Farang Farang

This video has some really cool Thai dance. Check it out! The music seems a bit repetitive at first but if you listen closely you can hear variations in it, as well as repeating themes.

This is a very short video but shows an interesting side to Thai tourism. This is a far piece from the flashy golden chedis of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. The hill tribes are closer to the indigenous people of northern Thailand and live in a good bit of poverty, as evidenced by this video. I will be posting more about the hill tribes later but this is an introduction – what you might see when entering the village.

I have no idea what this is, exactly. It’s obviously a television show about… well, about something. What I love is that foreign TV shows can be very entertaining and often you can follow along, even with minimal or no exposure to the language. Now and then, though, you get something like this, which is fun because you have no clue what’s going on. However, it does have great music.

Do you know what this is? Enlighten us!

Klong is the Thai word for canal. All over central Thailand, including in Bangkok proper, you can find a good number of river- and canal-based communities. As I said before, the water has a number of different uses, some you can see and others you can only smell. Passing through such a place on my first visit to the country, I was very grateful for the immunizations my doctor had encouraged me to get before traveling.

The reason the boatman honks is because there is no obvious traffic control. General maritime law says that if two vessels come toward each other, the one on the starboard side has dominance. This rule, sometimes seen more as a best practice than an actual law, goes away when you get on the klong. The horn is more a way of alerting other boaters that you are coming. The fellow piloting the boat in the video is very docile in comparison to one I had, who seemed to think he was the Thai Steve McQueen.