Chiang Mai : Getting up to Speed

One of the many impressive floats at the flower festival.

Right then, I have now been here a little over six weeks - wow, time has flown by!  That will be the having fun I suppose, which I certainly have been, school is great, but still leaves me plenty of free time to just chill and make use of that massive pool, or get on my bike and explore the area.  There certainly is a lot to see around here, not just in the city itself but the surrounding country too, mountains, rivers and waterfalls of course, and indeed not a few temples.  I will definitely do a 'things to look at around Chiang Mai' post at some point.

There always seems to be something going on around here too - often many things at once in fact.  Just since the start of February we've had the wonderful flower festival, the Jai Thep music festival (a proper festival in a field with camping and even mud!), various celebrations of the Chinese New Year - it is the year of the doge, sorry dog now.  And barely a day goes by without one or other of the mall carparks near my condo being taken over by some sort of event, generally a mix of live music and open-air dining...

There was more than just the flowers.

So how is the language learning going?  Well - this is a very odd language from a Western perspective.  Many of the concepts we're used to are simply absent, there are no tenses, no cases, no declining of verbs at all, no gendered nouns, no adjectival agreement, no plurals even.  The same words are used for object and subject pronouns, or as possessives - not exactly articles, there are, again, no articles.  Even the idea of a distinction between verb, noun and adjective isn't really here... take the (very important) word 'sanuk', I can say 'Chiang Mai sanuk' - Chiang Mai is fun.  But also, 'pom sanuk tii Chiang Mai' - I have fun in Chiang Mai.  But that isn't to say there is no grammar at all... indeed in many ways the language is quite rigid, often a strict word order has to be adhered to, or there are rules along the lines of, you have to specify something, for instance, you cannot simply answer a question with 'it depends', but rather you must say 'it depends on '.

Jai Thep music festival.

I begin to get the feeling that it is a mistake to assume that because Thai lacks so many familiar grammatical elements, it must be simple - rather the complexity lies elsewhere.  One thing we've begun to touch on is the idea of 'classifiers' - as I say, Thai lacks plurals, but, if you are going to refer to a number of things, you can't simply say number - thing.  Rather the structure goes number - thing - classifier, for instance to say four chilli peppers I would say 'prik sii met' where 'met' is the classifier.  Apparently there are at least six hundred of these... not really looking forward to trying to remember lots of them, not least given they really don't add any useful information to what you are saying.  But by all accounts if you miss them out it is going to make it less likely that the locals will understand you...

Wat Haripunchai in Lamphun.

Given I'm getting around by bicycle, another thing I'm having to get to grips with is Thai traffic which is... interesting.  This country does not have a great reputation for driving, in fact statistically it ranks as one of the worst places in the world for road deaths, and honestly you can see why.  There are for sure plenty of people here who can drive, but there are also a lot who are really quite bad - indicators and indeed all lights are optional, people will drive on the wrong side of the road, and giving way is just not a thing - they do paint zebra crossings on the roads here, and you will sometimes see tourists standing folornly at the edge of one as cars stream by.  I guess a corollary of the 'no giving way' thing is the behaviour that I'm pretty confident is causing all those deaths, a very Thai thing which is to simply pull out into moving traffic without looking, the particular style in fact is to pull out, or away from the kerb, and then dawdle along for a few seconds doing, well, I am really not sure what.

At the Queen Chamadevi monument.

In fact though, on a bicycle, none of this is too bad.  Other people may not look before pulling out but I sure do, and I am also aware that they are going to do that... and there are plenty of upsides to riding here too.  The roads are generally very good, and everybody drives pretty damn slowly, in fact on my bike I am often one of the faster vehicles around, indeed I had to get used to cars sitting behind me, not in frustration as they would be back home, but simply because they are quite happy to drive at the same speed as me.  Road rage is just not a thing here at all, Thai culture massively frowns on both public display of emotion, particularly anger, and also criticising other people in any way.  So unlike back in England I don't get passing drivers yelling at me, and I just don't have to worry about some angry driver deciding to attack me for having the temerity to overtake him... bottom line then, I do feel pretty safe here.

Photos to go with this post can be found here