Today I went with Thai friends out to a restaurant that served different types of curry noodle soup. One friend of mine that I call "Little One" has a tremendous amount of English skill. She has lived in America and received a graduate degree from an Australian University, but she is always seeking to learn more English.
Now I disappoint a lot of Thais with how much I enjoy and am not fazed by spicy food. Little One told me that I was "very good at eating spicy food." She asked me if that made total sense in English. She has a real passion to learn the language. I told her that normally in America people would not speak in exactly that style. Then I learned something interesting.
In Thai, the ability to eat a lot of spicy food is considered a skill that you have to practice to attain. In Thai being able to eat spicy food is a skill while in America it is not. In the US it is simply a preference, a taste.
Later I was eating some more of this curry noodle soup thing (it was spectacularly good) but I had some fish bones on my plate and I accidentally ate the fish bones!! :-( I had to eventually spit them out, which is not polite either in Thailand or the US, so I was very embarrassed.
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