Speaking Thai at a Urinal

We were in a Thai tourist bar overlooking the Mekong river two nights ago, listening to a Thai band play western and Thai cover songs and watching Thai tourists from the south getting drunk as though it was a team sport, when suddenly I had to pee. I didn't exactly find this condition alarming -- it's a normal reaction of my bladder to either beer or cover bands, I can't quite figure out which -- but I knew from past experience that it would be best if I did something about it.

I walked to the men's room and found a long row of urinals, each of which were specially designed to receive and dispose of a man's urine. There was only one person using these technological wonders, and when he noticed my presence, he tensed up and looked down, apparently concentrating intensely on the task at hand.

I pulled up to a spot two urinals down from him, commenced peeing, and I started thinking about something friendly I could say to my pissing partner to set him at ease. As I've said previously on this weblog, I've been learning Thai, but my pronunciation is very imperfect and my vocabulary limited, so I'm not exactly able to throw off stupid urinal jokes like I can in English, such as "so, this is where all the dicks hang out."

Looking up at the night sky through the open window of the well-ventilated men's room, I decided I wanted to say something like "nice night." I don't know how to say, "nice", but I can say "beautiful", which I thought would work well enough, and I do know the word for "night". I began formulating this two-word sentence when I realized I might have a problem.

The grammar in Thai is super easy. For example, you don't need to put a "to be" verb in between a noun and an adjective. You just need to say the noun and say the adjective, like "night beautiful". The hard part of Thai for westerners is the pronunciation. The language has 5 tones, each of which can change the meaning of a word. The word "suay" (pronounced more or less like "sway") said with a rising tone means beautiful, but if you mess up the tone and say it flat, or mid-toned, it means "bad luck". I was pretty confident I could pull off the tone, though, so I wasn't worried about accidentally saying that the night was bad luck.

The other difficulty with pronouncing Thai is the vowels. The Thai alphabet has 32 vowels, many of which are only subtly different from one another. Our Thai teacher has a system of writing these vowels in our alphabet, doubling up letters to make a longer vowel sound, or by using upsidedown e's to indicate that they should sound like you're throwing up, and not like a normal e.

The word for night is spelled by our Thai teacher "kuun", except that he crosses both u's with horizontal lines about halfway up, to indicate that they are a different vowel from the normal u sound. I can't explain the difference between this u and a normal u, and I can only approximate the sound when I try to say it. Usually I rely on context and not accurate pronunciation to get me through linguistic ambiguities.

The real difficulty of my situation was that the word "kun", with one u, uncrossed, means "you"; talking about the night being beautiful would put me into a linguistic minefield from which the context of a men's room unoccupied by any other men couldn't save me. The very best misunderstanding I could hope for is that I'd botch both the vowel on the first word and the tone on the second word, and he'd think that I was calling him unlucky, possibly because of something I'd caught a glimpse of while he was urinating. Given my present ability in speaking Thai, however, it was much more likely that I'd nail that tone on "suay" and I'd totally botch the subtlety of the vowel on "kuun" (crossed u's) and he'd think I was saying "kun suay": "you're beautiful".

I decided not to say anything at all. Let him be uncomfortable about my presence while he pisses; it's better than him thinking that I think him either beautiful or unluckily endowed.

Sometimes when you travel you can have grand adventures without anything happening outside of your own head.

Mae Kuang Dam Loop

Erin and I did a fun one-day ride yesterday:

We left Chiang Mai following our little rural river road that lets us avoid the highway, and then went up into the hills, where we found a very attractive and reasonably-priced (free) waterfall:

Then we proceeded to the lake, where we were going to get a boat to the other side. We should have known this wasn't exactly a high traffic route with regularly scheduled ferry service. The jungle was eating the road and nobody seemed to care.

At the lake, there was no boat and no sign of any boat, but we waited there like morons. Fortunately, we met a very nice Austrian man on a motorcycle, who helped us pass the time.

Finally, we were finished waiting, and we went back up the extremely steep road we'd just come down and stopped in the village 3 km down the road to get some noodle soup. Using our pathetically limited Thai, we tried to ask the nice lady who made soup for us how one could get a boat to the other side of the lake. This was quite challenging for us, because we didn't know the word for boat, and we hadn't brought our Thai dictionary with us.

A word of advice: if you're ever taking a bicycle trip in rural Thailand that absolutely requires you to catch a boat, unless you want to go 75km back the way you came, learn the Thai word for boat.

The word for bicycle in Thai is jak-ga-yaan. The tones for the three syllables are low, low and mid, respectively. We learned this somewhat difficult word almost immediately on arriving in Thailand.

The word for boat, according to my dictionary is rua. Mid-tone, nice and flat. That's one of the easiest words I've ever learned in Thai, but yesterday, we didn't know it. We did know how to say, "we want to go to Doi Saket", which was the name of the town on the other side of the lake, and we were able to combine this linguistic snippet with smiling ignorance and, after going through three intermediaries, we got someone to telephone the ferry man on the far side of the lake and tell him to come and get us.

So we went back down the hill to the lakeshore and waited for the boat.

Here's Snakeslayer taking his first-ever boat ride; I think he liked it:

And then we road home. Rice harvest is approaching here, and the countryside is beautiful.

And the lantern festival is underway in Chiang Mai.

Which has meant there's been so many fireworks set off that it sounds like there's a war going on every night. The festival is fun, and Erin and I intend to enjoy it tonight, but there's only so many explosions my nerves can handle.

Last night I was at a bar where a few of the patrons at the instigation of one of the Thai employees, decided that it would be hilarious if they started sneaking lit firecrackers under people's tables, or placing them between their feet while they weren't looking. Okay, it was hilarious, but there's only so much hilarity a guy can take.

Either tomorrow or the next day Erin and I are going to set off on our longest tour yet, going north through Pai to Mae Hong Son. We'll see how far we get. We've got some work we have to do in the next week or two that's will be incredibly urgent once we're able to start, but we have no idea when we're going to be able to start.

Ahh... the peaceful, contemplative life of a writer. Fucking deadlines.

Gear Crisis Update

I think I've fixed our pump problem.

I went down to the only road bike store in town and found a couple of el-cheapo emergency pumps. These pumps were Giyo brand, which I've never heard of, but I've certainly come across this exact pump before. Back home, MEC sells these things under the brand Filzer, and I can truly attest that they are pieces of garbage. Erin had one of these things and the very first time I used it, the plastic handle twisted off in my hand. The pump was still awkwardly usable afterward, but it certainly wasn't any pleasure to do so.

MEC gave me a full refund on that pump. Now I own two more of the things and there's no way anyone is going to give me a refund when they break. But I seem to remember an old saying about beggars and choosers, and how they can't be the same guy, and seeing as how I'm a beggar in the pump department right now, I'll take what I can get.

I picked up two of these things at the bike store and told the non-English-speaking clerk in what I imagine was flawlessly intoned Thai, "I would like to buy two."

He responded with some tonal gibberish that I didn't understand at all because I don't speak Thai, which I later understood to mean, "I'll give you a better price if you buy two." He also might have said something like, "nine hundred," although I can't be sure.

So I multiplied the 550-baht marked price by two and said in perfectly-intoned Thai, "one thousand one hundred?"

He shook his head and walked to the desk to get a calculator. He typed in "1000" and showed it to me. I handed him a thousand and took my pumps.

All things considered, the Thai lessons are going quite well. The trouble is that when I speak Thai to people, for some reason they imagine that I'll be able to understand their response, which I seldom can. Thank the big bang for the honesty of the shopkeepers around here. If this had been Bangkok, or worse, the beaches in the south, they'd have let me bid up the price by several thousand baht, instead of giving me a discount for being stupid.