My favorite Thai words

We are now well into our third year in Thailand. I firmly believe in learning the local language when you live overseas but boy, the Thai language is hard and my progress is much slower than I want it to be. 

Amidst grappling with the unfamiliar script, the 44 consonants, 28 vowels, 5 tones and lots of alien sounds to get my mouth around. . . . . I do however find language learning fun and a fascinating window on culture and life here. Here's a few of my favorite Thai words I've learned so far.

ถุงเท้า (tung taao) means sock. Some words in Thai tickle me because of their simplicity. This word literally means "bag for your foot".

กินข้าว (gin kaao) is a phrase we use here all the time. It means to eat rice but is actually used to refer to having any kind of meal. Most Thai people do eat rice at every meal, but even if you don't, you can still use this word. The word ข้าวเช้า (kaao chaao) means breakfast or literally morning rice! 

Rice varieties, Sansai Market, Chiangmai 

If you agree with someone in Thailand, you say เห็นด้วย (hen duai) which literally means to see together. Similarly to sympathize with someone is เห็นใจ (hen jai), or to see their heart. How beautiful is that?

ไม่ใช่ (mai chai) is the word for no in Thailand - or literally "not yes"!  I might be reading too much into this but somehow this fits with a culture where people don't like to disagree with you to your face. With this phrase, even when they're saying no, they're still actually saying a modified form of yes! 

The word ใจ (jai) meaning heart, is used a lot in the Thai language to describe people and feelings. For example, being kind is ใจดี (jai dii) good-hearted and being impatient is ใจร้อน (jai roon) hot-hearted but my favorite is generous, มีนํ้าใจ (mii naam jai) literally "having a heart that flows like water". How about that for a description of what generosity really is. 

Water flowing in abundance at Mok Faa Waterfall

In the same vein เข้าใจ (kaao jai) means to understand in Thai, in other words "to enter your heart". Oh how I am hoping for more of this fascinating language to enter my heart soon and with it, a deeper appreciation of this beautiful culture and people.

Hope you enjoyed this little taste. Thanks so much for reading!
สวัสดีค่ะ Sawatdiikha

Watering can prayers

I have a confession. I am not very disciplined in my prayer life. I shoot up lots of "help me" prayers and I try to thank God often but when I sit down to pray more in depth about something, I get distracted easily and drift off. I think that's why I'm constantly looking for friends to pray with.

One thing I have noticed here in this predominantly Buddhist country, is that the temples provide many physical and symbolic ways for people to offer their prayers and invocations. We have these in the Christian tradition too but not so many.

There are the offerings of the symbolic lotus flower to represent the desire for a pure spirit.

. . . . the rubbing of a gong to aid meditation

. . . . the incense to burn, the stupas to walk around while you make your chant, the prayer wheels to spin, the candles to light and the bells to ring.

I've been quite fascinated by these physical aids to worship in my visits to Buddhist temples here in Chiangmai. You can certainly see how they increase habits of worship and aid focus by engaging all the senses. 

I have found my own physical way to pray recently too and it has surprised me how much it has enhanced my prayer life. One of my daily chores here is watering our plants at our back door. 

It didn't start as a prayer, it was just something I needed to do, but I found myself praying for God's Spirit to water my kids' hearts as I tended to my plants. Turns out "watering can prayers" have a whole load of applications. How badly I need His Spirit to water my own soul in all the dry and stubborn areas of my heart. I have prayed for His watering of our marriage, for His Spirit to pour out on the people of Thailand and for the seeds sown at Thai Village to be saturated with His Spirit and flourish.  It has been good to have a symbolic and physical accompaniment to my prayers and somehow, it has engaged me all the more in believing and persisting in prayer as a daily habit.

My plants are growing well and I enjoy them every day. Now they are a constant reminder too of the source of all our life and flourishing. My prayer life needed a boost and I found it in my own back yard! Prayer can be so much more than words sometimes.

Wild things of Chiangmai

So this post may have some pictures of creepy crawlies in it. Please feel free to stop reading if this is not your thing. First of all though, I want to make a few things clear about where we live. 

Yes, we live in the tropics and we have banana trees and palm trees growing in our front garden, but we do not have to slash our way through undergrowth to get to school in the morning or share our bed with unwanted visitors; we have yet to have any poisonous animal inside our house (though not unheard of amongst our friends!) and we do not live in fear of snakes or spiders biting our children when they play outside. Just want to keep this real. 

Having said that, there are some amazing tropical creatures here and since many of them are probably unusual to most of you, I thought I would share a little taste of the wild things we have encountered here in Chiangmai.

Because it's rainy season right now, let's start with the frogs. 

Brown tree frog making a visit

This one we found on the porch at our old house. We haven't seen them yet at our new house but we know they are here because they make a right racket, especially after it rains. Apparently, tree frogs mate in the rainy season and the environment is perfect right after a cloudburst, so the loud croaking we hear after the rain is the male's mating call. 

Click here to listen to the tree frogs outside our kitchen window the other night.

This house gecko has been sleeping in our bedroom

Geckos are called jink-jok in Thai and we have them all through our house. We happily share our space with these cute creatures because they eat the much less welcome mosquitos and other flies. The only down sides are the droppings they leave behind and occasionally finding a smushed gecko in the hinges of a door frame. We didn't mean to, I promise!

A cousin of the house gecko is the much larger tokay gecko which gets it's name from a loud vocalization it makes. We hear these a lot but the only time we've ever seen one was on the ceiling of a restaurant out of town. This is a bad photo but I was happy to get it as tokays are notoriously shy. He was over a foot long and had excellent grip on the woven bamboo ceiling. 

You have to admit, tokay geckos are pretty cool!

Click here to hear the sound of the tokay gecko.

Moving on to insects, I do not have time here to list or show pictures of all the colourful bugs we have encountered in our garden and on our hikes. They are pretty funky and all of us (apart from our eldest) enjoy discovering new ones and attempting to identify them. Here are a couple of our favorites.

Lantern bugs found gathered in pairs on their host tree, Chiang Dao

Thailand Monkey Grasshopper found resting near Sticky Falls

Unidentified caterpillar found on a hike up Doi Suthep
Some caterpillars can be poisonous here so we avoid touching those
with spikes or hair especially.

And now to the three scariest ones - spiders, scorpions and snakes. India had prepared me well for these - not that I ever got used to having spiders the size of my hand in my house. . . . but there is a resilience that builds up I guess. Here, whilst we have had lots of little spiders in our house, including the tiny jumping ones, all the big scary ones have been encountered in the wild so far and somehow that makes them much less threatening.

Even I could see the beauty in this orbweaver spider, Southern Thailand.

Scorpions have yet to make it over the threshold in our house, although again we have seen them on our hikes. This picture was taken at an insect zoo where we were allowed to touch only the black ones which have much weaker venom even though they are bigger. Not sure I would be this brave though.

Liam and friend at Chiangmai Insect Zoo, 2015

And snakes have actually not featured at all in our Thailand experience so far - except at the snake farm. We've heard stories of house intrusions and we see signs like this in national parks, so they're out there, but thankfully keeping their distance.. . . . for now.

Sticky Falls warning sign - photo credit Tina

There's so much more I could write about of course - the colorful birds and butterflies, the numerous species of ants that live here, and even the awful and creepy giant centipede. . . . but I haven't got good photos of them yet so that will have to wait. 

Thanks for being interested in our "wild life" here in Thailand. We'll be sure to keep you posted on more wild encounters. For now, I'm off to bed to be rocked to sleep by the mating tree frogs. 




 

So how was your summer?

School started again here yesterday. That means we're all asking each other that inevitable back-to-school question, knowing full well it's impossible to sum up your summer in a couple of sentences.

This summer for us has, in many ways, been a microcosm of the full range of experiences and emotions that go along with a life overseas. Let me try to recap . . . 

One of our children had hard goodbyes at the end of the semester with close friends who were leaving back to their home country; we had wonderful visits from family and friends which filled our whole summer with joy; we got to travel to new places and combined visa runs with relaxing stays on tropical beaches; we experienced frustration in discovering that the immigration laws had changed by the time we got back and my freshly stamped visa suddenly became no longer my best option to work here longterm; we longed to be back in our other home with the news of the loss of a dear Grandad (in UK); we grieved from afar and talked for hours on skype and messenger to stay connected with family in far away places; we cherished the moments with dear ones visiting, knowing that all too soon they would be leaving and cramming as much as we could into that short precious space in time. 

Grandma love at the end of the school year

Auntie Rachael in Vietnam with us - one of the best travelling companions a family could hope for! 

Buying plants in memory of a dear Grandad who loved to tend his beautiful garden.

Reconnecting families - Tina and I haven't had extended time together since our kids were born so their visit was a huge gift for all of us.

So yes, our summer was wonderful . . . . .with sadnesses and stresses mingled in. We felt the distance intensely, especially in the loss of our dear Grandad but also when that distance was breached for a brief window and we got a taste of being with those who are usually so far away. Distance sucks, but one thing is for sure - it certainly makes you cherish the together-time all the more.

Amazingly, thanks to the very generous gifts of some family members, we are going to be able to travel to the UK later this week to attend Grandad's funeral and be with family. That is not something we take for granted with the life decisions we have made so we are very grateful for that.

I leave you with a picture of this dear man, taken earlier this year when he blessed us all with his presence all the way over here in Thailand at the ripe age of 88. We will miss you Grandad.