Not too long ago I finished my most recent 6-month vacation here and Thailand, returning home (กลับบ้าน) to my beloved US of A. It’s not the first time I’ve spent such a long time here in the Land of Smiles, but I think this time I’ll miss it (คิดถึง) more than ever.
So this post will be about vocabulary for taking a holiday.
Now if you take off just a day or two, its called วันหยุด. วัน means day, and หยุด means stop. It refers to taking a break off from work. Now if you take a long period off from work, its called พักงาน, where พัก means ‘take a break’, and งาน of course means work. So when I took 6 months off from work, I was พักงานอยู่. Adding อยู่ at the end is almost like adding ‘ing’ to a verb, meaning in the state of doing it.
If you were going to go traveling, you’d say ไปเที่ยว. Now in Thai, it doesn’t exactly mean the same as in English. If I was to ask a girl out for a date, perhaps go to a restaurant followed by a walk in a park, I would ask her something like ไปเที่ยวกันมั้ย? She’d of course inquire ‘เที่ยวไหน?’ or ‘ ไปไหน?’, and then it’d become clear if I meant out to lunch, or a week in Japan . . .
To get home, I need to take several forms of transportation. Getting onto each requires various verbs to describe the action. For example, I will นั่งแทกซี่ (get in the Taxi) and ขื้นเครื่องบิน (get in the plane). If there was a boat I needed to ride, I would ลงเรือ. So why would you ขื้น (go up to) the plane but ลง (go down to) the boat? Well, back in the day, you had to go up a staircase to get in the plane, and go down a ladder to get in a boat. Now we have simple loading ramps making the language so unintuitive for us to learn . . .
vocabulary (คำศัพท์):
กลับบ้าน return home
คิดถึง to miss, or think off
หยุด stop
วันหยุด short holiday break
พัก rest, take a break
พักงาน long break period from work
อยู่ added after verbs like an ‘ing’ in English
ไปเที่ยว go traveling (or go on a date)
นั่งแทกซี่ sit in a Taxi
ขื้นเครื่องบิน get into a plane
ลงเรือ get into a boat
