Me vs them

One thing you have to take in to account when moving to another country are the cultural differences. When you stay on the same continent these are not that big, for instance you learn to live with Germans munching on larger than life sausages while watching Scheissemovies, Brits being bloody hooligans and Spanish being lazy bastards as they go sleeping in the middle of the day. But when you're moving to Asia things are a bit different. These people have a totally different way of life. Asia is big and I'm going to focus on Thailand, because that is where I live now.

For instance, where I come from, people eat 3 times per day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. In Thailand, people eat 6 times per day and when you look closely it comes a lot closer to 20 times. They are eating all the time. Maybe that's why it takes so long to get things finished around here.

Good thing for them is that they don't eat a lot of fats, so they stay skinny. And of course not every Thai eats this much, the beggars have to satisfy themselves with one portion of sticky rice per day, or was that sticky lice?

And actually this doesn't bother me at all. There's nothing wrong with people eating.

The thing that bothers me the most is the "cultural perception of time". In other words, Thai are always late. When you make an appointment at 9 o'clock, be sure to see your counterparty at 9.30 or even later. The longest I had to wait for someone was 75 minutes and this was not even business-related.

When they arrive eventually, there is always an excuse, there was too much traffic, it was raining. This is just a way of telling you that they were too lazy to get their ass of the couch or they couldn't be bothered meeting you.

I once had a meeting and the email stated: the meeting will start at 2-3 PM. Can somebody please enlighten me what time i had to be there? As a good boy from the western world I was there at 2 PM and the meeting started at 2.30. At first this really gets to you. Being 5 or 10 minutes late doesn't bother anyone, but the Thai way is really testing people. But then again, you learn to live with it. When you have an appointment, be sure to bring a book or an MP3 player.

The last thing I hear many farang complain about is the telephone conversation, especially with their Thai girlfriend. In the West a telephone conversation starts with: Hello, how are you?

In Thailand it goes as follows: Hello, where are you? So either they don't trust the farang boyfriend or they are very insecure about people's whereabouts. Or just making sure he's not in the area because she is with another guy. This is all possible.

After 5 months you see things in a different way. Tourists can't be bothered with cultural differences, because 2 weeks later they are on a plane back home. Expats have to live with this, live through the ordeals.

But as stated before: just go with the flow.