Living in Bangkok with Two Lurchers

Having now completed the Cross-Cultural Management course, and being presented with a certificate to prove this,  I am obviously totally proficient expat manager in Thailand. I no longer make cataclysmic errors in how I talk to people that result in blank stares and a wall of silence, and I have been able to influence my team’s thinking so that they anticipate issues and plan! Well maybe not, but the course did throw up a few interesting points. Nervous Anticipation After an intense, yet unusually productive two days at work, it was nice to have a change of scenery in the form of a swanky central Bangkok hotel, endless coffee and a seemingly never-ending array of deliciously tempting food. I felt quite nervous about the course, slightly afraid of how I might uncover previously unregistered, heinous crimes against Thai culture and feel truly mortified. But I was also excited to gain some knowledge and hopefully some useful techniques to make me a whole lot more effect...

Now that I’ve been here for 6 months, work has decided to send me on a two-day cross-cultural management course to learn how to work with Thais. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky enough not to have to interact with many Thais on a regular basis, so haven’t needed any guidance on this up to now…oh wait! Flailing Around By all accounts, it is better to have spent some time here before you attend this type of course so you have some real-life examples that you can reflect on. As I’ve been left to flail around, committing social faux-pas and offending people for several months, I have a lot of examples that I hope will be given some context. Hopefully I will feel completely enlightened by the whole experience and return to work as an effective expatriate manager, however, I fear it might be slightly more complicated than that. We’ve been issued with some pre-reading ahead of the course, and it appears the cultural differences run a lot deeper than I’d originally thought. The aim of the ...

The past week has been tough, probably the toughest week we’ve had so far in our 6 months in Thailand. It’s been the sort of week when I’ve questioned why we’re even here when we could be this miserable anywhere in the World! But somehow, and I don’t really know how we’ve survived to do it all over again. Stop Being So Dramatic! On reflection, I’m probably being somewhat dramatic as nothing really that bad has happened, we’ve both just been very busy and under a lot of pressure at work which hasn’t left much time for anything else. This is no different to what anyone else who has a job is facing, but for me, it feels like such a waste of our time here if we just follow the work, eat, sleep, repeat routine. I feel like we’re incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity to live in such a weird and wonderful country, I just don’t want to waste it. I think it’s like the ‘fear of missing out’, or ‘FOMO’, a term that younger, cooler people might use. You believe that everyone is out...

When you search for the top tourist attractions in Bangkok, several websites will point you in the direction of shopping malls. The only recommendation that is more bizarre is to “ride the BTS” which I can assure is not an attraction and is merely a convenient, yet crowded method of getting around Bangkok. A Shopping Mall. Really? So, the first question is why would anyone want to visit a shopping mall when they’re on vacation? You can go shopping any time at home so why would you ever think about deliberately going to a mall when you should be doing something more cultural? When you live here, you do find yourself venturing into malls quite frequently. One reason is there are just so many of them! I’m not actually sure how many there are, but really there is an infinite number, as new ones are constantly being built. The site of the old Dinosaur Planet on Sukhumvit Road (which strangely burnt to the ground just two days ago) is now destined to become a high end, low rise mall s...