<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by rjh:
It's my experience that it's no big deal to wear pants, even in hot season in BKK. If you're wearing pants, you may begin to think that farang in shorts look fairly silly.</font>
Good for you, but for us "temperature-challenged" people, wearing pants when walking around from site to site when above 75 degrees F (let alone the humidity) is unthinkable. My ego certainly does not care if others think it silly, nor if it attracts the comments of the Thais.
Wearing pants or not, you still stick out and are a farang.
The only time I wore pants was at dinner if going to an "upscale" restaurant or if visiting wats.
If I was there for business, of course I would wear pants. But then I'm going from a car w/ A/C to a building w/ A/C etc. etc. I'm not walking miles to get to my meeting.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by UAL Traveler:
Thais are extraordinarily adept at instinctively assessing social position and class....</font>
Lucky for us, as a farang, you are "automatically" assigned a high social position and will be treated as such. If my "position" was knocked down a few pegs due to my shorts wearing, so be it, we never felt our treatment suffered because of this.
I was under the impression that the Thais we interacted with were very pleased due to our attempting to speak the language and adding the all important Krap or Kah to show an added level of respect.