In thailand - traffic travels on the left-hand side of the road. Its funny how you base so much of your daily habits on something as simple as the flow of traffic. When you find yourself always travelling on the 'wrong' side...you start to realize that it's not just vehicles that follow these rules! It's the flow of people in the market, the aisles of the grocery store and the way you pass on the sidewalk.
There are lots of customs to get used to in a new place. Here - you use your spoon for everything, and your fork just to load the spoon. *shrug* And no chopsticks! Just after I had improved my chopstick skills. Ray says that they stopped using chopsticks here in order to be more 'modern' or something like that. I wonder how he knows all these things? I bet he'll make a great dad someday....he'll know things like how they make crayons and why the sky is blue. Although....sometimes its hard to tell if the answer is real or if he's being silly and testing to see if I'm naive enough to believe :)
Another interesting custom designed to confuse the foreigners is the use of plastic bags. They use them for everything! Lunch. Soup. Drinks. Street food. Everything! It's really quite smart if you think about it because it creates so much less waste than a paper cup, or a styrofoam container, it's easier to pack on your scooter/sidecar and take to the beach to sell your wares, and its cheap. The trouble is that they pack things in multiple plastic bags...with the world's tiniest elastic bands to hold them closed. Say, for example, you got some amazingly yummy looking fried tofu at the market - they would put the tofu in one bag, some pickles in another, and then throw in a tiny bag of yummy looking sauce. But if you are a foreigner, you won't be able to get into the sauce. No no no - you may stare longingly at it, and wish you had sauce for your tofu, but you won't know how to get through that anti-foreigner force-field otherwise known as the elastic band. Sigh. I have taken to stabbing the bag with a fork and then squeezing out the sauce.
The final thing that confuses me for today is the street lights. Ray and I were talking about this last night when he was lamenting about me being alone this week. You see - he is offshore for the week, and he's concerned about me being on my own. He would like me to go for dinner before it gets dark so that I don't walk home alone....hahahah.....good one Ray! It gets dark at 6:30pm!!! But that got us talking about the street lights on our street - which are actually fluorescent lights. Just plain old long skinny fluorscent bulbs, like would be in a ceiling light...hanging from a telephone pole....randomly...not spaced out....not all hanging in the same direction....?!?! I suppose they do the job, but it certainly is a bit odd.
Well, now that I'm on my own - I'm off to start a quilt. Bought some very cool cotton at the market this weekend so I should definitely cut it up into little bits and then sew it back together :)
Lots of love
Pamela
Pamela
p.s. I already finished one course for my masters....I'm thinking this week will be similar with Ray gone....I'm gonna have to ask for more courses before I leave here. Hahaha.
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