I attended a birthday party for my friend Linda Hall on Saturday night. The gathering was held at the Just one restaurant on Sathorn Soi 1, just around the corner from my old hotel of choice (during my tourist forays to Thailand in the early 1990s), the Malaysia Hotel. It was a very enjoyable evening; enjoying the company of nice people, wolfing down tasty food … along with a bit too much beer (if the headache I suffered the next morning was any indication). After her birthday wingding Linda was heading back to her current home in Vientiane, Laos the next morning.
A couple of nights later I was out on the town again. Making a public appearance outside of my bookshop, and twice in a week, is a very rare thing for me. The reason for this second outing was the arrival of a special visitor from out of town; my friend Julie Faulk from Orlando. Like me, however, she hasn’t lived in Orlando for many years. Earlier this decade she moved to South Korea and worked as a teacher for a few years before taking a similar position at an Air Force base in Germany. We had a marvelous time catching up on things and swapping stories of travel and expat life in foreign countries. Julie considers herself a “medical tourist” for this trip to Thailand. She is going to a Bangkok hospital for some Lasik surgery. During her correspondence with the hospital she mentioned that she was a travel writer and was interested in writing something about the hospital and her experience there. Well, as soon as she checked in at her hotel yesterday, the hospital’s PR representative (“Hi, I’m a PR!”) was calling to invite her to have coffee downstairs. Those PR types don’t waste any time! The only problem, Julie confided, was that this PR person didn’t have a very good grasp of English and couldn’t understand much of what she was saying. On a related writing note, Julie has an excellent article about buying a trishaw (yes, “buying,” not just riding) included in the just-released edition of To Myanmar with Love from Things Asian Press.
Customers shopping in my store are not content to just browse the bookshelves. Nearly every day I notice someone furtively perusing the pile of titles we have stuck in a corner of the store. These are books that people have left us, ones with torn covers or missing pages, or just overstocked titles that are already displayed on the shelves. Others are so impatient to see what’s just arrived that they try to pull out books from the lots that are stacked next to the counter but haven’t been priced or logged in the computer yet. Whatever you want to call these people — nosey, curious, or sneaky — they are just plain annoying. I suppose it’s only human curiosity, but what ever happened to politeness? Would it be too difficult for them to ask permission before rummaging through, and making a further mess of, the un-shelved books?
