Someone you must learn about is our driver Somchai. He tries to keep everything on a professional level and usually when you ask him a question he ends his answer with a laugh. But I have found that when I am with him, especially when Steve is not around I can get some amazing stories out of him especially about his childhood - about soldiers coming to Thailand from the Vietnam war, his village, and his family.
One Friday night Somchai picked me up around 5 pm to take me to Steve's plant. We were going to paint his office. A huge thunderstorm had already come through the city, plus more rain was to come. Anyway, just some rain can shut the city down for a little bit, add on that it was Friday night, pay day, plus a huge amount of rain -- well, Somchai and I sat for 2 1/2 hours in traffic. We had plenty of time to talk. Here was one of the first stories I got out of him:
Movie Night
Somchai comes from the Northeastern part of Thailand also called Isan. There are a lot of very poor people in that part of the country and it seems like a lot of the young people come to Bangkok to try to make money so that they can send some back home to help out their families.
His village was very poor and there was not a lot of entertainment to be had, but something special happened once every couple of months. This was in the early 60's, before his village had any form of television. A man would come through the village with a megaphone and announce "The movie is coming! Mamas bring your children, Papas bring your families!" Over and over he would say this. The excitement would build. Finally movie night came and everyone assembled in the village center
.
The man would have a microphone, but there was no electricity to power it so they had to pour gasoline into some container to get the microphone going. Somchai said that you didn't want to be anywhere near that microphone! I asked, "Was it a Thai movie or an American movie?" He said "American of course!" I wanted to know how those poor villagers could possibly understand English words. He had a solution for that - the man with the microphone would play all the parts!! He would use a deep voice for the man and a high voice for the woman. Somchai laughed and said that they never knew if the man was translating exactly word for word, but they enjoyed it just as well!
What does the _______say?
I realize that a lot of people don't think the way that I do and that is ok, but bear with me, Somchai and I laughed and laughed over this one. I hope you find it funny too.
Ok, so maybe an hour into our trip, we may have gone a mile or two, so I asked Somchai, "What does a dog say?" He looked at me like I was nuts, which is no big deal to me because Steve looks at me like that all the time. So I boldly asked him again. He said "Nurf Nurf! I laughed and laughed. He asked what was so funny. He laughed when I told him that a dog in English says woof woof or bark bark. So on and on we went trying to find a similarity between animals. We finally found two animals that could actually talk to each other in Thai and English and I bet you can't guess who they are.
A Cat - Meow
A Horse - Naaa
Everything had a different sound, very interesting don't you think?
This was my favorite entry so far, Mom! I especially loved what does the dog say... that was great! Teddy would say that a cat says "AH-OH" though... lol.
ReplyDelete