Out on a Date...with a Thai!

Part of the luxury of working here at the resort is that I am provided with a place to stay (a modest room in the staff housing building) and three meals a day (which are served in the staff 'canteen'). When I first took the job, I had my sights set high, thinking I was going to be able to dine on the same extraordinarily healthy 'spa cuisine' that is served to the guests at the resort. WRONG. The food in the canteen is typical Thai fare, which in my opinion, has some good aspects and some bad...I've never exactly been one of those people who LOVES Thai food. (All of you Thai cuisine aficionados reading this, I can already imagine the aghast look on your face after reading this. Sorry! That’s just the way I feel!) The food is prepared in a typical cafeteria style manner.... massive amounts of food cooked in gargantuan pots, and frying pans filled with way more grease than I would ever use in my own kitchen throughout my entire lifetime…sitting all day under heat lamps. So as I walk into the canteen each day, I usually think to myself, ‘thank God for the salad bar.’

Anyway, so here I am, day after day, walking into the staff canteen and doing my best to create a healthy meal and a pleasant eating experience for myself. I used to take my meals upstairs onto the roof, to be able to enjoy a quiet and peaceful meal outside…until I was told about the rule that no food is to be taken outside of the canteen. (Crazy, huh?! Here I am living amongst the beauty of the sunshine and warmth of the tropics, and yet I literally have to fight to find time in my day to get outside. Trust me, my colleagues and I tried to fight this one but there are so many, in my opinion, ridiculous rules around here for us staff that it’s hard to create a proposal to change each one of them! We are just happy that the gym isn’t locked up twice a day anymore and it’s actually open from 6am to 9pm now.)

So lately, I have begrudgingly obeyed. I have eaten my meals in the pea green painted canteen, amongst the cacophony of conversation, the blaring television with who knows what going on (its in Thai of course), and my body shivering due to the blasting air conditioning. I could sit at one of the two tiny outside patio tables adjacent to the cafeteria…and when I do, each bite of my food is accompanied by a fresh breath… of smoke. The smokers, of course, have been granted use of this space. (Just one of the many ironies of life, isn’t it? Here I am at this ‘5 Star HEALTH Resort’ and who gets granted the FRESH AIR in which to enjoy their meals? The SMOKERS.)

Anyway, I still usually walk in with my typical Jody exuberance and give a big smile to the cooks. There is this one young guy who on a good day might say hello. I must be invisible to the older guy though because he has not acknowledged my presence once in the, let me guess, 739 times that I’ve walked into that cafeteria over these past 9 months. The older woman smiles back at me I’d say about 50% of the time, and the other half of the time, she seems to be too busy to smile. But a few months back, they hired a new guy. Since he started, everyday I walk in now, I am greeted with, ‘Hi Jody! How are you?!’ Don makes my day.

When he says his name, it kind of sounds like Don. I’m sure its not actually ‘Don,’ given that the Thai language uses more foreign sounds when pronouncing their words than I ever knew could even exist. So sometimes, I kind of mumble it…or change the intonation a bit…in hopes of masking the fact that I really am not sure if I’m saying it right at all. But that’s the best this English speaking girl can do. So until he corrects me, that’s what I’ll call him. “I’m great, thanks Don! How are you?!”

Don has become quite observant of my preferences. He now daily goes out of his way to serve up some sort of vegetarian alternative to the main course of the day and walks over to my table to personally serve it to me. I give him a big smile as I thank him and tell him he is wonderful. He then responds with this little childlike, shy gleaming grin as he turns away and walks back into the kitchen. (That’s one thing about the Thais, and perhaps Asians in general…my experience of them is that they are very shy. They avoid direct questions. There is a lot of bowing and smiling and superficial conversation. To this outspoken American, it’s a way of interacting that I find rather slow and unengaging…yet intriguingly challenging. Part of my enjoyment of living amongst a foreign culture is experiencing and learning other ways of being. It’s a great practice to get outside of my own belief systems about the way things ‘should’ be, and instead see an entire culture of people who live in another way. Its easy to say that ‘my way’ is better…simply because I am more familiar and comfortable with it. But that’s the great thing about travel…our belief systems of life are always challenged and resultantly, expanded.)

So the daily dread that I’ve felt when walking past the greasy options for my sustenance day after day in the canteen has now been mitigated by this much welcomed new joyful presence. “Hi Jody!” “Hi Don!” Don now makes a habit of walking around from behind the kitchen side of the food counter in order to chat with me face to face about my day. At dinner time especially, he likes to ask, “Jody, where you go?” I started to realize that this was perhaps his way of asking, “Jody, wherever you are going, may I come with you?” I’ve been practicing not being my outspoken self, and just going along as, not the leader, but the follower of the conversation.

One day he asked, “Jody, you go out to dinner?” (…which I knew likely meant, ‘Jody, we go out to dinner together?’) This particular day, after having spoken to clients hour after hour for my entire day, I really needed to just enjoy an evening without conversation, (especially without conversation in which multiple attempts are usually necessary for a simple sentence be understood). So unfortunately for him, it was the worst day he could have chosen to finally ask me out. ‘Oh, how mean of me’…. ‘oh, how cold hearted’…. I can’t even imagine how much energy he has spent over the past weeks to build up his confidence to this point. But hey, I’ve always been told that men like it when a woman plays hard to get. So without even intentionally playing the game, I replied, “Yes, I am. So I see you tomorrow!” And I smiled and walked away…

But Don, he’s a persistent one. The next day, he walked around from the back side of the kitchen counter and asked, “Jody, you like movie? You heard of funny movie in town, about rap singer who now be monk? You like to go?!” “Well, sure Don. That sounds great!” His smile had a gleam of the innocence of a twelve year old boy, full of pride for finally finding the courage to ask the girl he fancies out on a date and hearing her say ‘yes.’ (But my guess is that Don is about in his mid to late 20’s.) It was a bit of a struggle to make sure we both understood what the plan was for meeting up, but I think we succeeded.
So a few hours later, I met up with Don out in front of the movie theater (which is located by the way, on the top floor of this huge, three-story, sadly materialism-glutinous-pushing ‘mall,’ reminiscent of all the other gargantuan shopping malls that litter the landscape of every city in the western world…and are now leaching their way into Asia as well…). “Hi Don!” Hi Jody!” We exchanged some light pleasantries and walked into the theater.

Wow! How fun to be in a movie theater! It felt like I had suddenly been transported back home! (Except for the fact that I couldn’t read any of the advertisements that were flashing across the screen since they were in Thai….except that I could recognize the Pepsi symbol of course…and the Toyota one…and that worldly symbol of the golden arches….) But everything else was the same…. the big room filled with rows of comfy seats…people leaning back chomping away on popcorn. We weren’t sure if there were going to be English subtitles, but I didn’t really care. I was on a date with a Thai guy in Thailand…that was entertaining enough for me!

Right in the middle of our small talk, Don suddenly stands up and tells me to stand up too. And then I notice that everyone else is standing up as well. ‘Hmm, interesting.’ The next two or three minutes there is a tribute to the life of their King played on the screen…photos of him as a young boy in school, of his family, of he and his young wife, of him shaking hands with presumably significant people….and the crowd is singing the national anthem. ‘Cool,’ I thought. (The immense amount of devotion and respect that the Thai people have for their King is ubiquitous throughout the country. Coming from a country where presently every home in America is being inundated with advertisements bashing our top political figures, I find this extraordinarily impressive.) Then the movie starts….and yes! There are English subtitles! Don and I look at each other and smile.

I could go into the details of the movie… about the young Thai boy deciding to leave his rap band life to pursue living life as a monk…and finding himself being swept away by the wind, ripping to shreds his orange robe and sweeping away all of his belongings….and landing him in a village that was being bombarded by flying boulders due to the bad guy who keeps blowing up the mountain to extract its precious metals lying deep inside…and the monk trying to bring joy to the villagers by conducting his sermons as if singing a rap song… But, I’ll just leave it at that. The most humorous part of the movie for me was actually reading the English subtitles and realizing that whomever wrote them wasn’t exactly a fluent English speaker! For example: “Big mountain go boom! Hurt house hole roof!”

So the movie ends. We walk out together. Small talk ensues. I ask him if he is hungry. He says no. (‘Hmm, that kind of kills what normally happens next,’ I thought to myself.) He says he has to go to the hospital to get his stitches out, (he cut himself at work last week) and as he pulls his keys out of his pocket, he asks me if I want to come with him. I happened to have rented a motorbike for the week so I simply answer, “I have my own motorbike today.” “Oh, okay. Bye.” …and then Don walks away…and that is the end of our date.

I’m left standing there amongst the hoards of shoppers in the mall, by myself. It was the funniest feeling. I don’t think I’ve ever had an interaction with someone end so abruptly! I couldn’t help but stand there for a minute and kind of laugh! The next day happened to be my day off so it was like my Friday night and yet suddenly, I was out in town, standing by myself, without any plans. I called Monica. She was already in bed. I called Nadine. Her phone was off and thus was likely already asleep. I called Katrina. She didn’t answer. They’re basically all the friends I have here but they all had to work in the morning. So there I was in the mall, on a ‘Friday’ night, standing there suddenly by myself. What did I do? That is a question I find myself grappling with almost every day off. In town there are shops and there are restaurants…and that’s about it. So, I found some interesting Thai snacks to munch on and then, just walked home.

Some of you might be thinking, ‘That’s it?!’ Yep, that’s it.