Some funny things my wife did and her observations during her first month in the US:
After getting out of JFK airport and on to the Belt Parkway: The trucks look like toys! Look! The farangs are driving cars!
After seeing the kitchen/dining room which is the first room in my apartment: So this is our room?
She would laugh every time she saw a watermelon. She said that they are a lot smaller in Thailand.
She couldn’t believe that people don’t eat rice with every meal.
She kept on asking me the first week, “Where are all the people?”
She would let me turn on the fan because it was too cold outside. It was 26C.
She kept on forgetting that my Indonesian friends were not Thai and would start babbling in Thai to them. Being good sports, they would just repeat whatever she said back to them in Thai. The only disturbing thing was their Thai accent was better than mine, and I’ve been studying this monkey language for two years.
She finally understood what jet lag was. Before, I would land in Thailand after a 17 hour flight and she would get mad at me for wanting to sleep in the mornings and not rushing out to meet the whole family. She was lights out the first week she was here.
It took about a month before she understood the purchasing power of the dollar (One dollar is not equal to one baht.) It wasn’t until she lived her for a few weeks and took charge of the food budget that she realized this. In all fairness, it took me a while to stop converting every purchase from baht to dollar instead of looking at the purchase relative to the cost of living in Thailand.
She was amazed that at the number of white women with black husbands. She was even more amazed that no one gave a shit or thought that it was strange.