Thailand or Asian America? Part 2
Ok so I’ve having been in Thailand for a little while now, let me tell you…. Thailand is NOT an Asian America. In no way is Thailand like America!
Currency… USD is 100% not accepted here. Any cash we had had to be super crisp and new in order to be exchanged. The USD to Baht conversion is 1 to 30, so prices aren’t bad here but price tags definitely require some mental math. But after having used it a lot at this point, conversion comes naturally.
Driving… driving is on the left side of the road and definitely not as hectic as it was in Cambodia. You don’t have mopeds cutting in front of you every 12 seconds and there are traffic lights and road markers here (thank God).
Language… everything is in Thai. Nothing is in English except for road signs and important city buildings. For Thailand being such a big tourist destination, they don’t out much emphasis on teaching English. In fact, according to our host, the Thai government pushed really hard for teaching English back in ‘08, but since then it hasn’t been a priority so like very few people here actually speak any English. When ordering food, they have menus in front of the registers, so you just point to thing you want. And in markets, communication is done with calculators. For example, if you want to buy a pair of pants, they’ll tell you their price on the calculator and then you can counter by typing in a new number. It’s actually really smart because even though the way numbers are said changes based on the language, the actual written number is universal. But for pretty much everything else, better hope that you have a translator app or something!
Here in Thailand was probably the first time I felt like a foreigner. Yeah I stuck out like a sore thumb in Cambodia too, but at least there the culture was pretty centered around Western influence. Please don’t miss understand these last two posts as me being ignorant of the differences between other countries, and understand that these posts are actually about me realizing that some of my assumptions were valid and others were way off. Globalization is a beautiful, crazy thing.
Thanks for reading!
