Looking around at Bangkok in the days before I flew home, I was struck by how different it appeared in comparison to when I arrived for the first time. Living in the Land of Smiles for the best part of a year had made me see it in an entirely different light.
During my first visit I never really managed to make the separation in my head between the popular beaches on Thailand’s south islands and the very different environment of the capital. As such, I tended to wander around the city and even into bars and nightclubs wearing the beach-bum uniform of board shorts, flip-flops and a counterfeit t-shirt bought off some stall or other. I was totally oblivious to the fact that the Thais in the city all dressed in an entirely different manner. But by the time I was due to leave I was giggling along with my Thai co-workers at the beach-ready foreigners whose dress sense doubled as a sign reading ‘I’m an oblivious tourist!’
Another big difference came about when I learned to speak and understand some Thai. The Thais are an extremely proud people, and while most working in the hospitality industry fully expect people to address them in English, the average Thai on the street is rarely over the moon when a foreigner assumes they are proficient when asking for directions or what have you, and in so doing highlights for anyone else who might be within earshot that they actually aren’t.
Thais, being an extremely conflict-averse group who see confrontation as something which brings about loss of face to all parties involved, will generally remain all smiles in such situations and not let on that they might be irritated or offended. So most foreigners can blunder on blissfully unaware that they have just ruined someone’s good mood.
Visitors who didn’t take the time to pick up a phrase book and learn 20 or so words before flying out will occasionally encounter a Thai willing to use this to their advantage – and more often than not they will be in the form of a taxi or tuk-tuk driver. Tales abound of wide-eyed tourists being taken for mugs in all manner of inventive ways. Rip-offs range from the old trick of negotiating an inflated price before the start of the journey instead of turning on the taxi metre, to bringing the farang to a commission-paying out-of-the-way jewellery shop and refusing to take them anywhere else until they’ve bought something – which will usually be fake.
However, even if visitors do get away with it – and they generally will – I’m of the opinion that there is something fundamentally wrong with going to someone else’s country for anything more than a couple of days and expecting your hosts to be able to cater to your needs by speaking a language that is foreign to them. You don’t have to master the language, but you can at least make an effort.
Naturally, the first thing I did was to learn how to chat with the taxi drivers who ferried me from my apartment to the Muay Thai gym, the Skytrain station and the night market. Starting with asking them to turn on the metre and instructing them to go left, right, straight or to a stop, I slowly built up a repertoire that allowed me to converse in a way that created an illusion of language proficiency that simply didn’t exist. I also learned how to politely guide the conversation and keep to the narrow topics I could actually speak about. It was like a deviation-free pre-prepared speech that I rattled off with a few predicted interjections from the driver.
I had originally decided to embark on the endeavour as a way of avoiding the hassle of taxi scams, but I was immediately struck by how happy I made people by showing a little effort with the language. Not only did scam attempts fall at the first hurdle, but Bangkok’s taxi drivers actually went from potentially my worst enemies to being my best friends.
A lot of people who go to Thailand see the broad smiles they are met with by the locals as a transparent means of hiding mercenary intentions. It is true that the Thais keep their smiles on a hair-trigger, and the mercenary aspect could be somewhat accurate if you never get beyond the tourist areas where the Thais you meet make their living by parting foreigners from their money. But if you dig that bit deeper, and especially if you arm yourself with some of their language, the country and the people will open up and those ever-present smiles become far more genuine.
Robert Carry is a former staff journalist at Metro Éireann where he served as chief sports reporter and headed the paper’s Northern Ireland news section. He is currently working in Thailand as the news editor of an English-language magazine
