Motorcycles and Accidents

January 29, 2009 at 12:10 pm (Bumrungrad Hospital, Chulalongkorn Hospital, Sukhumvit, motorcycle accidents, motorcycles)

In the last two months, I am aware of three motorcycle accidents in my area.

Tonight, coming out of Ploenchit Centre onto Sukhumvit Soi 2, there was a bunch of people clustered around the point where the driveway meets the road. There was an overturned motorcycle, which looked suspiciously like a police motorcycle, as it was creamy-white and had a red beacon light on a post. There were at least 8 people standing around, three of whom looked like uniformed security guards.

One young lady was lying on the ground, sitting up, and holding another who was whimpering and obviously in pain and probably shock. The one holding her was obviously trying to comfort the injured girl but not having much success. I didn’t see any blood, and the girl’s jeans and shirt were not torn, so I suspect she got hit by the white motorcycle and knocked flying.

I stood there and watched for a good ten minutes, wondering if I should help or intervene to get the girl to a hospital. No taxi pulled up and no ambulance either.

Finally I decided that she was well taken care of by the 7 or 8 people standing around, and I began to leave.

Just at that moment, a motorcycle taxi came out of the parking lot beside and behind me, trying to go out the entrance rather than driving another 8 or 10 meters and go out the exit. A security guard jumped into his path and told him sternly not to drive there, to go out the exit, not the entrance. The motorcycle taxi driver said “I’m just going over to the Rajah Hotel” and pointed down Soi 2, and the guard let him go. If I had been the security guard, I would have rapped the motorcycle driver on the knuckles and enforced the rules, but this is Thailand, and I am not a security guard.

A couple of weeks ago, my assistant came to work one day, limping, with her face scratched up and with her left eye swollen and bruised. It looked like she had been in a fight. She said she had been walking on the sidewalk on Soi 4 and a motorcycle taxi had come up behind her and knocked her down. The bike ended up on top of her, and somehow she ended up with a black eye.

She said the driver was most concerned and drove her to Chulalongkorn Hospital. Bumrungrad is much closer, but Bumrungrad charges farang rates, whereas Chulalongkorn charges Thai rates. He stayed with her at the hospital and paid her bill. You see, there is at least one gentleman in Thailand. Then he drove her back to Soi 4.

I asked if she sat on the motorcycle like a man (legs on both sides of the bike) or like a woman (side-saddle, a particularly dangerous and unstable way to ride a motorcycle, especially after you’ve been in an accident and are unsteady). She said “sidesaddle, of course”. Sigh.

I told her that if a motorcycle on the sidewalk knocks me down, the first thing I would do is punch the idiot in the face. But that’s just me. They’re not supposed to ride on the sidewalk in the first place, but they take it as their personal roadway with all these stupid and annoying pedestrians blocking the way.

About six weeks ago, I happened to be at the corner of Sukhumvit and Soi 4 waiting for the light to change so I could chance crossing the road. I was right beside the police box.

A motorcycle carrying a large load came up fast along Sukhumvit, no more than a metre from me, and then zigged right, immediately in front of a car. He hit the bumper of the car and the bike went flying. The car driver slammed on the brakes, which was fortunate, as the driver, bike, and cargo were scattered immediately in front of the car. The bike rider rolled a few times and came to a stop face down.

Within seconds, a policeman emerged from the police box, and walked quickly over to the car, said something to the driver, and then motioned the car to go around the mess and leave. He walked over to the motorcyclist, who was now sitting on his bum, trying to get his helmet off. The policeman yelled at him, then helped him stand the bike up and push it off to the middle of Sukhumvit, which has a wide median and concrete pillars holding up the SkyTrain. They stood the bike on its stand next to a pillar. Then they went back and gathered up his cargo, which turned out to be bolts of material. Then, are you ready for this? The policeman pulled out his pad and wrote the idiot driver a ticket. I was impressed.

Now if we could somehow teach the other 4 million motorcycle drivers about the rules of the road, I would be extremely happy.

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Troubles with a Thai Woman

January 26, 2009 at 4:34 am (Thai girls, Thai women, troubles with Thai women)

I don’t think there is a farang in Thailand who got into a relationship with a Thai woman and then did not regret it. This is the story of one of my assistants, whom I will call “R”.

My relationship with her was not sexual, strictly business. When she got pregnant, supposedly on the first sexual experience with her boyfriend, she did not want to tell her aged father, so she lived at my place, in a second bedroom, and I treated her like a daughter as her pregnancy advanced.

Nevertheless, she stole a lot of money from me.

She did it in a subtle way: we were supposed to participate in the IT trade show at Muang Thong Thani in July 2006. I worked nights to get Speak Easy Thai done on time. “R” made the arrangements; she said the booth was free, as the Ministry of Industry had a promotion to help small business start-ups, but there were certain expenses.

I paid for a security deposit for the booth, although the rental was free. I also paid for an advertising sign, 300 CD-ROMs with packaging, promotional T-shirts, and 1000 brochures. All together, it was over 30,000 baht. However, “R” said she found a sponsor with her sister’s help (her sister works at the German Embassy) that would help defray the costs.

I worked nights until 3AM to make the deadline.

Then at the last minute, “R” said the Ministry had cancelled the booth; she said they wanted to set up a display honouring the Queen for her birthday.

But the security deposit did not get refunded. The CD-ROMs did not get produced. There were no T-shirts, brochures, or a sign. And there was no sponsor.

One day, “R” called and said she was in the office of the CD-ROM company waiting while they did the final packaging. She called 5 times, every two hours, saying she was still waiting. Next day, no “R” and no CD-ROMs. The day after that, the CD-ROM company called and said, “When are you going to pick up your CDs? They have been sitting here all week.” I said, “R” said she was there waiting for them all day, two days ago. He said, “No, nobody has been here all week. And by the way, they are not paid for yet.”

So I went there, and sure enough, the CDs are sitting there in boxes, waiting. I got money out of the bank and paid for them again, and took them away.

No word from “R”.

Finally, she gets in touch and says she has the T-shirts and brochures and sign, but her boyfriend is driving around with them in his van. I say, “Put them in a taxi and send them here, and I will pay the taxi on arrival”. Next day she calls and says she put them in a taxi, and paid the driver for me. No taxi showed up. She said the taxi driver must have stolen the stuff.

This is beginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch.

She also had my notebook computer which I had loaned her for two days. After 6 weeks, she would not give it back.

I got in a taxi with my other assistant, “P”, and we drove out to her parents’ area, near Mall Number One. I called her several times, saying I was coming. She did not want to give the computer back. I insisted, saying I was in a taxi and coming to her parents’ house. She panicked, would not let us go to her parents’ place, but met us at the Mall with the notebook. So at least I got that back.

I never did get the 30,000 baht back and I know I never will.

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Learn Thai Like a Child

January 16, 2009 at 2:04 am (Thai language, learning Thai)
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How does a child learn a language? They are born unable to speak, and for the first 12 months, just make noises. But after 12 months, words come. Single words initially, but by 24 months, most children are speaking in simple sentences and have a vocabulary of several hundred words.

By the age of 5, most children can form complex sentence structures and communicate their thoughts and desires quite well.

How did they learn that? No young child has formal grammar lessons, they don’t do verb conjugations, they don’t do spelling tests, and they have no idea what “grammar” means.

In Western cultures, parents often sit with a young child looking at picture books and encourage learning. In Asian cultures, especially in poor Asian families, this is less of an occurrence, simply because they can’t afford to buy books. Still, even in Asian cultures, children are reasonably fluent in their language by the age of 5.

How, exactly, do they do that? And can you use the same techniques to learn a language like Thai?

The short answer is “imitation”. Children copy adults. They hear the sounds, they see the actions associated with those sounds, and their brains make connections.

The brain is a complex instrument; some people compare it to a computer, as it has inputs (sight, taste, sound, touch) and outputs (speech, movement), and storage (memory). But it is more complex than any existing computer. Your brain is constantly taking in information every waking moment, filtering some of it out, and storing the rest in “short term memory”. For example, as I am writing this here in my room in Bangkok, I can hear traffic noise from the Expressway which is not far away. My brain is not storing that noise very long, maybe only a second or two, and then it is discarded. But if someone talks to me, the storage time dramatically increases; I can recall what someone said to me half an hour ago, but if you ask me to repeat what someone said two hours or two months ago, the exact words are lost, all I have retained is the general concept. Your “long term memory” contains far fewer details.

When you try to learn an “alien” language like Thai, you need to find a way to make the brain remember the details. I call it “alien” because Thai does not use English characters, it has its own alphabet. The sounds and rhythm of the language are different from English and other European languages, the grammar is totally different, and the vocabulary has different base sounds. “Alien” seems more appropriate than “foreign”.

Children learn by imitation. But you have an adult brain. If someone sits in front of you and says “meu” 35 times, and you repeat it 35 times, will you remember the word? Probably not, because it is not in any kind of context. While you might remember it for a day, a month later it’s gone. It’s just a sound, has no meaning. But if I show you a picture of a hand with six fingers, not five, and say “meu” twice, only twice, chances are you will remember that word the rest of your life.

Why is that? Because hands normally have five fingers, if I show you a picture of a hand with six fingers, that is something different; your brain will associate that picture and the sound together and make a permanent link in your memory. That’s how children learn, but we have tricked the brain to learn faster by making the image unusual to force the link.

Furthermore, if I show you a picture of the Thai word for hand in Thai script at the same time as I show you the image and say the word, your brain will store two images… the pattern of the Thai word and the picture of the hand, along with the sound of the word; this is a three way link. A week later, when you see that word written in Thai, your brain will fire a recognition trigger and pull up the image of the six-fingered hand and you will hear the word in your brain. You didn’t learn the Thai script, the characters, you learned the pattern of characters that makes the word.

It’s like seeing “WORD” as “WORD” rather than “W”, “O”, “R”, “D”.  It’s the whole pattern that is important, not the individual letters. While you are reading this article, you are recognizing words, not spelling letters.

This is why I wrote Speak Easy Thai the way I did; the software uses 5000 interesting pictures tied to 5000 words spoken by native Thai speakers and shows you the Thai word in Thai script so your brain can make those important 3-way links. This is an excellent way to learn vocabulary; you just use the program for 10 or 15 minutes whenever you feel like it, and you get new vocabulary each time.

There is another section of Speak Easy Thai which shows 16 cartoon scenarios of common situations, like shopping in a supermarket, being in a classroom, renting a car, etc. I chose to have a young girl (my niece) draw these cartoons because she was not a professional artist. I knew in advance that her drawings would be childish and not professional, and they are. And because of that, they are memorable. When you learn vocabulary with her cartoons, you are learning words in context, like a child, and because the cartoons are different, your brain makes the 3-way links.

I have toured many of the world’s greatest museums and art galleries and viewed thousands of paintings and sculptures. But the ones I remember are the ones that were different in some way: Gauguin’s colourful south seas series is highly memorable, much more so than the thousands of renaissance art pieces. Michelangelo’s David is another example. Dali’s paintings are one more.

While Speak Easy Thai’s cartoons are certainly not up to the caliber of Gauguin, they are different enough from the norm that your brain remembers the cartoon and the Thai words in context.

Learn like a child. See, hear, remember. That’s what Speak Easy Thai is all about.

About the Author:

Douglas Anderson is the author of Speak Easy Thai [http://www.Thai-Culture-Publishing.com], an easy way to learn Thai vocabulary. The software runs on Windows PCs or Macs under BootCamp and includes Fundamentals of Thai Grammar [http://www.learn-faster.org/Thai], a 350-page eBook. Speak Easy Thai uses the Internet for updates, but does not require an Internet connection during operation.

More Thai resources at Learn Thai Faster! [http://www.learn-faster.org/Thai/]

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Thai People and Common Sense

January 5, 2009 at 10:12 am (Erawan Shrine, Nana Entertainment Plaza, Santika tragedy, Sukhumvit Soi 4, Thai Culture, Thailand Ladyboys, common sense, ladyboy bars, motorcycles, safety, street vendors, traffic in Bangkok)

Having lived in Thailand for a number of years, I am convinced that Thai people lack the common sense gene. I love them, I love living here, but every farang here has seen many examples of seemingly stupid behaviour, ranging from sidewalks that are broken and barely usable to the recent tragedy at the Santika Club on New Year’s Eve.

I live very close to the Nana Entertainment Plaza on Sukhumvit Soi 4, so tonight I walked around before it opened at 7:00 PM. I was checking to see if that complex had any safety features. I didn’t expect much and I didn’t find much.

If you haven’t been there, allow me a moment to describe it. There is a single entrance to a U-shaped complex with bars on 3 levels. The first level is the ground floor; there is no basement. The structure is concrete, although there is lots of wood around. At the entrance, there are bars on opposite sides of the lane, and both are made of wood. I could not see any sprinkler system, fire hose, alarm system, not even a water pail.

I would guess there are about 30-35 bars, ranging from small to huge. All of the bars have decorations of some sort inside, they are not bare concrete. At the Santika, some people died because of the poisonous fumes from the burning decorations.

Wandering around on the two upper levels, and peeking into some of the bars, which had doors open, but were not operating yet (because it was before 7:00 PM), I saw zero evidence of safety features.

No alarms, no fire hoses, no sprinklers, not a single extinguisher in evidence.

And there is only one way out of the complex, and that’s through the small lane at the front. There is often a truck parked in that lane, presumably making deliveries, and there are street vendors as well.

There don’t appear to be any other entrances/exits to this complex, but I do know that there are metal fire escapes on the outside at the right. I know because I used them once when the police raided the short-time hotel in which I was passing a short time and I had to use that metal platform and climb back through a window into one of the ladyboy bars. Got some funny looks that night, as I came out of the ladyboy dressing room and walked in front of the stage in full view of 20 or so patrons. It’s one of the stranger things I have done in my life.

What happened at Santika is tragic. But if a fire ocurred at Nana Plaza, there would likely be 10 times as many deaths because it’s much larger, there’s no safety equipment or emergency equipment of any kind, and there’s only one way out.

I wonder if Bangkok city government (Bangkok Metropolitan Administration) will now clamp down on safety; clearly nothing has been done so far. I suspect most commercial buildings, other than those built by Western companies, are lacking in basic safety features.

I live on a narrow soi, one lane wide. As you probably know, traffic here drives on the left. Except motorcycles, which go wherever they please. I have seen many instances where a car or truck is trying to manoeuver around the tight corners, and a motorcycle comes roaring up and squeezes in between the vehicle and the concrete building at the corner. Common sense would say, stop and wait 30 seconds until there is more clearance, but like I said, that gene is missing.

Walking along the sidewalk near Nana Plaza in the evening is a joke. In too many places, street vendors have blocked the path, leaving a very narrow space. When two Westerners approach from opposite sides, one always gives way; it’s the polite thing to do. Whenever I have done this, invariably two or three Thai people who were walking behind me refuse to stop, and squeeze through the extremely narrow opening, which is even narrower because there’s a hulking great farang coming at them. No common sense.

Today I was walking along the bike path which runs between the train tracks and a service road. My apartment is within a few meters of the service road. I discovered a while ago that it was better to walk along the bike path because it is asphalt and relatively smooth and marked down the middle with a dotted line, indicating two lanes. If you walk on the right side, bikes and motorcycles drive on the left and there is no conflict. That’s right, motorbikes use the bicycle path. This afternoon, however, I was walking along that path, keeping to the right, on my way to Ploenchit Centre. Suddenly there was a loud beep right behind me. I jumped into the ditch at the right, and looked back, and nearly fell over. There were two cars driving along this narrow bike path. No common sense.

A week ago, I was walking along the train track, and was amazed at the condition of the ties. They are very old and rotted. In many places, the spikes that hold the track to the ties are missing; the wood is in such bad condition that the spikes have simply fallen out. In this picture, taken just a few metres from Sukhumvit, the girl has her feet on a tie. Look where that tie meets the rail at the left. There should be a spike there, but there isn’t. These ties are in relatively good condition; in other places, they should have been replaced 10 years ago.

There are a dozen trains a day along this track. One wonders how long it will be before a train causes the rails to move apart an extra few centimetres and there is a derailment. Just on the other side of Sukhumvit, many people live within 2 meters of the track. If a derailment occurred there, their houses would be destroyed and many people would die.

When I first came to Thailand in 1988, the traffic was much less and the pollution was ten times worse. One day, I was in a taxi that was driving along Ploenchit at a good clip, maybe 60 km an hour; traffic was light. I was in the back seat. When we got to the intersection with the Erawan Shrine, the driver took both hands off the steering wheel, looked at the Buddha in the shrine and made a wai. This took 20 seconds or so. We’re travelling 60 kph straight ahead and he’s looking 90 degrees to the left. No common sense.

There’s no doubt that living in Thailand is an experience. I just wish the people could learn a little common sense.

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