Cut From a Different Cloth

My friend, Mika, has been enjoying the availability of inexpensive tailoring in Pattaya.  She found a Thai couple who will make a copy of any clothing you bring them for a very reasonable price.  So she has been cruising the fabric shops in the area of late.

One day she and I went to the Jim Thompson fabric store here in Pattaya.  Jim Thompson was an American who greatly influenced theThai silk trade in the 1950s and 1960s.  He was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in Delaware.  He studied architecture in college, and designed some homes and a band shell in Rehoboth Beach.  He later joined the military, and was recruited as an operative for the OSS.  He was involved with the Free Thai movement, to help liberate Thailand from the occupying Japanese army after WWII.  In 1948, he co-founded the Thai Silk Company Ltd.  He is somewhat of a hero figure in Thailand, having helped countless fabric-makers to sell their wares.  The Jim Thompson house is a popular tourist attraction in Bangkok.  He designed it using parts of old "up-country" houses, bringing them by boat and reassembling them.  He used his creation to showcase his vast art and antiques collection.  He mysteriously disappeared in 1967.

The fabric store here in Pattaya has lots of high quality fabrics, many for furniture upholstery, and many with southeast Asian motifs.  We each bought a bit of fabric to have aprons made.  While the fabric was a bit costly, the tailors charged less than three dollars to make the apron.  It will be a nice souvenir of our time in Thailand.

I also heard about the great fabric shops in Chonburi, a town about forty minutes north of us.  On a day when Tim was in India, Mika and I took a little road trip to look at fabric there.  I knew Mick's wife had that day off, so I asked him if she might want to ride along with us, and she did.  It took all of us to navigate our way to the fabric market where Mick dropped Mika and me.  It was a hot, humid day, more so in Chonburi, I think because it is further away from the gulf.  Storefront after storefront overflowed with bolts of colorful fabric, with narrow aisles to navigate between them.

Chonburi is much less international than Pattaya, so shop owners were less fluent in English, but we managed to communicate what we needed.  Our Thai language classes were helpful in that regard.  It was an added challenge for me to shop for fabric in meters rather than yards.  But I did a little homework beforehand and had a pretty good idea how much I might need.  I was looking for some fabric to make capris, and told the salesperson I wanted a heavy cotton with a bit of stretch.  She showed me some fabric and said what I thought was "Spanish."  Was this fabric imported from Spain?  I heard it a few more times, finally realizing that they were saying the word "spandex."  I found a nice brown/green color and bought two meters.

Mika was shopping for fabric to have some shirts made for her mother.  She found some nice patterns and hoped it would be what her mother wanted.  The market was a mini version of the Jatujak market in Bangkok, with row after row of tiny shops under a common roof.  We enjoyed seeing not only the fabrics, but the many other wares for sale, including some interesting sea food and fresh produce.  We saw some beautiful blue crabs and many items I could not identify.  It was enjoyable seeing how the locals shop in an area that doesn't cater to tourists.  Unfortunately I didn't remember to take any pictures.

When I called Mick to say we were done, he said something about "car park" and "police" and "temple," and asked if we could walk a little bit.  I interpreted this to mean the police directed him to park in the temple parking lot and we should walk over that way.  (There was a large temple near where we were let off, and he said we should meet back there.)  We wandered to where we thought he might be, but couldn't find him.  We walked in the opposite direction, as Mika said she saw another parking area.  No luck that way, either.  We were headed back to the first area, when Mick's wife came out of a shop and called to us.  She led us back to the car, where we discovered that a boot had been placed on the tire.  Mick was not at the car, but he appeared shortly on the back of a motorcycle taxi, soon followed by a policeman.  I guess he had to go pay a fine to get the boot removed;  apparently he was parked in a no-parking zone.  Pretty harsh - he was not a happy camper.

We were soon on our way, and were hoping to stop for lunch at a place Mika wanted to show me, called J-Park.  This area has a large Japanese population and many of the shops cater to them.  The "J" stands for Japanese.  Mika's family likes to come here for groceries and such.  However, with a grumpy driver and fuzzy directions, we eventually decided to give up the search and head back to Pattaya for lunch.  We stopped at Tree Tales near our condo, but managed to stop Mick before he drove away when we discovered that they were closed on Mondays.  We went up the street to Coffee Club instead, and had a quick lunch before heading home.

Mika had purchased some pineapple chunks from a street vendor when we were in Chonburi.  I admired her willingness to "go local."  Unfortunately it caused a pretty severe stomach reaction later in the day.  I am always leery of buying food from the street vendors, and this reinforced my hesitation.  You just never know what kind of sanitation precautions are taken.  I'm sure many are perfectly fine, but to an untrained eye they are indistinguishable from the risky ones.  Poor Mika!