of patience, and live in the moment that they are presently in, rather than looking ahead to what they will be doing next, as we tend to do.

You know that spacey person that never seems to know what's going on, but is never bothered by it. The kind that forgets about meetings and never seems to pay attention to the time. Yeah yeah, I realise that some of you are thinking that I just described myself. Well, working among the Thais seems like being in a country that is full of those people. Living in a country like that might sould great if that's your attitude towards life, but it's not as easy as you might think when everyone else is thinking the same way. For instance, you go to a restaurant and order some food. It's not that uncommon for them to forget your food, or make the wrong thing. The reason...they never seem to write anything down when you order. When you ask to collect the money, they come over, look at your plates and start doing the math in there head. And there's a lot of times when they are wrong, not intentionally, but come on, they can't be expected to remember everything your ordered and correctly do the math for everyone that's coming to eat some dinner that night. They got a buisness to run.

Thai people always seem to be late, but if you show up late you're usually the only one that came late. Meeting times change on a whim and noone ever seem to understand what is going on, but that's not so bad when you don't feel a need to know what's going on. I used to think that my problems was the language barrier, but it doesn't matter what language you speak to some people, they probably won't remember too much of what it is you were trying to tell them and ask again later...or just do something they think you probably wanted. Asking Thai people for directions is like a form of gambling. You're always going to get an answer, you just have to go and find out if it was the right one or not.

Friday we had a staff meeting where the director told us that it wasn't going to take long, not like the last one that lasted 3 hours. Since the meeting is in Thai and doesn't pertain to the volunteers we said if it was going to be long we would just leave after the introduction. He said it would probably only be an hour. 4 Hours later (after everyone in the room had fallen asleep several times) the meeting had finally ended.

What made me think of this tonight? We were visiting our friend who lives on an island by our house tonight. She invited three of us over for dinner since the two belgium people are leaving back home thursday morning. We showed up and she asked why everyone else didn't want to come eat too. I thought it would've been rude to show up with 8 people when she invited 3 (who know's how much food they had prepared) but I guess it was rude not to invite everyone. Then they waited till 10 o'clock to let us know that the boats stopped running at 9:30. I don't think they had stopped to think about that till then. They asked if we were willing to wait half hour for her aunt because she was coming to the island on a boat and we could ride it back. No sweat, but if you know anything about the culture, a half hour never means half hour. Hour and a half later we were on our way back to shore.

I got laughed at the other day by two girls who were wearing bags on their heads.