Working with Thais

Almost 2 years ago, Mel, Evan, Brian, Ah neh and me was sitting at a kopi tiam before I started my life in Bangkok. As usual I cracked my stupid slapstick jokes and Mel said.. “Imagine Kings cracking all these stupid jokes in Thai…” .. I made it. Now I can. I am now mostly independent and my partner can leave me alone to work with Thais.

Blog has not been updated lately. Am just busy, not killed by angry anti-Singapore protestors. Worked at a town called Kaeng Khoil. I was at a power plant construction site for more then a week, driving in and out of Bangkok.

Yesterday I drove in a sudden heavy gale and downpour back into Bangkok, alone. Scary as hell. Lightning when touchdown 200 meters away, was a beautiful ball of green radiant fire, followed by fireworks of equally green luminescent sparks. It was terrifying beauty as the tarmac lit up shimmering green in reflection, followed by the plunge of darkness as the street lights went out. The sky was lit green every then and then as the thunderous blots was striking close by. Green, the color of lightning as I only found out yesterday.

My Peugeot was not happy with all the heavy driving. It has died once again. Brakes jammed this morning and smell of burning metal discs. Now it is in the work shop again, my mechanic grinning as I, his customer, in my car crawled into his garage.

Working with the Thais has been pretty interesting, especially if you are the lone foreigner in the sea of their men. Someone would walk up to me and consult on a technical issue, and I would answer like a retard. Then they would realize my alien originality, and what followed will be communication at 50% efficiency. But I got my message through.

After a first few day there, all would have known me by then… and then all hell broke loose.

“Thai girl pretty… u like?”

“You marry? Have girlfriend? Want to go massage?”

“500 baht beside hotel… very good… very good….”

Those are just some of the stuffs they talked to me in English… and after they realized I can communicate rather okay in Thai…

“What do u want to ride to night? Tiger or Elephant…?” I was at dinner with them. There was a Tiger Beer and a Chang (Elephant) Beer promoter nearby.

“Eat these friend frog skins, it is delicious. After you eat all of them you will be very STRONG MAN…” They were referring to genital performance.

“Good book… read!” I was in the middle of a very difficult technical issue when one of them pop a Japanese porn magazine and flip it opened, revealing all the oh-my-Buddha so beautiful round things. I had to start solving the technical issue all over from the start again.

“There is a condom called KingDome, some has studs… it is very thin…. Blah blah blah…” That was when I was typing a report and they were trying to make fun of my name. I had to redo one page of my report.

I learned, the Thais are really beautiful funny and friendly people. Even when working, they have these relax and joking attitude. It is good… it makes work easy for me as I delivered each and every technical solution. If there is a big problem, they just crack some genital related jokes on me. And so do I. And I will correct the problem and get back to them, my friendly customers.