Creating a meal and consuming the meal is very important in Thai culture. The preceding 2 activities are much better done with friends than alone. The more the merrier! Please remember to take a picture before consuming the meal. It is best if the pictures include both the food and friends and then the required posting on Facebook to garner as many likes as possible. It seems to me that the ultimate market for Facebook is Thailand.
The 4F's (food, family, friends, and fun) all go hand in hand with Thais. You will not often find a Thai living alone ... for a number of reasons. One, most Thais do have a lot of money to spend on living accommodations, 2, they like to be surrounded by family and friends, and 3, they have a strong belief in the afterlife, especially ghosts!
It is not unusual to have 5 Thai women curl up in a Queen size bed for a good night's sleep. The most number of Thais I have seen on a 125 cc motorbike is 7 (all without helmets). I will include more on safety in a later post. Whatever the reason, Thai's like company and lots of it and company means sharing. Most lo-so Thais would never go to the bank to borrow money. Instead, they borrow from their immediate circle of family and friends. Pay it forward and what goes around comes along ... are both alive and well in Thailand. Their credit rating is word of mouth. For the most part, this all works quite well except when the walking ATM, aka the farang boyfriend is involved. For whatever reason, Thai people think all farangs are wealthy and have unlimited funds available to them. I assume much of this is propagated from the 2 week vacationers who spend like there is no tomorrow and then spend the rest of the year paying off the vacation. Reminds me of Christmas back in Canada.
So, it is a bit of an honour to be invited to dinner, but beware, if you are a farang, they expect you to pay.
TTYL,
Jim
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