Oh, God, Could It Be The Weather?

I was talking a while back with an English friend of mine about the book Watching the English, and how it describes the British obsession with talking about the weather.  According to the book (and backed up by my own experience, once the book helped me crack this oh-so-crucial aspect of socialising in the UK), it’s not enough to simply discuss the weather; you have to discuss the weather correctly.  In the UK, what that means is that you have to agree about the weather.  If someone comments that the rain is dreadful, the right response is, “Oh, yes, it’s awful; it’s not going to be fun trying to get home in that!”  Americans, on the other hand, when speaking about the weather (and a lot of other things), tend to default to trying to one-up each other.  “You call that rain?  You should have seen the nor’easters we used to get when I was living in Boston!”

Since I’ve moved to Thailand, I’ve noticed that the way I discuss the weather has changed again.  Not so much when I talk about it with Thai people, since there’s a strong cultural impetus against disagreeing with someone, so “agree about the weather” pretty much still holds.  “Wanii ron, na kha?”  “Ron, kha!” – “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”  “Yeah, it’s hot!”

No, what’s changed is the way I talk about the weather with folks back home, wherever I consider “home” to be.  Because Americans and Europeans have one thing in common:  when we talk about the weather, we tend to talk about extremes.  “What’s the weather like there?  Because here, it got down to minus ten/it hit over a hundred/we got two feet of snow!

When people ask me what the weather’s like in Thailand, though, extremes are normal.  Hey, it hit over a hundred today!  Just like every day this month.  Instead, what’s notable are the increasing irregularities in what’s supposed to be a very defined cycle of seasons.  There’s hot season, monsoon season, and cold season, and while there can be some overlap at the edges, the majority of each season is usually pretty absolute.

That’s how I end up having conversations like this:

“What’s the weather like there?”

“Oh, it’s scorching!  It’s in the eighties.  What about you?”

“… Um, kind of hotter than that, yeah.  But listen to this:  it rained yesterday.”

“Oh.  Uh, yeah, that sucks.  All day?”

“For like TEN WHOLE MINUTES!”

“…”

“But it’s APRIL!”