My Spanish friend Pablo bought a pin (like the kind you pin to your shirt) in the area behind the university that's kind of like a small city for the students.
The pin said this: ไห้ รัก ไห้ รอ. Transliterated into English bastard, it's something like "hai rak, hai raw." When he showed it to me and my other American friends, we were puzzled. My first thought whenever I see a word in Thai that I don't understand is that it might be a word in English transliterated into Thai bastard. And the word "hai" loosely means "give" but has many meanings related to transference when used in conjunction with other words. So I figured the pin might say "give rock, give roll," which, I thought, was a pretty good guess and might translate properly into something like "Rock and Roll, bro! I'm wasted!" Later in the night, however, my friend Erin asked one of our Thai friends what it meant and reported that it read, "If you want love, you have to wait," which would have been disastrous if I had pinned it to my chest for all the ladies to see how much I'm down for whatever. Just disastrous.
