Pom rak kun yaao chuang, ga-laa-sii-rua!

"Me love you long time, sailor!"

As you can see I missed the Christmas posting by a couple of days (depending on which side of the magical mystery date line you find yourself on). Though I hope you found my belated Christmas Eve entry less than completely tedious blog filler.

(Keep those comments, mouse clicks and donations coming friends – I’ve got a baht bus driver and several motorcycle taxi families to feed.)

(For those of you, who have read the P-word articles, please note any proceeds from this website will not be used in support of local prostitution – no way do I see making enough for that with this silliness. Besides, as self indulgent as this site is I don’t need to pay anyone to tell me how wonderful and sexy I am. I keep a mirror near my computer and just glance up every few lines. It’s more hygienic, cheaper and condom free.)

I had a quiet Christmas Day, outside of the fireworks last night, which were pretty.
I have been force feeding myself Thai using a dictionary and just writing out words and phrases that I think may be helpful and doing a straight translation. Certainly not the most efficient way to lean a language.

While trying out my bits of Thai here and there, I often wonder if the Thai are hearing something like this, when I ask a motorcycle taxi driver how much to take me to my hotel.

"Me hello you. How much you I pay about hard want I you me take hotel mine not?

It’s all very fine and well for the typical farang (foreigner) to listen to the Thai heroically struggle with our damnable paa-saa-ang-grit (English) and think "how funny, make her say that again".

I’m here to tell you it’s another matter all together when one of us tries to tackle paa saa giao-gap muang-tai (the language of Thai).

The written language is basically a form of Sanskrit. The dictionaries are in both the Thai and English alphabet (phonetically spelled out). Thai uses a lot of nuances in tone that are fine when plodding through a slow recorded voice lesson, but when speaking in a natural setting I’ve quickly realized that I have to rely on contextual awareness or I am quickly done. The words for horse (maa), mother (mee) and come(maa) are all phonetically spoken almost identically except for the tonal accents; the marks which you can only see written. If I hear someone say "Pom hen mee kawng kun maa" I’ve got figure out if I’m being told that some one see’s my horse or my mother coming.

OK, I’ll grant you it’s unlikely for anyone in down town Pattaya to say that to me, but you never know. The point is that the language is full of such hazards for this poor former student of the romance languages.

In addition to attending a daily class with a local Thai-English language school, Random picked up a nifty set of language cd’s that I’m almost entirely uncertain are in no way related to a similarly named language course in America. I may check them out as well.

I had considered taking a class at the school with Random. For convenience sake we wanted to take a class at the same time. After the first day of sitting with Random in a cube with a sliding glass door, with our instructor, Brutus (a Thai guy named Brutus, I shit you not) I opted out. They wouldn’t give us a deal on the cost. Brutus is a very happy friendly guy, flamboyantly so.

It is unfortunate that the use of the word flamboyant conjures up stereotyped gay mannerisms. While gay mannerisms may be flamboyant someone or something can be flamboyant without being gay.

I like Brutus so I will just say that I didn’t feel that the class was a good fit for me. I may have simply been ruined by an American Public education.

One thing that both Random and I have noticed as we work at our skills, feeling most comfortable with Spanish after English, we hear ourselves breaking into "Como se dice…" or some other nonsense halfway through an almost memorized Thai phrase.

Speaking of Spanish, I think it was last week sometime, we had stopped at a road side café in Nokula. We had placed our order when some eastern European fellow who looked like he was on the (really) bad side of a heroin addiction stumbled up and gestured at one of the open seats at our table before slouching into it and lighting up a cigarette. When the waitress came back to our table it appeared that he was a familiar because he gestured to her and in too few syllables for me to guess at a language gave her an order. She returned shortly with a beer. Not sure if the likely language barrier was worth the trouble of engaging him, we let him sit there while we ate.

Random started talking to me in Spanish. He later admitted that he had been concerned that if the guy thought we spoke English he might try hitting us up for a donation to his substance abuse fund. We conversed about our guest and the food in Spanish, while our table mate consumed 3 more beers before we departed with out any problems.

I also have a background in German beyond simply understanding what my ex-mother-in-law meant when she said "Scheisse-Kopf" when ever she saw me. There is a large German and Dutch presence here and I have been hearing enough of it on TV, the baht bus or restaurant so that in addition to my occasional Spanish non sequitors I have also thrown in a "verstehan zie?’ or some other tragic bastardization from time to time.

I became far more fluent in Spanish while running a crew of Hispanics on an industrial cleaning contract than I ever did when I took it in college. When you have to get things done you tend to get quickly beyond "Dónde está el baño?" I’m confident that as I continue to live here I’ll learn Thai too, or at least enough to ask more than "tii-nai hong-naam?"