gejohesch

It's the calm that precedes the storm

Farang people I interact with might start with such platitudes - that's normal - but most of the time we follow up with some more substantial discussions. Sometimes on light subjects, sometimes about more serious subjects. It does not matter what, the important thing is that there is a "real" exchange, moving beyond endless and repetitive platitudes.

Only in your imagination

The entire world sees what it is: a mega MAGA <deleted> show. And is laughing/crying at what the USA have become.

I did much to learn it, formally including reading and writing which helps tremendously to get the phonetics right. It took me 3-4 years to be comfortable to the point of reading without even having to think about the correct pronunciation. I have to say, not bragging about it, that I'm very good at languages (I'm very familiar to fluent with several). With all that, I lost interest and motivation over the years because: - as you say, most Thais we encounter speak a version of the language which is extremely different from the official Thai. - most do not have anything interesting to contribute to any discussion which goes beyond the stage of "it's hot today" or "is the food too spicy?". - in Isan (my wife's region), and certainly in the villages, many people understand Thai but can hardly speak it. I'm not kidding! My wife has to accompany her elder brother to the hospital, recently, because some doctors cannot speak the local "phasaa isaan", and he cannot speak proper Thai. - I worked a few years in a Thai enterprise, with mid-high class Thais who spoke proper Thai. They hardly interacted with me socially, many quite obviously hated having a non-Thai colleague around. With all that, I lost interest.

Good riddance! The current USA administration has never been a sincere party in this affair, on the contrary, it has clearly displayed its sympathies for the Russian aggressors. The world will be better off not without them!

Thanks. I could not agree more. And like what we see too much playing in the USA, the more fascist-minded and the more crooked they are, those French (and elsewhere) politicians like to parade as "patriots". It's revolting.

That would make sense. Bangkok is built on very poorly consolidated sediments (fluvial/alluvials to paralic clastics from the Chao Prayah river system). I would guess that any building of some size in Bangkok requires rather deep foundations, and of course concrete requires time to cure.... A lot of investigation required here, and lessons to be learnt maybe?

I would agree, Bangkok being really quite a distance from the epicentre (Sagaing Fault in Myanmar). Also, German expert sources mention 6.6, as opposed to 7.7 Richter for the quake. That's a big difference.

Really? "Taxi meters will be recalibrated for farang tax" : is that true? I would not put it past Thailand, though...

Besides other considerations, I find the "high literacy" argument totally misleading. True, it's difficult to find a Thai person who cannot read. But what beyond just being "able to read"? A large part of the population, certainly in the rural parts, does zero "real reading". People there only read the forms they have to fill in or that they get from the administration (and often with difficulty), or religious material. Apart of that, it's all about "reading" stuff on the social media. Few people read books. It's of course not necessarily 100% true, but I guess what I see in the villages in Isan is representative to a good degree of the reality in Thailand : I have never ever seen books in a house in Isan. My wife went to school until she was 12, she can read but with some difficulty. Some members in her family cannot read at all.

Flip-flopping, confusion and unclearness are characteristics of the way things go with Thai people. Hidden behind this, possibly another characteristic : the lack of efficiency of the police forces. If there are so many foreigners engaging in illegal activities, would not a good, efficient and reliable police be able to effectively fight against it? Maybe I'm naive, but don't get sufficient info on who enters the country to profile people and narrow down on potential illegal workers? OK, tracking them once they've passed immigration might be an issue.

"As of the third quarter of 2023, individuals of Mexican descent accounted for approximately 11.4% of the total U.S. labor force. Given that Hispanics or Latinos made up about 19.1% of the U.S. labor force during the same period, this means that Mexicans represented roughly 60% of all Latino workers in the United States." (from ChatGPT) It does not matter one bit if the exact percentage is 50% or 70%, instead of 60%. The point is that Mexicans are by far the dominant component of the Latino workforce. Gringo

But going back to the main topic here - the smiles. I do not spend a lot of time in what seems to be the mainstay places of so many - Hua Hin, Pattaya, the islands, Chiang Mai and so on. When in Thailand, I spend 99% of my time in my wife's region, in Isaan, and I never noticed people around there losing their smiles. They are all, without any exception, very friendly and keep smiling even when I get a bit worked up when a shop assistant or a bank employee (recently) does not understand what I'm after (I cannot help being a farang after all!) - they still smile! They have defaults, of course, but as for smiles : always there!

Burmese in Thailand seem to be the equivalent of Mexicans in the USA. But, possibly, better treated, as says my wife? She also considers Burmese are harder workers than Thai people are - again a possible parrallel with Mexican workers in the USA?