This morning we had out Thai cultural orientation… it’s crazy how different Thai culture is from North American culture. Mostly for humour’s sake, I’ll put up a few of the differences here:
1. The head is the most honourable part of the body – if you touch someone else’s head, it’s incredibly insulting.
2. Feet are dirty. Never point your foot at someone or something. Don’t sit with your legs extended.
3.Buddhist monks can not touch a woman. If a woman has to give something to a monk, she must pass it to him through a man.
4. The Thai people love their King. When they ask you anything about the King, you have to reply “The King is good”, even if they’re asking a question like “Is the King tall?”
5. Questions like “Why are you so fat?'” or “What kind of birth control do you use?” are perfectly normal, and not considered nosy.
yep… kinda some weird things that will probably take a while to get used to.
After orientation we had a bit of a food orientation… it was awesome. Thai food is amazing. We went to a restaurant, and they just had a billion different foods there for us to try (mostly it was just lots of different stuff to put on rice).
I just posted the link to this on my friend from Thailand's wall for confirmation. That's some pretty weird stuff, hah.
ReplyDeleteyah, some of it I don't really actually see as being true from what I've seen around here, but that's all stuff in our booklet thing that we get when we arrive.
ReplyDeleteAlso Bangkok is really international. It'd be like going to Montreal, expecting all the Québec stereotypes to be displayed.
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