Joanna James
Once you start living in a country outside your own, after a while you will find yourself slowly changing your mannerisms and styles of talking or eating to mirror the culture that you reside in. It is an inevitable part of life and that shouldn't matter to you at all if anything it should be interesting to spot the changes.
If you have been living in Thailand for a while you will find that Thai has started to blend into your English. While it makes no sense in either language by itself, the people in Thailand will understand you. It could be the deliberate pronunciation of words wrong to make the person you are talking to understand you or using everyday slang like "555" in your texts which is the Thai equivalent of "lol."
The people of Thailand are known to be very superstitious and scoff as you might at their various roundabout ways of doing things to avoid bad karma, soon you will just find yourself going along. No longer will you get a haircut on Wednesdays or whistle on your way home at night lest an old lady yells at you for trying to call on the ghosts. As the adage goes, "If you can't fight them, join them!"
Where ever you are, whether in a luxury hotel or a street food stall or one of the teppanyaki restaurants in the neighbourhood, you will find yourself depending more on the spoon than other utensils to eat. While classy places like Benihana Thailand offer you a whole range of cutlery, traditional Thai places often don't, so in any case, you will have to get used to eating with a spoon. But after a while, you won't miss the other cutlery. Thailand is the land of soups and rice so who needs a fork anyway?
This is a habit you need to get as quickly as you arrive in Thailand, especially if you tend to convert the local currency to dollars, pounds or euros in your head, everything in the country will seem like a bargain to you. That is the easiest way to get cheated. But the more you deal with local currency the more you will understand what price on an item is deemed as expensive and what is deemed as cheap. The sooner, the better.
This is something you will have to pick up in most Asian countries, as they would have to if they moved to Europe or the United States. The West's relationship to toilet paper. In Thailand, the locals don't use toilet paper but a bidet shower with which they wash their bums. Some foreigners may stubbornly persist for years but what are you going to do when you're in the countryside somewhere and there is no toilet paper for miles? It is a much more hygienic alternative to toilet paper so might as well get used to it.
A true believer that the pen is a mighty weapon, ventures into reaching the minds of every reader with the earnest hope of leaving an indelible stream of thought.
A travel writer who has a passion for fashion and a deep interest in admiring new and exotic attractions around the world.
