Must-do things in Southeast Asia

Food Have a noodle soup or a spicy kebab for breakfast. Learn to distinguish at least ten types of rice and fifteen kinds of bananas. Drink beer with ice. Identify the quality and popularity of a restaurant by the number of paper napkins on the floor and the number of dogs around. Have your rice soup with an egg cracked into it.

Now this leads us directly to the Bum Gun … Use this great invention, it makes the true paperless office possible in countries without toilet paper. Its uses are manyfold and reach from the intended purpose to ant control or mosquito killing.

Customs & Culture Greet with a wâi, a prayer-like palms-together gesture. Take off your shoes when entering a home or a temple. Tap your feet to karaoke music. Let your pleasure in slapstick comedy be revived. Play volleyball with your feet only. Go to see a Thai boxing event. Get a Thai massage and have your eyeballs pushed into your head.

Street life Take a torch with you; don’t expect any street lighting. Aspire to Lexus ownership, heavy SUVs have built-in right of way. Try to walk amidst the cramped swirl of buses, trucks, motorbikes, cars, taxis, tuktuks, people, sometimes cows and dogs, wagons and handcarts delivering sacks of rice, piles of clothes, ice blocks, watermelons, animals, whatever. Accept the fact that the maximum passenger load means there is always space for one more. Caution on a zebra crossing; these are favourite areas to be run down. Joking apart, what we noticed is that the locals really watch out for each other on the streets (except for SUV drivers).

Animals Careful with cows on the roadside, they make unpredictable moves! The same applies for dogs, which at night form street gangs, protecting their territory. Barking across town in the middle of the night, they transfer the message of approaching strangers to each other. Get used to see cats with cutoff tails: Apparently they are not mutilated, but born that way. Accept the fact that geckos defy the laws of gravity. Count the Tokay Gecko’s cries and hope it will be seven – that brings good luck! Don’t put hamsters into prayer wheels. It will not optimize your kharma, nor help the hamster to be reincarnated as a tiger!

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