Saturday, February 18, 2006
People You Meet, Thailand
We said good-bye to Koh Samui today and headed back to Bangkok for just one night. Tomorrow we leave to spend three weeks in Vietnam. While we were quite certain we'd had enough of Bangkok when we left it last week, it felt good to be back in a city where we knew our way around. We went back to our old hotel hoping they'd have space for us. Even though their "All Rooms Are Full" sign was out on the desk, they remembered us and squeezed us in while turning down two other people in the process.
We dropped our bags and took a seat in the hotel's lobby restaurant. The waiter smiled in recognition and came towards our table. He was a short, slight man in his twenties with an active sense of humor. If he saw you headed for the staircase and your room upstairs, he'd jump in front of you and block your path. Then he'd busy himself with a pile of napkins, a stack of menus or whatever he could put in his hands to make his presence look legit.
We always got a kick out of watching him take other customers' orders. They would order "One Coke" and hold up one finger to help get their point across to a waiter they assumed didn't speak English.
The waiter would smile and hold up five fingers. "Five Coke," he'd nod and pretend to write it on his pad.
The customer would say, "No, no. One Coke," and again hold up one finger.
The waiter would smile, nod, hold up four fingers and say, "Four Coke." The waiter would keep up the act until the customer figured out he was joking, which sometimes they never did until he came back with just one Coke and set it on the table.
Approaching us now, the waiter looked right at Quang and said, "Iced coffee?"
Quang nodded.
The waiter turned to me. "Fanta?"
I smiled. He remember us well.
The big screen TV in the lobby was turned to CNN. Headline News was on and we tuned in to catch a glimpse of the "real world". Olympic winners, new bird-flu cases, the election of Hamas, and possible Argentine beef bans crossed the screen. Then came a story about recent cartoon protests in Karachi, Pakistan. I tapped Quang on the arm. "Hey, that's Karachi," I pointed. "That's where that family was from."
We both watched the rolling footage of the now-all-too-familiar cartoon marches and shook our heads. Just three days past we'd spent the entire day with a family from Karachi. They were a part of our "Most Unusual Day", a tour we took of Koh Samui island, along with a Scottish couple and a German couple. The family from Karachi was gracious, curious, outgoing and kind, and now the city they had talked so fondly of all throughout our tour had been dragged into this whole cartoon mess.
Once again we found ourselves with a sort of personal stake in global events. The cartoon protests in Karachi felt real and sad because we knew that this family we had so enjoyed had gone home just in time to see their beloved city shut down due to misunderstanding, anger and hate.
We felt this same stab, this same personal stake in the story, when Israel's Sharon had a stoke, and again when the Palestinians elected Hamas. We thought of Yael, a young Israeli woman we'd met in Patagonia who had followed our trail (or perhaps we'd followed hers) from the Perito Moreno Glacier and on to the Navimag cruise.
And again we felt it when we read the first scrolling headline on CNN that exports of Argentine beef had been restricted. Having been there, having experienced that country's love of meat, we knew the impact mad-cow would have on the Argentines.
That's one of the things I love about travel ... if you let it, travel will put you face to face with people you'd never otherwise meet. You will make friends, you will connect with people. And when you go home and watch the news on TV, which only seems to grow more violent and hateful and messy, you will know that there is a real woman living in Karachi.
She was a table tennis champion in college. She has two daughters and a brother who used to have a German Shepard, but one day, for some unexplained reason, the dog fell off the roof of the house and died. This same woman has a husband who works on commission selling textiles. He is gentle with their daughters. He cradles them on his lap and lets them fall asleep. And as their eyes grow heavy and their necks begin to rock, he whispers sweet words in their ears.
We dropped our bags and took a seat in the hotel's lobby restaurant. The waiter smiled in recognition and came towards our table. He was a short, slight man in his twenties with an active sense of humor. If he saw you headed for the staircase and your room upstairs, he'd jump in front of you and block your path. Then he'd busy himself with a pile of napkins, a stack of menus or whatever he could put in his hands to make his presence look legit.
We always got a kick out of watching him take other customers' orders. They would order "One Coke" and hold up one finger to help get their point across to a waiter they assumed didn't speak English.
The waiter would smile and hold up five fingers. "Five Coke," he'd nod and pretend to write it on his pad.
The customer would say, "No, no. One Coke," and again hold up one finger.
The waiter would smile, nod, hold up four fingers and say, "Four Coke." The waiter would keep up the act until the customer figured out he was joking, which sometimes they never did until he came back with just one Coke and set it on the table.
Approaching us now, the waiter looked right at Quang and said, "Iced coffee?"
Quang nodded.
The waiter turned to me. "Fanta?"
I smiled. He remember us well.
The big screen TV in the lobby was turned to CNN. Headline News was on and we tuned in to catch a glimpse of the "real world". Olympic winners, new bird-flu cases, the election of Hamas, and possible Argentine beef bans crossed the screen. Then came a story about recent cartoon protests in Karachi, Pakistan. I tapped Quang on the arm. "Hey, that's Karachi," I pointed. "That's where that family was from."
We both watched the rolling footage of the now-all-too-familiar cartoon marches and shook our heads. Just three days past we'd spent the entire day with a family from Karachi. They were a part of our "Most Unusual Day", a tour we took of Koh Samui island, along with a Scottish couple and a German couple. The family from Karachi was gracious, curious, outgoing and kind, and now the city they had talked so fondly of all throughout our tour had been dragged into this whole cartoon mess. Once again we found ourselves with a sort of personal stake in global events. The cartoon protests in Karachi felt real and sad because we knew that this family we had so enjoyed had gone home just in time to see their beloved city shut down due to misunderstanding, anger and hate.
We felt this same stab, this same personal stake in the story, when Israel's Sharon had a stoke, and again when the Palestinians elected Hamas. We thought of Yael, a young Israeli woman we'd met in Patagonia who had followed our trail (or perhaps we'd followed hers) from the Perito Moreno Glacier and on to the Navimag cruise. And again we felt it when we read the first scrolling headline on CNN that exports of Argentine beef had been restricted. Having been there, having experienced that country's love of meat, we knew the impact mad-cow would have on the Argentines.
That's one of the things I love about travel ... if you let it, travel will put you face to face with people you'd never otherwise meet. You will make friends, you will connect with people. And when you go home and watch the news on TV, which only seems to grow more violent and hateful and messy, you will know that there is a real woman living in Karachi.
She was a table tennis champion in college. She has two daughters and a brother who used to have a German Shepard, but one day, for some unexplained reason, the dog fell off the roof of the house and died. This same woman has a husband who works on commission selling textiles. He is gentle with their daughters. He cradles them on his lap and lets them fall asleep. And as their eyes grow heavy and their necks begin to rock, he whispers sweet words in their ears.
