CMU Classes

Chiang Mai University (CMU) has been trying to educate us for the past week.  I am not sure how successful they have been, but it has certainly been interesting.  We had lectures in Thai etiquette, Thai cooking, and and Thai language. Interestingly there have been no lectures yet in Thai history.  I think that the courses so far have all been designed to help us students overcome whatever culture shock they may have been experiencing.

Kathleen practising the "Wai" while eating breakfast
(and thinking about Scrabble)

In etiquette class, we learned how to "wai" - the traditional Thai greeting.  For Kathleen and me, this is sort of optional as, being seniors, everybody is supposed to "wai" us and we can respond as we please. Thai culture is fairly formal by Canadian standards and one of the things that we appreciate is the respect they have for seniors.  They actually believe that people with grey hair know something! We are hoping that the young people on this trip absorb this bit of Thai culture and carry it back to Canada.  Another value I appreciate is that they discourage smoking whenever somebody else is within smelling distance.

Kathleen having fun cooking

The cooking class was lots of fun.  My partner was Kathleen - "John, you have to read the recipe!" - I kept leaving out steps.  At the end, the instructor came along and with a whirlwind of moves, finished for us.  We made chicken curry, sticky rice with mango, and pad thai.  We got to eat the fruits of our labour - it was all delicious.

Sign outside a Wat (Buddhist temple) we visited
(note the Thai script)

Our Thai language instructor is delightful.  He keeps telling us Thai is an easy language.  Somehow I haven't got to the easy part yet.  The Thai script is beautiful but totally incomprehensible to me and is hard to follow because it does not leave any spaces between words in a sentence - it is just one big long string of characters which are totally unrelated to the Roman characters we are used to. So our language teacher uses a phonetic alphabet with at least some familiar characters and sounds.  But there are a whole lot of new sounds as well.  To say spicy duck you say "phet pet".  Both words sound identical to me but Kathleen says she can hear a difference.  I think I will stick to eating plain chicken - they have a lot of chicken dishes here.

Thais are very polite.  One thing they do is add a word at the the end of most sentences just to make it more polite - sort of like us adding sir or madam.  The ladies add "kha" and the men add "khrap".  Whenever I say thank you, it is pronounced "kop khun khrap."  It is hard not to think about how that sounds in Canada. I note that at McThai (aka McDonalds) the men serving use "kop kun kha," maybe because they don't want to have the tourists think they are serving "-----"!