Language barrier

We’d only been away from home a week.  A week into our six month trip.  Our first week had been spent in Hong Kong, with a family who were intensely English in the  way only expats can be.  We’d eaten Marmite on toast, been to a hand bell ringing practise, giggled as we watched Morris Dancers.

We arrived at our next destination after an interminable stop-start taxi trip through the notorious Bangkok traffic.  Hot, queasy, and nervous, two teenagers, turning up at a stranger’s house, all the arrangements made by my mother.  The taxi dropped us in a quiet walled courtyard at the end of a dusty lane off the roaring urban highway.

There were two buildings surrounded by lush tropical planting and shaded by the highrises on the nearby main road.  We stepped over the threshold of the larger house, poking our heads into a blue walled kitchen.  A smiley lady who was chopping herbs started chatting away in Thai and then shouted across the courtyard.  A girl our age came hurrying over from the other house and also started talking to us in Thai.  We did lots of smiling and said the only word we knew “Sawadee”, which according to the huge sign at the airport meant “welcome”.

They were clearly trying to communicate something important to us, but we just smiled and nodded, desperate to shed our heavy backpacks, our pale English faces growing redder and shiner by the minute in the overwhelming heat and humidity.  Eventually, the girl led us inside and through the kitchen to a hallway with beautiful dark, shiny wood floors, our trainers squeaking as she took us upstairs, past a small shrine with golden statues and burnt incense sticks, to a bedroom with a double bed and the blessed relief of air conditioning.

On the bed were a letter and two maps of the city.  The letter, from my mother’s friend, explained that she and her husband were away and would be back in a couple of days.  We would be fed three times a day if we were home, her cook and family would look after us.

Over the next two days we tentatively explored our surroundings.   Bangkok was like nothing I’d ever experienced.  The heat and humidity blanketed us like an incense scented karvol steam inhalation.  Walking down the street required effort worthy of running a marathon.  But we discovered a lake with pedalos, which we steered under the cooling mist of a fountain, a freezing cold temple to shopping and a low wooden school full of smartly dressed navy and white unformed girls who waved and said “hello” every time we walked down the dusty lane.

We’d return to the house for meals.  And what meals.  The food was a world away from the Thai restaurants in London.  Delicate, citrusy, very lightly spiced and fresh, perfect for the sweltering heat.  Big bowls of clear chicken broth with coriander for breakfast, sour green papaya salads, stir fries with herbs and greens.  We got used to not being able to communicate with the lovely people looking after us.  We had nodding and smiling down to a T, said thank you in Thai at every opportunity.  When we weren’t eating, we’d go to our room and pore over the maps, trying to match the places we read about in our Lonely Planet with the bus routes and rivers snaking their way over the crinkly paper sheets.

After two days, our hosts returned and greeted us with smiles and apologies.  “Sorry we weren’t here to welcome you, hope you’ve been enjoying yourselves.  Have the staff been looking after you?  Have you enjoyed the food”  “Oh yes, they’ve been so kind, it’s all delicious.”

They spooned rice onto our plates, looking rather embarrassed “There’s just one thing.  The staff have been trying to tell you, but you didn’t understand.  You see, we never wear shoes inside Thai homes.  Outside shoes are considered very unclean.”

Mortified, I thought back to the many times we’d seen the barefooted staff sweeping and wiping the beatiful floors.  Wiping off our dusty shoe prints.  The dirt we’d carried in from outside.

For all our reading of the Lonely Planet, we’d omitted to look at the local customs chapter.  It’s not a mistake I’ve made twice.

For this week’s Sleep is for the Weak writing workshop, I’ve chosen to interpret the prompt “When did you say the wrong thing, and wish you could have eaten your words” as “When did you do the wrong thing because you didn’t understand what was being said.”