It’s three a.m. on a Bangkok morning. The temperatures have cooled to the low 80s. The streets are, amazingly, empty. The highway has some traffic: a few Porsches and Lamborghinis moving along at a not-insignificant fraction of the speed of sound because this early in the morning is the only time the roads are empty enough to do so. Two hours from now the cars will be so thick you won’t be able to see the pavement on the road.

And I still can’t read the signs.

I guess that’s where this list of takeaways from my first visit to Thailand has to start: with my high speed crash and burn into the language barrier. Thai, like many other Asian languages, is a tonal language. That is, it’s not only what you say, but how you say it, that conveys the meaning. English is tonal in one major aspect: at the end of a question the tone goes up. Thus “Wanna go for a pizza.” sounds whiny and petulant whereas “Wanna go for a pizza?” sounds like you’re fishing for a go-ahead. Thus it is in Thai except that it happens on every syllable. There are three different tones (high, middle, low) which can be spoken flat, rising (low, middle), or falling (high, middle), which when applied to some twenty-one vowels, according to my preliminary calculations, yields a number of vowel sounds roughly equivalent to the number of grains of sand on the beaches of Phuket.

Clearly I’m missing something.

But the language is still just words and I found that if I sat quietly and listened to conversations around me, I started to tease individual words out of the mix and in pretty short order get, at least the context of the conversation, if not the actual meaning.

But the signs eluded me. And now I’m pretty sure I know why. Despite having similar roots in the deep past, the Thai and Latin alphabets have diverged to such an extent that you would never know they were related at all. In written Thai there are forty-four, count ‘em, different consonant letters representing twenty-one (I told you it was confusing) different consonant sounds. Vowels can be written in line with the consonants, alongside, above, below, or even in a combination of these locations; almost more like modifiers than actual letters.

Yikes.

What this means is that you can’t just read the transliteration (sometimes helpfully provided beneath the Thai script) and expect to trace the sounds back to a unique combination of Thai letters because, as we can calculate, there are a total of 44^(21^5) different consonant-vowel pairs; a number exceeding the total number of atoms in the Universe.

Plus, the guys in the Thai Department of Transliteration are fucking with our heads anyway. The purpose of transliteration is to write something in one character set that sounds like something originally written in another. Think of Vietnamese. Originally written in Chinese pictographs, Vietnamese was transliterated by the Portuguese in the 1500s. Since then the Chinese characters have been completely replaced by the transliteration. Now you can walk into a Vietnamese restaurant for some noodle soup (phở) and whether you say it “foe” or “fuh” you won’t get slapped in the face.

Because Thai is already an alphabetic language, it’s not so easy. That “ph” diphthong isn’t pronounced “f” it’s more like “p” except that you avoid saying the last eighth of the letter. The “th” combination is similar so that even Farang khi nok, like myself, don’t run around talking about “Thighland”. Same for that “kh” in “khi”. Then, suddenly, you run into “ch” which is used for a number of different sounds, only one of which sounds like “ch”. So the transliterated “chit” in places represents “chit” and in others something more like “titp”.

This all leads up to the final complication – what I have dubbed the Thai Paradox. In written Thai there are no spaces between words and no punctuation, only spaces between sentences. This makes it impossible to read a sentence unless you already know all the words and impossible to know which words are being used unless you know the context of the sentence. Which you can only get by… reading the sentence.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read the signs.

Which, as always around here, brings us to economics and to what I’ve chosen to describe as the American Paradox. Thailand has a booming economy. They are a major player in the electronics, automotive, agricultural, and food processing industries. The fertile delta of the Chao Praya River is packed with rice paddies and massive factories for the likes of Honda and Nikon. Enormous double-decked coaches shuttle workers between their homes and the factories which are running 24/7. The place is amazing.

In Bangkok, a city of eight million; twelve when you factor in the sprawling suburbs, downtown real estate is nearly priceless: tiny condos start at around US$2,000,000. Everywhere you look brand new cars gleam in the tropical sun. Along the Skytrain in Sukumvit it is impossible to be in front of a shopping mall – major brands, top of the line, zillions of square feet – without being able to throw a wadded up pink napkin and hit another mall just like it. Imagine if Walmarts were five times as big as they are here and sold nice stuff. It’s like that. Everywhere you look are Porsches and Ferraris and Bentleys and Lamborghinis and Maseratis and BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes – all of which you can buy at the malls – in a country where the import duty on cars runs as high as 300%.

Which brings us to the paradox. If you took the Average American and dropped them into Bangkok, they wouldn’t be able to afford to live there at anything approaching the lifestyle they are used to. They just wouldn’t have enough money. Everything they’d want would be too expensive. At the same time, if you took the average Thai and dropped them on our beckoning shores, they wouldn’t be able to afford to live here. They just wouldn’t have enough money. Everything they’re used to would be too expensive.

The reason they wouldn’t have enough money is that, like most countries with developing economies, labor is cheap. I took advantage of my time there to visit the dentist. In my exam and cleaning he found a cavity which he subsequently filled and polished. Three visits, sixty bucks for everything. At each visit the dentist was assisted by two techs and the equipment in the room was brand new (including the most comfortable chair I have ever experienced). Or, horror of horrors, say you woke up one morning and found that you brought something back from ElephantStay; something which made itself a new home within you. You rush to the hospital, on a Sunday, and visit a specialist who checks you over and gives you some drugs. Total cost: less than thirty bucks. Including the prescription.

This translates into a very high level of employment as pretty much anything that can be done, is done. By somebody else. Bus your own tray at the food court? Nonsense! Why do it when there is a phalanx of uniformed workers hovering, just waiting to snatch up your dirty dishes and take them away to be washed. Yes, you eat from dishes with metal utensils at the food court because there are dish washers, non-mechanical, who will clean your plate. Inside most stores the sales help outnumber the customers by a factor most easily specified logarithmically. No matter where you are or which way you turn, there’s somebody waiting to help you.

And sometimes that help is deeply appreciated, especially when trying to navigate Bangkok’s Olympian traffic. The road system in Bangkok is designed to handle 1.2 million vehicles a day. When I was there the Bangkok Post published an article stating that the number of vehicles registered in the city had hit seven million and growing at over 1,200 cars per day. Throw in the scooters and the poor pedestrian feels like they’re walking through a gate reading “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Really, it’s nuts. The worst traffic I’ve seen anywhere.

But fear not. No matter where you are there’s a friendly and helpful security guard waiting to step in and set things right. Walk up to a store and the door magically opens. The uniformed, white-gloved greeter holds the door for you, then clicks his or her heels together and snaps off a precise salute. The guards dress in styles ranging from military severe to Banana Republic Dictator. Some of them have more gold braid looped through their epaulets than Hugo Chavez wears to the Battle of Carabobo Day festivities.

But each and every one of the guards are willing to rush into the insane traffic blowing their whistles like the Keystone Cops and bring eight lanes of traffic to a standstill just so you can cross against the light.

There is of course more. Meals packed with fresh seafood for two bucks. Express boats will take you miles up the Chao Praya River for fifty cents. Everywhere you turn, there are gilded temples and spirit houses where the devout go to find out what numbers they should play in the lottery. Music. Noise. Advertising on every possible surface for every – ahem – possible product and service.

It was great.

So we got to the airport in record time and boarded the 747 for the flight to Tokyo and thence to Seattle. I’m still, now three days later, unsure of the correct day, but full of hope that I might actually get more than two hours of sleep tonight. Because when I do sleep it all comes back to me in my dreams: the amazing sounds and smells and tastes and sights. Everything just as it was.

Except in my dreams, I can read the signs.