Success and distress

Today I find myself feeling very successful. I summoned a song tao and negotiated a price for Billy, Mark and I to get to the mall. I tried negotiating in Thai, but the driver knew his English numbers and so the scene was with me holding up three fingers and saying "houg sib", and him holding six fingers and saying "sixty". Apparently we were saying the same thing, except he was multiplying 20 and 3 in his head.

I also successfully ordered khao soy at the mall. I think it's my favorite dish here. Melinda took me to an export store this morning and I bought three shirts and two pairs of pants suitable for work all for 420 baht ($12). These clothes of course all have some sort of defect, some of them nasty dirty, of course not the ones I picked up though. This is how it is possible for Thais to live on 170 baht a day.

Towards the end of the work week I had been feeling somewhat glazed over all day long. You could say its from the stress of a different culture or language, or from the jet lag, or the lack of coffee, or any number of things. I don't really know what it is, but it gets hard to work and even harder to communicate effectively later in the evenings. I end up feeling somewhat cut off from society both here and back home.

One of my biggest desires is to be able to hop on a song tao or walk into some public place and strike up a meaningful conversation with a Thai person. I don't really care much what language this conversation should be in so long as it's meaningful. There's so much I'd like to learn about this place. Someone here told me about how he liked living in Papua New Guinea because he was very motivated to learn the language and integrate himself with the culture. Here in Chiang Mai, however, he doesn't feel like there is a need to learn Thai, and that even if he did the social structure wouldn't allow him to really form strong relationships with Thais. There are people who have learned the language and penetrated the social ranks, but they've dedicated themselves to the task; if I were to do this I would have to split my attention with working on software engineering at the office.