The first time I ever “got” a Thai inside joke was a pretty big deal for me. Most foreigners live here with a more-or-less vague understanding of the behind the scenes to-and-fro that goes on, but when it comes to the double entendres and the wordplay, most of us are in the dark.
Obviously when you try to fit in to a new culture, there are some obstacles that will just not be overcome no matter how hard you try. This is one of the reasons that it’s so important to have friends from similar backgrounds, because completely severing the connection to your own culture can, I imagine, have some ugly fallout. This little bit of expatriate source code came up for me tonight when, feeling sad about the death of Ronnie Corbett, I pulled up of one my all-time favorite sketches from his legendary show The Two Ronnies and […]
A few months ago I headed back to Canada after nearly 9 years without a visit. It was a trip I’d been looking forward to for a long time for obvious reasons (friends, family, Christmas, a nice change from the constant Thai heat), but also one that I was a bit nervous about. I don’t think I’ll ever move back permanently. I like to think it’s always a backup option – but what if this trip reveals once and for all how difficult it would be for me to fit back in to Canadian society and culture? I was definitely […]
If you haven’t picked up on it during previous posts, I’m the proud father of a beautiful, hilarious, mischievous, lovely little boy who just turned 1. I’ve written pages and pages privately about the experience thus far, but very little publicly. I wanted to reflect on one element of being a parent in Thailand that has never stopped making me laugh and/or frown in equal measure, and that is how Thais – most of the time females – react to kids. […]
There’s a very tired joke I like to make whenever some friends and I are oot and aboot in Bangkok. If we see a construction site, I always say “Maybe it will be a museum or library!” and everyone laughs and I get high fives, because 99% of the time it will either be a mall or a condo. Or both. Some love it, some hate it, but you can’t deny that Bangkok’s efforts to overtake Singapore as Asia’s shopping hub are ambitious and persistent. […]
Finding a really sweet pad in Bangkok is a rite of passage for anyone new to the city, as well as a draining and sometimes mystifying quest for old hands. Where to look? How to look? By local standards, what’s considered big or small, a good deal or a bad deal? What should you look out for? How “native” do you want to go? We covered this a few years back in an episode of Bangkok Podcast, but it remains one of the biggest issues facing expats here today. But recently a friend emailed me some interesting problems […]
Fortune telling – possibly an even older profession than the Oldest Profession – is huge in Asia. (The Oldest Profession is also huge in Asia, but that’s another blog post). In western cultures, fortune telling is relegated to circus side-shows and party tricks, a goofy remnant of a long-forgotten superstition. But if you read the daily headlines in Asia you’ll see that everyone from the girl selling coffee on the street corner to the leaders of most countries rarely make a major decision without consulting their favorite seer. […]
In my time in Thailand, I’ve worked in a lot of offices, and they’ve all been very different – from a small family-run operation to a huge, multi-cultural office spread across multiple floors and buildings. In formulating my previous rant post about working in an office, I thought a lot about what it meant to work in an office in Thailand, and made a stray observation that I thought was interesting – in every Thai office you’re in, you will almost always find the same […]
After years of roaming around Bangkok and its surrounds, meeting people, and trying to familiarize myself with the vibe of the city, I’ve been very lucky to have built up a pretty good selection of solid, trustworthy friends. In a city full of some very eccentric and strange people, that’s no easy task. However, the other night at a very crowded event, it hit me that “my time” in Bangkok – that is, when I was at ‘peak social’ and knew a goodly chunk of the expat population by name – was over. At 39 and 13 years into my […]
This post will only really be understandable to those who are familiar with Thailand’s recent political past. I’m not going to try to weigh in either way on the political problems that the country is dealing with (there are plenty of others who do it far better than I), but I did read something the other day that struck me as incredibly interesting, and it was too thought-provoking for me not to post about. […]