>>Thais smile all the time. Means nothing. Most frustrating thing in the world is to try to argue - Western style - with a Thai. they just won't play. But they have raised passive aggressive to an art form almost unknown in the West and communication can be just as blunt - just done differently. Smile - and show the sole of your foot - or approach a table of seated people while standing upright and you'll get the message across faster than shouting across the pub or spitting in somebody's beer would in English.
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>Showing the sole of your shoe is also bad in arab (moslem?) countries, I understand. Seems stupid to me, how do they buy shoes? Don't they look at them? Now, spitting in someone's beer is a serious offense. Don't do that. (at least with Irish, German, Czech beer - with American it's not as serious a problem as it is not beer anyway).

Yeah, feet aren't very popular a lot of places. When you see an American movie in a theater full of Thais and some guy puts hit feet up on the desk it gets a real rise out of the audience.

Can be subtler, though. Just having your head higher than somebody of a higher rank is pretty disrespectful. I remember once being at a conference where there were a bunch of guys on the stage that were pretty high up in the Thai government and military. The girl who brought them tea pretty much crawled across the stage with the tea tray.

At one point I was working with some people who were pretty important, one was even a jhow - i.e. royalty - and even though they cut farangs (foreigners) a lot of slack, anything other that walking around like I had curvature of the spine ( I'm 6'2" and they averaged about 5' 5" ) would have ruined the good vibe thing I was trying to establish ( by giving speeches in pretentious Thai <g> ) For years after leaving SE Asia I would stoop as I approached any seated people - not realizing I was doing it and much to their amusement and confirming suspicion I had "gone bamboo"

Language is another issue. Of course in Spanish etc you've got tu and usted, but in Thai you have about five levels, one used just for monks, one for royalty, one for formal speeches ( and being pretentious ), one for everyday polite and the village stuff that kids talk to each other and household pets. But it's not just pronouns - verbs are different too ( not case - whole different vocabulery ) as well as a lot of adjectives.

The left hand thing is a big deal a lot of places, of course. Mostly for sanitary reasons. But being left handed that was hard for me. My first introduction to Kurds was around a communal cooking pot on the Syrian border with a bunch of guys that looked like Pancho Villa goes to Afghanistan. My local buddy kept reminding me all the way to dinner that it would be a good idea to sit on my left hand because if I dipped it in the communal food there was a very good chance one of those heavily armed people would take lethal offense <bg>