Ling, Ling

Ling means monkey. It's the only Thai word I can remember from my back seat language lesson. The word for cow sounded almost identical to the word for pig. I had a tough time distinguishing a tree from a nose, and car and sheep sounded pretty much interchangeable. The Thai have a much more complicated language that we do. There are 44 Thai characters, 26 vowel characters that can go above the word characters and 4 different melody characters to go on top of those. One word can literally have five different meanings depending on the tone in which it is said. John and I got a mini-lesson yesterday on our way to the Phaimi Historical Park. The lesson came from a nine year old. We pointed to parts of our body; she told us the words in Thai. Sometimes John and I had different pronunciations, but our teacher smiled every time we came close and we figured we were doing pretty well. By the time we reached the Phaimi excavation site in the Korat Basin, I'd forgotten everything except the word for monkey. We all amused ourselves by pointing to each other saying "ling, ling, ling, ling." and laughing.

We'd come to the Korat Basin with Sudarat - Tuk for short; Chaipion - Tum for short and their three children. Tuk is the sister of Suwanee. Suwanee is a friend of the son of a friend of my Mother's. (I'll give you a minute to sort all that out). The Korat Basin was fascinating. The excavation site contains the 1000 year old remains of Thai descendants. But nothing could compare to the Phaimi Temple.

It was built in the late 11th century AD and is similar in architecture to the Angkor Wat temple of Cambodia. We could have spent all day walking through the stone arches, gazing through the windows, at the buddahs and into the courtyards. The stone work was nothing short of amazing.

Our entire trip to the Nakhorn Ratchasima province of Thailand has been great. We toured the city of Korat, walking in and out of stores getting a taste of the local culture; we visited Suwanee and her family in Dunkwean where they produce Thai pottery, and we spent a day touring the town of Pak Thong Chai where Thai silk is dyed, spun and woven. There we walked up and down the small town streets visiting the silk shops and listening for the clat-clat of looms.

This was our first experience in an area where no one spoke English. Away from Suwanee and her family, we were totally on our own. We couldn't understand what people said and we couldn't read the street signs. On the buses, the signs passed by us too quickly to memorize their characters and compare them to a map.

To get back from Pak Thong Chai I employed the technique of drawing a clock on a piece of paper and presenting it to a bus driver. "Korat, Korat," I said pointing to the clock. He held up five fingers. Well now, that worked pretty well. Only at 5 O'clock the bus wasn't there. Back to the drawing board. Eventually after saying, "Korat, Korat" enough times someone pointed to a waiting bus and we hopped on board. "If this bus doesn't go to Korat," John said. "We're screwed."

It did go to Korat and once there we tried a different trick. John handed another bus driver our hotel receipt. Somewhere in all those Thai characters we knew there had to be the hotel name. He gave us a funny look but then he nodded and pointed to the seats behind him. "I guess this is the one," John said.

It took a while, but after one week we feel we finally have the buses figured out, only now it's time to head back to Bangkok. We said good-bye to Suwanee, Tuk and Tum tonight, promising them postcards from Nepal. From the back seat of Tum's car, a very sleepy nine year old girl waved good-bye and called to us from the window. "Ling ling, ling, ling, ling."