as a quick trip into the market. I usually pride myself on being time conscious. If I know I need to be somewhere I'm not going to get caught in a jam that makes me late. I don't usually get caught in situations where I have to politely continue a conversation or go into over-time when I'm teaching. It's not in my personality to not be tied to my watch; however, for the past two years I haven't been wearing a watch, and here's why.
I found myself constantly looking at it to see what time it was. I decided I needed to be more "Thai" and concern myself more about relationships rather than time. After all, time is what we have more of (that's not so American is it? For the American time is money, we don't want to waste time, etc.). So I've made a conscious effort not to be so concerned about starting and finishing on time which seems like trouble for our furlough next year but usually works well here.
Then I start with a new student at my house. She's been really faithful to come, but she is time conscious. It's really thrown me for a loop. When it's 10:00 she stands up and says it's time to go. I'm still the one talking, enjoying, and the one not looking at the clock.
A week or so ago it was the week to eat at the church so we planned to stop at the market before services. We left out a little late, but I thought if I returned to Susie time conscious mode I should have no trouble running in, buying some fried chicken, and getting to church on time. Boy was I wrong!
I went to buy the fried chicken, and the lady charged me 90B. I thought that was a bit high, but I didn't have time to do a lot of figuring in my head. I was thinking if I can hurry up with this I can make it to another stall and buy something else for lunch. I raced off to another stall where the lady recognized me and knew what I wanted. She had already seen and talked to me so I felt obligated to wait for the customers who were ahead of me. The fried chicken seller came up and said she overcharged me and gave me back 30B which confused me. The people in front of me bought what I wanted at this stand so I had to wait for her to fill up a couple of more bags which gave me time to think about what I owed for the chicken. I decided that I now owed the fried chicken seller 20B. :) So I grabbed my new bags and raced off to explain to the chicken seller why I owed her 20B. The poor guy next to me wanted to talk about how good my Thai was but by that time I was back to being time conscious Susie. He got a quick thank you, and I was off.
So I guess all in all the no watch experiment has helped me in the long run for life here, but it has made me nervous about furlough. I'm not sure I like being married to my watch anymore so when I have to be at a lot of places on time it might be difficult. Will I obsess about it again like I used to? Probably a little obsession in America is the right thing to do...we'll see how it goes.
We did make it to church on Thai time after all that. I do have one more thing to share about time--our friends also have a saying, "Come to work on Thai time and leave on Farang time." :) Most people know there's a difference. It just gets confusing when we're all trying to operate on each other's time table culture.
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