Left: Homecomming to a green, instead of a blue pool, consequence of an electricitybill not payed.....
Living, and even more so, being married to a Thai I now conclude is an 'artform' which one has to learn. And like all good art, it doesn't come easy, or cheap for that matter!
Living with Kik is not what one can call dull or boring, contrary.... allways there's a surprise, the unexpected popping up and often (or too often?) it is of a financial caracter.
We in the western world, as I call the world were I come from, have quite different rules to live by as the Thai seem to have. Different attitudes, different value of money.
On the one hand money is extremely important in Thai society. It gives one status no matter allmost where the money comes from or how it as been obtained. On the other hand Thai are very easy and are lacks with money, when they have it most Thai spend it and they do not worry too much about the futur. Most Thai also have land which will and often can provide for them as well. It changes when one gets sick ofcourse or some accident befalls on them... then, when one doesn't have enough money things can turn awkward here. Or when one does business with the wrong people, the trouble looms big as well.
For us in the west, money is also important, but be we deal with it in a different way. We learn how to plan our expenses and how rto take care of eventualities which can happen to all of us. Hence most of us, specially when Dutch, are often over insured, when we travell, or back home, we like to be covered against most what could happen to us if we fall on some bad luck.
Also money is often a dangerpit in/for every relationship, married or not.
Now, when two people from two such different cultures and attitudes towards money start living together these issues will ofcourse surface and pretty soon as welll.
With Kik and me it is no exception ofcourse.
Kik and I also have to deal with the 'problem' that we both have difficulty saying "no" when we are asked for help by our loved ones.
Kik has also an added burden in that respect, that his cultur dictates that he takes care of some familymembers or at least contributes to it. Ergo, if something bad happens to them he will go to allmost any length to help them in any way he can.
We in the west have a somewhat more tougher way of dealing with these situations. We also see it as the responsibility of the one getting in that particular situation.... which by all reason and purprose is what we learn. We learn that we have to take responsibility for our own actions and can not allways fall back on demanding help from our children or parents.
That we have to learn how to plan our money for instance to avoid moneyproblems, etc.
In Thai society, and specially that of North East Thailand, were Kik's roots are, questions like that are not asked but help is given regardles... also regardless for what it means for oneself.
We in the west will go pretty far to stay behind/support our husbands/wives, because in our way of thinking we are closest to easchother then anything else, often even closer then our own blood family. ourr partner has to be able to rely on you, to be and feel safe with you and ofcourse as partner you do your utmost and go as far as you need to, to help your partner.
Now, these different views were not unknown to me and I knew it would cost me some before I would get the hang of it to better control the finances, part of 'learning on the job' so to speak ;-)
Now, also other things have happened since we got married last year October/November: First of all the worldwide Economic/financial crisis. Second the politicol turmoil here in Thailand culminating in the occupation the the big international airports here as well as the ending by riots of the ASEAN conferance. And well, due to these actions of two warring political groups here in Thailand,the instability of the present Thai politics have come very loud and clear to wwworldwide attention. So much that most western and asians countries are warning their citizens to be carefull to go to Thailand or at least thnik twice or three times before going on holiday here (in itself I believe these warnings are not justified except maybe for 2 or 3 small parts of Bangkok). This mixture has for one given the Thai tourism industry a relative more heavy blow then the rest of South East Asia.
Also the Thai like to present everything as positive as they can and as such they manage to be surprised (the general population for sure) when things suddenly go bad and people loose jobs etc..... then Thai society seems to get hit harder then other ones do.
For us westerners this is a strange thing to wittness aaaaand we can't help but feel sorry for these people here because of that. But one can not change the habit of a cultur. A cultur by the way which also has a lot of positive things in it from which we could learn a lot ;-)
Then also things in my homecountry went different as we expected when we started our life together. The financial & economic crisis also hit home hard there and the selling of my house was cancelled at last moment by prospective buyers due to all the negative economic publications in the media. At that time (october/november 2008 the media turned the financial crisis in such a hype that it spread widly outsite its original limits and turned it into a global, all sections of life hitting crisis, simply because of the basic nature of men to financial conservatism in times of potential and actual criisis, at least thats my humble opinion as I have also expressed earlier in my other weblog) I had allready committed us to renting a house in patong Beach where also my dog was allowed to live and we had enough space for ourselfs as well as Mac aaand one guestroom. I had forgotten to investigate beforehand the acceptance of dogs in condominiums etc of dogs and I discovered that they were not allowed anywhere as well as in most houses... ergo I was forced to rent a somewhat more expensive house, with a swimmingpol though, where the owner declared that he had no problems with our dog. Well, one has or doesn't has a dog but when one has one, one has to except the consequences and simply can not abandon a dog because of dddifficulty renting a decent place... well, at least thats how I feel about it as I believe most dogowners would agree too ;-)
Kik's family, and as such Kik as well, was in that same period confronted with the loosing of the election by his grandfather, the pater familias of the family early November. Now loosing an election in the west is not to big of a problem in itself, but here in Thailand one has to invest a lot of his own money into it ddue to the system here. And I discovered that when one looses, one realy looses and from one on the other day one looses credit, all ones money because all the outstanding bills have to be payed by the candidate who lost, etc. Loosing face is not an option in Thailand for allmost everybody and one can gues, the whole family was asked to help out.
On my part I didn't feel much for solving these problems, simply because of the situation back home and making us incapable of building a decent life ourselfs....... now for us westerners a pretty logic stand but absoluutly not for a Thai, specially one embedded in the Thai cultur like Kik..........
well, as a consequence I discovered the creativity with which Thai can come up with all kinds of things to get you to come up with money here and there for this and that, simply because the family is (temporarily) somewhat broke because of al of this..ergo, slowly one starts to 'bleed' more and more.... and before one knows one might 'bleed' too much, and like with real blood, one needs a minimum of blood to stay behind to make enough new blood to keep everything functioning!
Well, all this mixture taken together has caused Kik and me to have landed in a somewhat awkward situation .
Kik lacks of understanding of what I wrote above, and tried to explain in lots of different ways, combined with alll the other things mentioned above, made my return here to Thailand somewhat different then I expected and planned.
A big, mainly financial mess was what I found which I had absolutly no choice but to solve to the best of my abillities without crushing us in the process. If I managed or manage, only the fuuutur will tell.
Kik now seems finally to understand that our ability to go to an ATM machine (or as we Dutch say 'flappentap') has its consequences and that the partner can not go on and on and on to suply whatever they need because the suppply is rather limited and one needs money to make money (one needs blood to make new blood).
This inability to understand and/or take serious my soft and strong signals and talks before and while in Holland in May/June caused additional problems partly allready mentioned.
I, on my part have learnd that I also need to adjust my attitude and let go of the 21st century way of western thinking of the functioning of a relationship and have to look more to how things went in the 19th and early 20th century in our western world when one looks how marriages dealt with such issues. A pretty big and rather difficult shift for a liberal person like me. But when I left Holland for Thailand again, I had allready decided to adopt this other way at looking at this part of our marriage, knowing it would be hard and pretty much against my nature............. But then again at that moment I didn't know yet what had happened here in Patong/Thailand during my total of 6 weeks beeing away.
What can happen when your Thai partner gets into a panick and you are not arround.....
Ergo, these last 3 weeks have not been a party, or fun but rather very stressfull!! It is no fun if one discoveres one is forced to walk a very tight rope indeed!! And it will cloud the comming months ahead, if not longer.....
And now we struggle how to get our affairs, which looked pretty good at the start, back in ordfer again.
It is pretty hard to do that I can assure you all. And it puts a lot of strain on us in the same time!
Two different ways of thinking, two cultures!
if we manage to combine the best of our two worlds we wil survive and grow stronger out of it all then we now may feel and see, if not.... well we cross that bridge when we are forced to cross it.;-)
Feel free to let me know your feedback or own experiences. Life is, and has allways been, one big fascinating school, we all hope to finish with some level of succes, so we take in as much as we can to learn and better ourselfs ;-)
