Visitors from outside the Kingdom are often enthralled and amazed at the incredible attention paid to the king and the royal family in Thailand. It’s understandable, especially if you’re coming from the US, where the tradition of nobility and aristocracy doesn’t exist. It’s a fascinating spectacle, and one that is worth understanding from a Thai perspective.

If you wander out of farangland and start associating with the Thai disco crowds, it helps to know a little bit about how a Thai gets drunk.  So let’s go over some of the cultural drinking norms to give you a good foundation for politically correct belligerence.

Where a wai fits into Thai culture is a complicated issue linked to the many levels of status that will be impossible to a foreigner to ever understand on every level. The role of multi-faced status on every interaction in Thailand is complicated to an outsider but to Thais is second nature. You don’t have to learn all that for a brief stay, but a basic understanding goes a long […]

Visitors coming to Thailand from the West arrive with preconceived notions about how the world thinks, many of which are incorrect. One such notion is that most of the world is Christian—in fact, it is not. In Thailand, try as they might, Christian missionaries have spent the past two hundred years or so failing miserably at converting this happily Buddhist nation.