soy una gringa

Spanish is turning out to be ever-so-helpful here in Bangkok. Sometimes I use it to help out a stranger. Other times I use it to avoid one.

I was standing alone at a bus stop on Sukhumvit after lunch today. Mariela and Alyssa had taken the BTS to read at Starbucks. I wanted to try out bus 2 since Navin (the tailor) told me it ran near my road.

Naturally, a woman who’s standing by herself wants to be approached by a strange man, right? After I had been standing there for two or three minutes, this guy walked up to me and asked, “Do you speak English?”

He didn’t look Thai, and I couldn’t place his accent. Ever-suspicious, I said the first thing that popped into my head.

“No, no entiendo ingles,” I replied, looking distinctly non-latina and definitely non-European.
“Ohhh. Spanish?”
“Si, si,” I said, naively thinking he’d lose interest.

But he didn’t lose interest. He said he had a friend back in New York who knew a little Spanish and he, in turn, knew un poquito.

"Does 'Si' mean 'Yes'?" he wanted to know.

Much to my amusement, he spent the next half-hour combining English, gestures, and the two or three Spanish words he knew to try to get me to understand him.

I honestly don’t know how I kept a straight face. Especially when he told me his name (“My nambre es Jason.”) and handed me a small slip of paper with his number on it.

He wanted my “nambre” and phone number. I told him, “Me llamo… Lauren.”

When I speak Spanish, I don’t sound like a total gringa. If I'd been quicker, I probably could have gotten away with being from Spain. But I gave my real name, sounding totally, 100% estadounidense.

Anyway, he must be really thick, because he didn't question it and continued trying to Spanishify his English to help me understand him.

I told him I had a novio. He didn’t understand that, so I mimed someone taller than me, and pretended to hug my invisible novio. He asked if I was married. I shook my head "No," but realized I shouldn't acknowledge that I understand English. (Incidentally, it's really rather difficult to pretend not to understand someone when you actually do.)

Unfortunately, he was waiting for the same bus I was.

When we got on the bus, he asked if I drove in Spain, pantomiming using a steering wheel. I played confused, acted as though I suddenly understood, and told him no, I didn’t drive there, because there was a metro in Madrid ("El metro, como el beh-teh-ese," I said, while pointing up to the BTS station) and people like to walk. I told him Madrid was very beautiful. Of course, the only word of it he probably understood was, “No.”

He had to get off at the same stop as me, but so did a lot of people. I let the crowd separate us, put on my sunglasses, and made a quick escape, succumbing to a fit of giggles as soon as I knew I was out of sight.