The Pattaya Otter comments on recent happenings in and around Pattaya   Maai Mai Mai Mai Mai Elephants and Beetles. 90 kph speed limit. The great British breakfast. A sniff in time saves lives   Maai Mai Mai Mai Mai During the time since I last wrote this column, which I admit has been longer than expected, a number of events have happened in my life here in Pattaya. Some of them relate to two of those most essential items for a happy existence not just here but anywhere, namely health and wealth and I shall not go into either of these suffice to say that on both fronts the patient is hopefully well on the road to recovery. But a third item that has occupied quite a lot of my time is my attempting at long last to try to gain some ability to understand the Thai language. Now I have always taken and still am of the view that the ability to learn a foreign language is an innate skill that you either have or don’t have, and if you don’t (as I appear not to do) then no matter how hard you try, you will never be fluent in another tongue. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort to at least try to memorise a few phrases that might at least convince your hosts that you aren’t a complete barbarian. Unfortunately such efforts are usually pretty unrewarding as firstly you find that no matter how well you understood what your teacher just said to you, the first phrase you hear outside the classroom at normal speaking speed immediately convinces you that you really haven’t learnt anything at all. And furthermore your attempts to speak the language are usually met with a gaze of bewilderment or a reply in fluent English. I remember well whilst on holiday in France some years ago, and French being a language I had not only spent several years studying at school but had also taken various evening classes in, trying to order food in a restaurant in what I thought was my best Parisian tongue only for the waiter to reply to me in German. This at least gave me the consolation of thinking that if I appeared to speak it as well as the average German visitor to France, then I must at least be making some progress. And at least French and indeed most of the European languages have at least something in common with English. For a start a common alphabet and also quite a number of words derived from the same root, so even an unfamiliar word can be guessed at – leastwise when written down. This is not the case with the Thai language which has absolutely nothing in common and therefore nothing you can use as a base to get started. Firstly in its native form it is written in a totally alien script. This means that when Thai words are written in the Latin script they are not translated but are ‘transliterated’. This gives rise to the phenomenon that when looking in dictionaries (and indeed street signs) that use the Latin alphabet for Thai words you find them spelt many different ways – usually about as many ways as you have dictionaries. Also there are Thai letters that do not equate one for one to Latin letters and in order to transliterate these, phonetic symbols must be used. Again no two dictionaries seem to agree on the same phonetic symbols to use or indeed which ones most approximately match their Thai equivalent. To this confusion must be added two other factors that often mean that when you think you have correctly pronounced a Thai word you are either not understood or perhaps worse, misunderstood. These are vowel length and syllable tone. Thai syllables use either short or long vowels and can also be pronounced in one of 5 tones (nothing to do with Close Encounters), high, low, middle, rising or falling. And each tone and/or vowel length can completely change the meaning of a word. Consider the phrase written at the head of this item, maai mai mai mai mai, which I have written in Latin script without attempting to add any tones. If the correct tones are applied to each syllable here (respectively high, low, falling, falling, high) the phrase turns out to mean ‘New wood doesn’t burn – does it?’ Now you try. So what else has been happening in my period of absence?. Back to Top of Page   Elephants and Beetles. Well as a fair amount of time has been spent in the confinement of Otter Towers it has given me the change to view the world passing below my lofty perch. And what a varied and ever busy world it is – also at times a pretty noisy one. Quite often the noise is a screech of tyres following by a crunching sound and on peering over the balcony to the road below the confirmation of yet another traffic accident. Sometimes if quick enough I can even witness (no officer, I didn’t really see anything) the most reported phrase on the local news bulletins ‘driver fled the scene’, whereby having been involved in the accident often with a lesser vehicle such as a motor cycle the driver of the car, van or truck whether at fault or not, immediately drives off at high speed sometimes pursued by an angry crowd. Then with impressive rapidity the police arrive and proceed to draw chalk marks round the usually prone body and any other remaining involved vehicles. Equally quickly a pick-up truck then arrives and the body on the ground is pretty unceremoniously lifted up and dumped in the back. The truck then heads off presumably to a hospital if said body is still alive otherwise to the mortuary. Everyone then departs and life returns to normal. Other passing events that liven the day are firstly usually about twice a day all the traffic being halted often for quite some time so that our resident royal princess can go shopping or similar. What happens here is that as she has a residence off the top of Thappraya Road, her usual route is to come down the hill and turn left at the junction where I live and then head up Thepprasit Road. The return journey is done in the opposite direction. My first warning that this is about to happen is a blowing of police whistles and upon looking out I can see a bevy of the local constabulary have taken up position at the junction of the two roads where normally traffic is left to fight its way through unaided. Another police contingent must also have taken up position at the top of the hill as no further traffic is seen coming down. All traffic coming down Thepprasit Road and wanting to turn right up the hill is made instead to turn left, go down the road and make a ‘U’ turn to join the already stationary queue coming up from the beach. This impasse lasts for as long as necessary and eventually a wail of sirens heralds the arrival of the first police car which comes down the hill and turns left into Thepprasit Road with lights blazing. A few seconds later another police car does the same and then a third and sometimes even a fourth. Next in formation usually comes a group of white limousines and then incongruously right behind them a bright yellow VW beetle. This is the princess driving her own car. Alongside these are usually a crop of police motorcycle outriders again with lights and sirens at full blast. Bringing up the rear are usually a few more police cars and that is it. The police at the junction make a token effort of letting each line of queued up traffic go one at a time and soon after just walk away and leave everyone to sort out the mess. So where do the elephants come in? Well ignoring the obvious answer of ‘any way they want to’, recently at about 6 o’clock at night, right in the middle of the evening rush hour, I have witnessed a troupe of anything from 3 to 6 elephants parading down Thepprasit Road to the junction and then joining the merry throng there in trying to exit and turn right to head on up the hill to… who knows where? So far the elephants and the beetle have not met – could be interesting if they did though. Looking further afield….. Back to Top of Page   90 kph speed limit. In an earlier article I commented on some of the ways that Thailand is coming into line with the Western world. Well another brick has just fallen into place with the introduction of the country’s first urban speed restriction as Bangkok has just introduced a maximum speed of 90 kph on its inner city roads – that’s about 60 miles an hour in old money. Not that this has made the slightest difference to the actual speed of traffic in most parts of Bangkok which is usually closer to 9 kph rather than 90. In fact in some parts 9 h per k would be more accurate. I recently waited for a telephone call from a friend in the city who shortly after lunch informed me that he was just on his way back to his office and would call me back when he got there. About 4 hours later I was just tucking into my evening meal when he eventually called. Speaking of tucking into food….. Back to Top of Page   The great British breakfast. Ask just about anyone from Britain living abroad what they miss most about ‘home’ (please note the quotation marks) and whereas some might say ‘an evening down the pub’, others might say ‘football’ or ‘cricket’ and there will also be a selection of other answers but I will guarantee that the most quoted reply will be ‘home cooking’. This is borne out by the fact that just about any place in the world that has a sizeable number of British residents or even visitors, will have signs outside bars and restaurants offering such local delicacies as ‘Fish & Chips’, ‘Sunday Roast’ and of course ‘Full English Breakfast’. Pattaya is no exception and here the battle rages about where to find the best breakfast by which we mean of course the great British fry up, bacon, eggs sausages etc (I’m starting to make myself hungry here), and several column inches have been taken up in the local press by people praising their favourite haunt. And indeed if this fare is to your liking then you really are spoilt for choice here with a sizeable number of establishments offering up the genuine article, and pretty genuine it is nowadays, and all at a fraction of the price you would pay back in Britain. But for those wishing to ‘go native’ there is of course the option of a traditional Thai breakfast of Khao Tom (a bowl of rice soup). I will give you a guess which is the more popular amongst us ‘falangs’. Mind I have found the rice soup an excellent cure for a hangover. And finally…... Back to Top of Page   A sniff in time saves lives A leading local politician has suggested that as an aid to ‘safe sex’ dogs should be trained to sniff out people who are NOT carrying condoms and bark at them. I’m not sure exactly where the dog is supposed to sniff but it would certainly lower the street noise outside at night. And that is the end of Otter’s Tails for this edition.. Back to Top of Page