We learned a useful phrase in Thai class today: puud len, to joke (literally “to speak
play”). You can use it to defuse a
situation – “Puud len, puud len! Just
kidding, just kidding!”
All things considered, I really wish I’d known that phrase
Saturday night.
What happened was this:
one of the VSO programme staff travelled out from Bangkok on Friday with
the last member of our merry band, an older woman from the UK who had only
landed in Thailand a few hours before.
We’d all gone out for a welcome dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant I
mentioned, which was fantastic (there’s this one dish where you get a plate of
dumpling wrappers, pork meatballs, chopped garlic, veg, and chillies, and make
your own dumplings – *swoon*), and then we’d gone for a drink together. After a beer, we all – the guy from the
programme office included – had a really good, frank discussion about, among
other things, Thai politics. (The last
few years have seen a conflict between the more populist “red shirts” and the
more middle-class “yellow shirts”.)
Flash forward to Saturday night, when all the volunteers,
the programme office guy, and our substitute Thai teacher (temporarily
replacing the spectacular Waraya, who taught us last week) were at the local
market having dinner. One of the other
volunteers wanted to get a shake, and the guy from the programme office pointed
out the right food stall – “It’s the guy wearing a red shirt.”
Without thinking, I cracked a lame joke: “Oooh, she must be choosing sides if she’s
going looking for the red shirts!”
Yeah. Protip? Always take into account everyone sitting at the table.
I turned around to meet the suspiciously narrowed gaze of our new Thai
teacher, who asked a soft, cold voice, “You don’t like the red shirts?”
Folks, you could play a clip of the Tour de France
backwards, and you would still not see anyone backpedal as fast as I did right
then.
(FYI, the next night, the guy at the stand was in a yellow
shirt. Keeping his options open?)
The new teacher, Sucha, and I seem to have gotten past my
initial screwup, though: Thai class was
a lot of fun today. It doesn’t feel quite like we’re sailing
along effortlessly, the way it did with Waraya, but we still covered a lot of
ground, and Sucha jokes around more with us.
She teases us about drinking (duum) and having lots of lovers (fan), and
she’s started giving us nicknames, which is a very Thai thing: most Thais go by their nicknames instead of
their full names. Some of the nicknames
Thais are given sound bizarre, and even insulting, to Western ears: It’s not uncommon to meet a Thai named “pig”
or “fatty”, for example (nicknames given to chubby babies at birth). Other nicknames are direct adoptions of
(often random) English words, like Bank, or Helicopter. (Yes, Helicopter.) Our Philippino volunteer, who’s the sole man
in the group, is now Bpoky – “handsome” in Tagalog.
It didn’t help today that a lot of us couldn’t stop laughing
at some of the words we were learning.
We’d already gotten through prik (“prick”), which means chilli, without
causing a scene, but when we reached sao-wah-tit (“sour tit”), which means
weekend, all the native English speakers in the class just lost it. :) So then we
traded obscene terms in English and Thai for a while. Suffice to say (as Pam actually warned me
ages ago), when you say, “I’m going to ride my motorcycle,” you reaaaaally want
to get the tone right.
Meanwhile, all the waitresses at the place where the other
women and I always eat lunch have really started cheering us on as we practice
our Thai. They get so excited when we
can have minor conversations with them (“What will you have?” “I will have fried noodles with pork.” “Can you eat spicy food?” “I can eat a little bit.”).
So, yeah, language training is still going well, though I
won’t be sorry to see Chiang Mai again.
And Arcee. It’s bizarre how much
I miss Arcee. She’s getting a nice motorcycle
wash as soon as I get back.
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