The most prominent cultural difference, when comparing Bangkok to pretty much any typical American city, is the way that the citizens think. It sounds obvious, but I can’t really think of a better way to put it. The mentalities of the locals, in each respective city, are so vastly different, and that breeds the differences in the way of life in each place. In Thailand, the culture is much more communalistic. People are very family oriented, food is shared between everyone, things become more gray and shared as opposed to black and white and defined, like American culture.
A few examples to better highlight this:
The Thai friends that I made are some of the most hospitable people that I know. They are so eager to invite you into their homes and give you everything that they have to make sure that you’re comfortable. They won’t ask you to leave, at all, and will keep you over for as long as you want to be over. They are so willing to have less for themselves if it means that their guest will have more.
Almost every meal that we had with Thai students was “Thai style”- everyone gets a plate of rice, and a bunch of dishes are placed in the middle for everyone to share. It’s something as simple as food, but it still makes a big difference when you share everything as opposed to getting your own meal. A funny tidbit about this- I once mentioned eating “Thai style” to a Thai friend, who, obviously, had no idea what that meant. Because Thai style is the only style, it’s not a specific way of eating, it’s just eating.
Thai people are also less time bound. Time is a flexible concept, and meeting somewhere at a specific time is more of a suggestion than a set deadline, and people are usually late.
Additionally, in each culture, different things are viewed as important, and thus different things are prioritized. It’s fairly abstract, and hard to put into words, but things like personal achievements, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and rags to riches stories are not as valued in Thai culture as American culture. Status is much more important, as is what job you hold, but this is in a different way to American culture. Like I mentioned already, it’s intangible, and not really easy to quantify, but living among Thai people feels different to living among Americans.
Another big difference is that Thai motivations are different to American motivations. This is probably the best way to describe the cultural differences that I’m having a hard time describing. The differences in motivations don’t always manifest themselves in different results, and that’s why it’s hard to put to words. Thai people do things for different reasons than Americans do, and this may end up with the same result, and it may not, but the difference can still be felt in the manner in which people go around doing things. It’s not a very good explanation, and I’ll try to think of a better one, but hopefully this makes at least a small amount of sense.
Culture shock didn’t really hit me as hard as I thought it would. The first month or so was a honeymoon phase- meeting new people, traveling to new places, trying new things. We were moving too fast and doing too many things to really have time to experience culture shock, and we got used to that kind of life style (or at least I did.) After that month, month and a half, when everyone started to settle in, we realized we needed to care about our classes, and we started feeling more at home and culture shock was felt a bit more, at least for me. I started becoming very comfortable in my new way of life, I formed routines, I knew how to handle my classes, I had specific places and times to eat. This is also when homesickness came, because it felt like this was my new home and, of course, I missed some aspects of my old home. However, this period didn’t last very long, and it was followed by a period of scrambling to do everything I wanted to in the last month I had before it was all over. This started another frenzied, fast period, where we traveled a bunch, went out a lot, hung out with people a lot, and just tried to cram everything that we had left to do in just about a month. This also left no time for culture shock or homesickness, but by this time we were already fully acclimated to how we were living, and totally used to living in Thailand and everything that brought.
To explain a bit better than that muddled paragraph, there were pretty much three stages during my study abroad:
- a) Honeymoon- About a month, month and a half
- b) Settling In- 2-3 weeks
- c) Cramming- Month, month and a half
The time flew by very, very fast, and didn’t leave much room for thinking past the weekend trip. The more that I separate myself from the trip, the easier it’ll be to reflect on, and the better equipped I’ll be to do so.
