Friday, July 16, 2010

Craving Condensed Milk!

You know you are no longer a tourist and live in Thailand when....

1) You spend ten minutes trying to decide between the extra thin blue ballpoint pen with the smiling monkeys and rainbows ("my pocket monkey") and the one with the bears, bunnies and cups of cocoa ("Hello Mr. Sweet") and then decided that you should probably buy both.

2) You don't think twice about making a u-turn on the super highway on your motorbike.

3) You become highly attuned to small shifts in temperature, and when walking outside into 93 degree weather find yourself commenting: “aww, how lovely and cool it is today!”

4) You wonder why an ice cream sandwich isn’t a scoop of ice cream between two pieces of white bread everywhere in the world and not just in Thailand.

5) You begin to lose your grasp on your native English tongue and sadly are unaware until another friend repeats it back to you: “‘I a teacher at CMU’…you mean ‘I am a teacher at CMU?’”

6) You purse your lips at the twenty year old tourists walking around in beer shirts bouncing soccer balls across the road while you are trying to get to the climbing wall on your motorbike and they are in your way.

7) The smell of baby powder pervades your room as you have sprayed it all over your walls and floor in the vein hope of driving away hordes of small marauding ants. It is also not uncommon to find you yelling “die, die” and pouring copious amounts of powder on trails of ants that have found a molecule of food on your floor. You have also given up on completely eliminating ants from your room.

8) All names, not just Thai names or words start having Thai inflections. You pronounce Obama as - Obam-aaaa! and think nothing of it, indeed you think it sounds natural.

9) You have your special food stands you frequent mapped out across the city, where the owners all know you: Mango/dragon fruit/pineapple smoothies at the Chiang Mai Gate Market in the old city, grilled bananas on Suthep road, iced green milk tea at the coffee shop near the English Department, and large noodle soup at the Biology cafeteria.

10) You crave condensed milk, especially poured over your fried and slightly more than oily roti with bananas, chocolate and sugar - the same delicious dessert that you recall asking yourself why condensed milk was a necessary addition a month ago.

2 comments:

  1. LOVE this post! What wonderful and colorful insight into your Thailand life. Sounds awesome!

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  2. 5) You begin to loose your grasp -- loose your grasp. loose your grasp! That's hilarious. Especially in context. How are you? Eitan

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