Losing The Forest

This is the sign in front of my friend Stewart's new drug store, Happy Drugs.

The other day I asked him if he knew what it meant. Being the smart guy that he is and being that it's his sign and his shop, which happens to be a drug store, he guessed that it meant "drug store", which is correct - although I explained to him that it translates directly as "sell drugs".

I'm always giving him a hard time about his Thai language skills, as he's been here for almost 4 years and has put very little effort into developing them - to his own detriment. I've always felt that speaking and reading Thai gives you a special insight into Thai life and a more fulfilling Thailand experience.

At the same time, getting too comfortable in your environment can cause you to lose perspective(i.e. you can't see the forest through the trees), and, quite often the "forest" is the best part of living in a foreign country.

From my own experience and from observing expats over the years, when living in a foreign country for an extended period of time, it's very easy to "lose the forest". Upon first arriving, there's a desperate struggle to put your "new" world in order, to understand the quirks of the local culture, and to assimilate with society. In other words, what usually takes us 20 years to do as children and young adults, we try to do in 2 years (or 2 months) as expats.

Needless to say, the rush to comprehend this new environment is usually completed through brash assumptions, generalizations, and rationalizations, which leaves an enormous gap between what you see your new home to be and what it really is. The danger is that once this belief system is solidified, you become blind to new perspectives and even worse - cold realities.

I guess that is what happened to me because while I looked at the sign and clearly saw five letters that spelled out "drug store", Stewart saw "drug store" described by 2 Pac-Man guys in the middle with their mouths wide open waiting for some pills.

I'm not sure who's more right, but it made me miss my first months in Thailand many years ago, when everything was new, and I was just a babe in the woods, surrounded by nothing but forest.