Kaw tairoob dai mai kah?

Every morning my homestay family and I watched the news. Despite my inability to understand more than one word every 10 minutes, I watched it pretty intensely. The female news anchor was stylish, the male kind of balding and gross. It was a weird dynamic. She mainly smiled and said "kaaaaah," while he blabbered on about something important.

I imagine the conversation went a little like this:

"Millions died when the ice caps melted and flooded all of Europe."

"Kaaaah"

Anyways, that morning there was a particularly graphic video of a group of young men beating a tuk tuk driver to a pulp. The security camera at what I think must have been a 7/11 caught every last detail of this merciless beating. It definitely wasn't something Good Morning America would air it in its entirety.

Champ turned to me, arms raised, hands contorted to replicate guns, "Bang Bang," he shouted cheerfully. My Meh and Paw smiled, Champ pointed at the wall where inbetween glass trinkets and posters of the Royal family was a machine gun hanging idly by a nail. "Bang Bang"

Next up, a photojournalist, Nic Dunlop, guest-lectured my class the other day. Seems like a pretty cool guy. Anyways he taught us a bit about photography and sent us on our merry way. We had four hours to get 5 quality photos of people at work in Khon Kaen.

Myself and Muriel wandered down the road past our apartment. We never really walk down there except to go to the bars on that strip. During the day it vaguely resembles a resort town and you half expect the ocean to be just beyond all the construction sites.

We wandered onto a construction site for luxury apartments. There were four woman crouched around a water jug. Water at the homestays and everywhere pretty much is served in jugs with just one cup perched on top. Everything is communal. I forgot to mention everyone eats on the floor and no one has their own plate. Sticky rice is your utensil and the rest is up for grabs.

Anyways we were interested in these woman because we had never really thought of women as manual laborers in Thailand.

"Kaw tairoob dai mai kah?"

Blank stares followed. Maybe we said "can I take your picture." Maybe we said something else. I'm going with the latter. Before we knew it we were ushered over to a skinny trendy looking Thai woman sitting in an outdoor office. She grabbed some blue prints and beckoned us to follow her further into the construction site.

At some point in this interaction Muriel and I led this woman to believe we really wanted to move into this apartment building ASAP. We got the grand tour, complete with granite counter tops and actual, not squat, toilets.

This apartment was for farang to rent out. The Thai's doing the actual labor could never afford to live in a place like this. Even the secretary was wearing slippers while she showed us around the site. Muriel and I entertained her with questions about rent, availability, size all sorts of apartment related jargon all the while creeping around the construction snapping photos. She must have thought we were out of our minds taking so many pictures of people drilling holes and painting walls. At the very end of our half hour tour she broke out her iphone and asked if she could take a picture. Of us.