It took 8-27 attempts, when we arrived at the BKK airport at 3am, to communicate with our cab driver. It seemed to be mostly a word-stress problem, in the end, not a problem with the 5 tones, because we were saying YAOwarat instead of YawaLAT (the "r" vs. "l" vs. something in between being another part of the problem). When we arrived at the Chinatown Hotel on YaowaLAT Road, the cabbie did not know we were trying very hard to say "thank you." Ungrateful Falong. I said to E that it would be a turning point when someone responded as though they understood what we were saying.
That turning point came the next morning, and now we can bow and say "hello" and bow and say "thank you", with everything in between being pointing and smiling and trying not to be too terrible a Falong. Most of the time we are able to communicate.
But we are not always so lucky. The morning of Day 1, after a point-and-wonder ordering job at a set of sidewalk street vendors, which yielded a delicious breakfast that we post-hoc decided may have been chicken feet or pork bung in a dark, gelatinous soup, paired with rice porridge with chicken meatballs, we noticed a third vendor on the same corner had bags of tiny donuts. Breakfast dessert! Lovely! So we tried to buy them. The lady said numbers, then we produced money, then she said no. We thought we had to buy more things, so we picked up a bag of cookies to go with our donuts. Still no. We tried big bills and small bills and change, but still she shook her head. So we put down the donuts and cookies and put away the banknotes and coins (all denominations bearing the face of the king) and we walked away, sad that we had done things so Wrong that the donut lady wouldn't sell us donuts, and that we couldn't even learn from the experience, except to be humbled by the fact that things don't always work out the way you expect, even when buying donuts.
A few days later, we managed to buy donuts.
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