Nick
Born in Napier, New ZealandA1977
Graduated Art History and Film at university
Traveling around Asian country as an English teacher.
He says "Teaching English" is a great way to learn a lot about
other cultures and different ways of life.
Travering Thailand - Bargain System!
Thailand is typical of most South East Asian countries in the respect that you have to negotiate for many services.
This can either be a positive or a negative which is the paradox; stray off the tourist route and you will come closer to something gauthentich and get ripped off (unless you learned the language from the phrase book on the plane ride over), or stay to the tourist route where rip off merchants have been ground away by the incessant flow of tourists but the remaining experience resembles gDisney-Thai.h
Interacting with the Thai people can either be a barrel of laughs (if you are in a good mood) or one of the most irritating, infuriating things possible (if you are in a bad mood).
The thing with Thailand is that most of the people that youfll have contact with if you are traveling here are the Thai's that make their crust off tourists. Thailandfs a pretty poor country and you have to fight for what you can get so these cultural factors create a mixed bunch from pious Buddhists to sketchy characters.
I've been told that you can get someone killed by throwing a few thousand baht (about 6000 yen) in the direction of the motorcycle taxi drivers. These guys are perhaps the crudest of all the people a tourist would come into contact with, but they are surprisingly polite.
When walking up to a pack of motorcycle taxi dudes, you may be met by a few mocking gestures. Donft worry, laughter is in the nature of a Thai, so laughs will be at the expense of the funniest thing around which of course means YOU!!
Once you are no longer a novelty, there will the task of negotiating the best possible price.
Hopefully you have some idea about how far it is to your destination. If not, you need to pretend you know and for this you need to bargain hard. If you donft bargain hard then this is seen as either a sign that you donft know or that you can be easily ripped off and you will be taken to the proverbial cleaners something like ga fool is easily parted with his money.h
It is proverbial because in a proverb there is no currency exchange. If we were to do a currency exchange then what are we talking about? 1000 yen? 2000 yen? No!! 150 yen. So donft ruin your holidays and walk because you thought too much about the proverb like I have done so many times.