Farang Farang

Mortensen talks about his struggle to help create a Thai orphanage so he could help kids who were in the sex slavery and drug world, which is not uncommon in Thailand. I don’t know much about this gentleman but it sounds like he has a good heart and objective.

Thailand from M. Scott Mortensen on Vimeo.

Seeing how other cultures treat the dead and act at funerals is very interesting. In Thailand, there is often close contact with the dead body, as you can see in this video. The family is there to offer the decedent various items as objects of love. Fresh coconut juice, flowers and incense are brought to the body and laid in the casket and afterward a big bag of kindling is added, along with a bottle of some sort of flammable liquid before the body is placed in the crematorium and ignited with what looks like the strike of a match. It seems rather matter-of-fact.

Some of this may seem like silly ritual – bringing offerings to the dead person. However, in our culture it is customary to send flowers to the funeral home and even to have a wreath on the casket. It’s the same thing if you think about it for a moment.

Another video from the good folks at Nanfeng Oranges. This time they take on Ayutthaya. I love the descriptions in their videos and the enlightened, informed way they go about their journey. I bet they would be cool folks to hang out with. If only I could get back to Thailand…

This video shows an important side of the tensions in Southern Thailand but does not do justice in really talking about Thailand’s role in causing the distrust between Thais and Islamic ethnic Malay people. Thaksin Shinawatra, the previous prime minister, did a lot to fan the flames and fomented violence in the south but this is almost glossed over in the video. After all, it is a VOA production, and the US government is on an anti-Islam kick, so I am not too surprised by this.

This video, by the folks at the Learning Thai Podcast, is rather long, but a great introduction to counting in Thai. They also have numerous other videos to help you learn this beautiful language. If counting isn’t your thing, go check them out for a different tutorial. They do a great job.

This is a wonderful video that features a Buddhist monk in Chiang Mai talking about Buddhism and the life of a monk. Great stuff and beautifully shot and put together by Kedar Video.

I love this video because it shows what many of the kitchens in Thailand are like, at least in my experience. They are often outdoors, like this one, with no refrigeration to speak of, and a small gas burner. The reason many kitchens are outside should be evident if you have ever tried to cook anything during the heat of the summer. It’s just too hot to keep fire indoors!

Because of the high cost of refrigeration, you really have to shop every day for fresh food. This may seem inconvenient but it sure does provide the freshest foods possible and the best tastes as well, in my opinion.

I suppose it’s relevant to the conversation to address the issue of just what a farang is. During my last trip to Thailand, I heard this word a lot. I’d sit at a food stall or go to a market, perhaps just walking down the street, and hear, “farang, farang.” I knew the people were talking about me.

I knew what a farang was already, but quickly learned that, like many racial terms, the meaning was not always positive. You can read more about all this here, but I wanted to share one excerpt from the Next Life in the Afternoon blog:

Farang means something on the order of “honkey,” had the term honkey caught on. Let’s be honest – beyond those two years sometime in the 1970s, nobody has heard or used that term with any seriousness or regularity.

Farang is the designation Thais use for most non-Asian foreigners. More specifically, a stereotypical farang has light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. Ironically, as I pointed out to my Thai friend Nut, those features are the same as you see in Siamese cats.

That brought no end of hilarity, it seemed for a little while. Farang cat, not Siamese cat. Good times.

There is some thought that the term farang may have come about in the early days of French colonialism, when missionaries came to civilize people through religion. Well, that was their intention. I am not saying they were more civilized, probably just more arrogant.

The Thai word for French sounds like, “farangsayt,” and these people were known as farangs, as farang is also the word for “foreign.” So there are at least two competing etymologies for this, and I understand that the true etymology is a contested issue among linguists.

If you know anything about Thai language etymologies, I would love to be set straight on this issue, so please email me with any insights.

One of the things I hope to do with this blog is to show some of the more mundane aspects of travel in Thailand. It’s not that Thailand is a boring place – far from it, in fact – but on the internet you can’t throw a durian without hitting a blog that talks about the beautiful, charming peoples of Thailand and their quaint ways. It’s all very, well, almost imperialistic to think that way.

That’s not what this is.

Yes, the people are wonderful, but so are the folks in Kansas City and you don’t see me writing about that place. (No offense, KC – you are a great city with more fountains than any other in the world except for Rome. Lovely, charming peoples in Kansas City.)

What I aim to do is show something of what you can actually experience while in the country, and a bit of what life is like there. I don’t mean elephant rides, snake shows, parties, nightlife and the typical tourist stuff, but what happens in between the destinations and where most tourists do not venture. This is one reason why I started the site with the previous video.

The camera is unsteady and the narrative lacking, but the creator does a great job documenting the scenery prevalent around Chiang Rai and gives us an understanding of what the countryside is like. You can learn a lot from watching videos like this. You see the type of architecture, a bit of the system of roads and get a brief glimpse into what daily life is like for some.

I hope you will continue to watch and see what I drum up. I hope to have lots of videos here, for one thing, but these will be interspersed with text and audio, as I can find and generate them.

Thanks, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.