I know that comparisons are hateful, but after spending 2 months in Indonesia I find it very difficult not to make them! Landing in Bangkok makes you feel like having one foot in Europe and the other in an unknown area. I arrived at a great and modern airport, full of tourists, many of them speaking Spanish, and the women with much shorter clothes than in Indonesia.

1. Transport

Ah! What a delight to go on the roads and highways of 4 lanes without hearing the horns of cars and motorcycles! In Thailand the circulation is orderly, silent and fast. Sometimes you even have a seat belt!

In Indonesia you don’t know what time the bus leaves or what time it arrives. Between Bukkitingui and Parapat, about 500 km, they told me it would take 15 hours and it took 22! The bus, with a motorbike and a few chickens on board,  had already been traveling from Bengkulu for a day. It arrived on time but shortly stopped for an hour eat at a ‘Warung’ (tavern). After there were stops to visit and chat with acquaintances, dinner, breakfast, pray in the mosque, and avoid the potholes of the road. All this seasoned with the fact that the bus was air-conditioned and everyone smoked inside!

Bus in Indonesia
A quite folkloric bus in Indonesia
Autobus Tailandia
Bus from Rayong to Surin, Thailand

In Thailand, as a curiosity, I came across an elephant at the Surin bus stop!

elefant parada bus
 
 2. Religion
Buda iluminado
Enlightened Buda

If in Indonesia they were basically Muslim, with Christian and Hindu parts, in Thailand they are basically Buddhist with other minor religions.

Something that surprised me a lot is the fact that they eat so much meat: already for breakfast they usually eat ‘noddles’ or rice with pork, beef or chicken. Thinking about Buddhism and considering that it is believed in reincarnation, it seemed a bit strange to me. They justified it by saying that monks do not kill animals and that by tradition when they went to the villages to ask for food they had to eat whatever they were given.

Also surprising is the coexistence between Buddhist temples everywhere and the most exacerbated consumerism, with people shopping everywhere and with mobile phones with internet moving their fingers up and down, at least in the cities.

3. Dances
In Indonesia there are a lot of traditional dances in theaters and in the streets, and it is a lot of fun to watch the videos inside the trucks in Sumatra, where you see girls singing and dancing with the microphone in hand and a bunch of boys in caps dancing stiffly to a safe distance from the girl.
But in Thailand they win them, as they look like the Brazilians from Asia: festivals everywhere, well-structured choreographs that seem easy to do, but if you try it you will mess with your hands and feet!
These college students celebrate the ‘lent’, a time in late July where monks stay in monasteries to avoid stepping on newly sown rice fields in their food search:

Even the elephants dance!

These elephants are from the “Elephant Village” in Ta Klang, which were formerly captured by the “mahouts” in the jungles of northeast and southeast Thailand and tamed to help with field work.
Mahouts Thailand
Mahouts in action: historic pic
4. The food

In Indonesia the food is a bit spicy, but in Thailand they win by far. If they invented an Olympic specialty of spicy food, I am convinced that Thailand would be on the podium. Luckily I had a bottle of pills for heartburn!

As for the ingredients, they are very similar: rice and noodles, meat and rare fruits such as “rambutan”, “mangosteen”, “dragon fruit” and “durian”. They do eat more seafood, and a good resource is to know how to say “Pad Thai” which is noodles with shrimp and cuttlefish, in case they don’t understand any English.

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5. The pictures
Fotos rey de tailandia
El rey de Tailandia es canonista

If in Indonesia people did not have a camera, in Thailand taking photos is the order of the day.

His king, Bhumibol Adulyadej ó ภูมิพล อดุลย เดช, appears everywhere in poster format with a camera around his neck, always Canon, I suppose he must be ‘canonist’ …

Even the monks take pictures!

 

monks taking pictures THailand
Monks taking photos at Wat Prasat Phnom Rung temple
6. Relationships and sexuality
In Indonesia, premarital relationships are not consensual, although some young people in cities skip this rule.
Weddings between people of different faiths are not legal, and one must convert to the other’s religion before being married. In Indonesia homosexuality is protected by law, but it is not very visible.
In Thailand everything seems very modern: it is full of ‘Farang’ or Westerners married to Thai women, either for love or for convenience. And homosexuality is much more accepted.
One of the most interesting things is the presence of Lady boys in society. Lady boys are boys who feel like girls and dress and act like one. It is not something marginal, since they are present in large numbers in all social strata: in street stalls, in the university, on television …
Thailand also has a high rate of Westerners who go there for sex-change operations or for body surgery.
7. The language

Indonesian is so easy, and you can learn to say so many things in just 2 months, that it makes Thai sound very difficult. In 20 days I only learned to say the numbers up to 10, hello and goodbye (sawatdii kap) and thank you (kopkun kap).

It must be said that apart from Thai, they speak Khmer (Cambodian language and totally different), Laos (Laos language and more similar to Thai) and other minority languages.

Thai has tones like Chinese, and therefore a word spoken with one tone or another has a totally different meaning. If you want to practice the tones you can press this YouTube video. At least the verbs and the structure of the sentences are simpler, since there are no conjugations and the structure is quite fixed.

On the other hand, there is the issue of writing: a series of strange symbols where the vowels are the sticks above or below the lines, and nothing is understood at all! In a bar they brought me the menu, and it looked like this:

I don’t know if it’s a sense of humor or a bad joke, but the menu ended like this: 

 

Sawatdii Kap family!

Yep Yep Yep

 

 

p.d. more pictures in https://picasaweb.google.com/109101372812336982551/Tailandia