Children put their shoes back on after visiting the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, Bangkok. Image by me.

Most of my travels have taken me to places where I knew the language or where English was relatively common. I can think of stops in India where things seemed to be Hindi only. There were remote villages in Guatemala where Mayan dialects predominated and my Spanish was useless. Or a moment or two in Barcelona or it’s suburbs where Catalonian and Spanish seemed many many miles apart.

But overall – I’ve had relatively few days of complete incomprehension.

While English is spoken by some, and major tourist stops include plenty of English signage – our time in Thailand has included several misunderstandings so far. Interactions where neither party knew what the other was trying to say. At all. Times when pantomiming only seemed to make it worse.

The trick is to avoid feeling, or throwing off, frustration. Which is easy when you are browsing a shop or idly looking over the contents of a food cart – but harder when it’s a more critical moment involving key travel details.

Laughter and smiles help a great deal. And getting a few basic Thai phrases under the belt is proving really handy. But better still – has been acceptance (in addition to the smiling).

Being ok with not being understood feels hard at first. I think it’s part of being human to want to be understood, right? We spend our first year or two working baby overtime trying to understand the world around us, and to get to a point where the adults can understand our most critical requests. Clarity is such an important part of our Business and Educational culture. It’s what so much of secondary education is about. Why be ok with returning to incomprehension?

While hard – acceptance feels good. By acceptance – I mean not giving up on communicating. In fact just the opposite. By being ok with not always being understood – I feel freer to interact with more locals, more often. Even if the results are frequently hilarious.
Those moments of misunderstanding feel vibrant – reading facial expressions in minute detail for any clues. And when things do click – and understanding does happen, it feels special and magical. Like what a wonder it is that any human communicates with any other human at all, let alone that there are trillions of those successful human to human interactions each day.

I know things may be more challenging in rural parts of Laos or Cambodia. So I will be sure to have even more chances to practice being misunderstood, and enjoying understanding when it happens. Looking forward to it!