Just this week alone, President Barack Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited Thailand, presumably because it's high season for travel in the superpower calendar. And who doesn't love it when important people come here? It gives us the chance to adorn them with garlands, giggle when they attempt to speak Thai (not to mention swoon when they wai), and most notably offer them a free tourism pitch for our most amazing country!
However, despite the grainy front-page photos from such eminent visits, sometimes cultural surprises result in some embarrassing blunders for our foreign guests. So we've decided to laugh at the mishaps of others when they step onto our humid turf. Why? Because we can! Here are three of the best.
Ai hia!
"Worthy of Trust and Confidence". That's the motto of the United States Secret Service, one of the world's most elite law enforcement agencies.
And while these badasses can take a bullet for the president, apparently they can't shield him (or her - Hillary 2016!) from an itty-bitty monitor lizard! That's because while inspecting Government House ahead of Obama's visit last week, Secret Service agents mistook the khlong-dwelling reptiles wandering around for "ferocious, carnivorous komodo dragons found in parts of Indonesia" according to the Bangkok Post citing a Government House source.
No word if these same agents also run away screaming when Obama's dog Bo gets too close to them.
No ha-ha for Gaga
It started innocently enough; Lady Gaga came here in May to wear her usual ridiculous outfits and sing her hits at The Born This Way Ball. But a seemingly innocuous tweet she posted upon arriving at Don Mueang incited controversy ahead of her concert: "I just landed in Bangkok baby! Ready for 50,000 screaming Thai monsters. I wanna get lost in a lady market and buy fake Rolex."
Some fans decided to boycott her concert, some local musicians commented on the hypocrisy of an artist who relies on copyright laws to make her living, and the Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) even sent an official complaint to the US ambassador in Bangkok! While we can hope this will ensure that future visitors only tweet that they want to buy OTOP products, perhaps the real embarrassment here is that an international superstar - who has more money than most of us will ever see in our lives - can't afford a real Rolex?
Mouth pong
Every Thai knows that there are certain places in this country where you should never have your mouth open. For example, while sitting on a boat on the Chao Phraya River (nasty water), when walking through heavy traffic (nasty pollution), and at a ping-pong show (nasty everything).
Unfortunately Bradley Cooper didn't get the memo while he was here filming The Hangover Part II. After the movie was released in May 2011, Cooper went on an episode of Conan O'Brien and admitted that he accidentally caught a ping-pong ball coming out of a woman's vagina in his mouth while attending a local show.
Cooper explained: "I being the jackass that I am thought why don't I do a still
[photo] where we are watching her do this. It went shoot - right in my mouth! Handy wipes are coming out from everywhere and
[fellow cast member] Ed Helms is throwing up - it was memorable."
We do it too!
It's not just our international friends that that have made gaffe-tastic mistakes. Here are some examples of stupid things people from Thailand have done when dealing in foreign affairs:
- Former prime minister Banharn Silpa-archa accidentally referred to Queen Elizabeth II of the UK as "Queen Elizabeth Taylor" when she visited the Kingdom in Oct 1996.
- Former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban said, "I don't respect 'farangs'. We do not have to surrender to them," when asked about having foreign observers monitor our 2011 elections.
- We could write a book on Yingluck's gaffes on the international level; here are some of the more notable ones:
- She referred to Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak as the "president"; wonder how she would feel if people called her "puppet minister".
- She accidentally said "overcome" instead of "welcome" to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a press conference in Nov 2011.
- In a meeting in Laos this month, Yingluck accidentally misread the part of her speech where she was supposed to say "thank you, thank you, thank you", but instead read it as, "Thank you three times!" Groan...
