Mexico vs Tailand (Emotions and ways of expressing)

It has been two months since my arrival to Tailand, and in my experience, diving into another  culture has been a hole process. I really wish I could say that it has all been  a walk in  park and easy as it could be. Strangely, I can sincerely say it has. 

However, the deeper i get  to know the culture, the less I identify with it and the more differences I find from my own . As the months go by, I get a hole different type of understanding of the Thai culture and way of living , that  has been around for milions of years, and is all based on complex ways of thinking and subbtle behaviour rules. 

"Nowadays, due to the rapid advancement of technology, the traditional Thai way of living, especially in the big cities, has inevitably changed. However, it is still preserved to a large area  in the faraway rural areas where modern civilization has failed to penetrate."  As you can probably imagine, the destiny decided to send me to one of the smallest towns in Northern Thailand registraded with AFS this year. For good of for bad, and as many of my Thai friends have observed,  this town has hardly lost its magic, traditions and conservative way of thiking and behaving of the last ten years. 

As an example we can take emotions. Emotions and the way we express them has always been caracterist of each culture and location around the world. In western civilization , in Mexico more especifically , we have a tendency to be very direct and let loose our inmense flow of emotions at the first opportunity. Expressing our  feelings is a very natural thing to the point we dont really realize how much we have exteralized our opinions until we are practically yelling at someone.On the other hand, in Thailand,  it is not polite to show emotion in public. Thais are especially offended when one openly displays  anger, so ¡Watch out latinos out there!

Thai people tend to be very warm and to  smile all the time. As all humans, they have many other emotions,  but they are most likely dont show them. For me specifically, this new way of manifestig my feelings has surely been tough. It it hard to keep up with thai good matters, but at the same time ¡It has been an amazing experience to put in practice all this new way of living!