The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Tim's trips are usually Sunday to Friday, or something similar.  But this time he was gone over the weekend.  Weekends are not so fun when he's away - I was missing our backgammon and Chinese Checkers games on the deck.  So I took a walk down the road and stopped into a little nail salon to have my nails done.  This was probably the third or fourth manicure of my entire life.  This will not surprise most of you!  I felt uncomfortably spoiled, with one manicurist on each hand.  This was definitely a low-tech operation; they plugged in a little mini-fan to dry the nails, and sat holding the fan over my hands.

Then I stopped for a foot massage at Savanna - this is a chain with locations all over the city.  Every location is the same - women out front, eating, looking at their cell phones, gossiping, killing time until a customer approaches.  For under fifteen dollars I got an hour-and-twenty-minute foot scrub, foot massage and shoulder rub.  This is also something I have only rarely done.  Not a big fan of having a strangers' hands on me, I guess.

The scrub seemed to last a long time, and not just the feet, but the entire leg up to the knee.  My skin felt like it was being rubbed raw (using sea salt?), and the woman showed me her raw hands when she was done.  Next came the foot massage, which was great until she started digging a wooden stick into the tips of my toes - ouch!  I guess this is supposed to hit the pressure points.

I attempted some conversation in Thai with the woman as she was scrubbing away.  She asked me something I didn't understand.  But after working it out in my head for a couple of minutes, I realized she was asking how long I'd been in Thailand, and gave her my very delayed answer.  She, like many, told me I spoke good Thai; they are all being quite generous and polite.

While I was in my chair in the corner, a family came in and sat in the next set of chairs over.  The adults and children all got massages.  The children sat playing on their game consoles while they were worked on - weird to me.  Wonder if they even noticed the massage?  And do children really need massages?  At around the same time, a man came in, I assumed, for a full-body massage and was led to an area behind a curtain just steps away from where I was.  After a few minutes, he was snoring loudly.  How would he know whether he actually got the massage if he slept through it?  Two more men came in and sat in the two chairs facing mine.  They looked like twins, and seemed to relax quickly with their eyes closed.  It was getting quite crowded, not the most relaxing atmosphere for a massage by that point.  But it made for some good people-watching.  The shoulder rub was kind of an afterthought, where I was asked to sit on the foot stool facing the other way.  Couldn't have lasted more than five minutes.

On the walk home I got some shots of some of the stray dogs that are a part of every corner of the city.  They are pretty mellow for the most part.  I think they are fairly well fed by people working nearby; food vendors and such.

Not a stray, I know

Monday, August 17th, a bomb exploded in Bangkok.  It was strange how I learned about it - my brother who lives in Colorado emailed and said he hoped we weren't near the blast.  He knew about it before I did.  I had not been to the shrine where the explosion occurred, but we had stayed at a hotel just two blocks from the site.  Chulalongkorn University is quite close as well.  I imagine the students were unnerved by the situation.  Thai news is not very discreet about showing things on TV, but thankfully they kept the gruesome images to a minimum.  I wished I could understand more of what was being said.  Very troubling and scary, not knowing the motive or the perpetrators.  It was clear that many people were killed, most of them Asian tourists.

Tim was due back from India the next morning, and I was a bit concerned that security would be much more difficult as a reaction to the bombing.  But our driver sat right at the door as he usually does, and Tim said nothing seemed different coming through security.

In the days to come, they would have countless news updates that would air simultaneously on about twenty different TV channels.  They took the unusual step of having English and Chinese translators on these broadcasts.  ( English closed captioning is nearly non-existent, with the exception of the Korean channel).  These broadcasts always end with a screen shot that says, "National Council for Peace and Order."  Sounds a bit Orwellian, doesn't it?

Chinese translator on the left, English on the right

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 
― George Orwell, 1984