Thursday, March 3, 2022
7:59 a.m. Room 4, PLP Guest House
Mae Hong Son, Thailand
I’m not having any small adventures in Mae Hong Son this time around. I’ve just been working on videos from my last visit here. Today will likely be my last day here. And tomorrow, I will ride to a new place. This will be a completely new town and a new experience, so I will likely fire up my GoPros and record some of that on video. But I’m not doing that for now.
I did have one interesting moment yesterday. Well, at least it was interesting to me. I was at the 7-Eleven around the corner the other day, and I bought four items. And I noticed that the clerk forgot to ring up one of them. She rang up three items and then forgot to ring up the bottle of milk. And when this happens, I’m faced with a dilemma. My instinct was to point out her error. Yet, I know that she won’t understand. So, what do I do? I’m forced into the situation of getting away with something and cheating 7-Eleven out of the price of a bottle of milk.
I did try to fix the error. I pointed at the bottle of the milk and I indicated the cash register and with sign language, I tried to get her to understand that she hadn’t charged me for the milk. At first, she thought I wanted a bag for the milk. I shook my head no at that. Then she assumed I wanted a straw for the milk. I said no to that as well. And then she thought I didn’t want the milk anymore and she indicated that she should take it away. I also indicated that that wasn’t what I meant. In the end, I had no choice but to give up. As I walked away from the cash register after paying, I looked down at my receipt to confirm what I already knew. The receipt listed three items but not the fourth one, the bottle of milk. And I realized that with the receipt, I could show her what I was talking about. But when I turned around, the next customer had moved up to the counter. And for a moment, I thought I would just wait until she was finished with this customer. But this customer happened to have a large basket of purchases, and it was clearly going to be a long and complicated transaction. I could tell just from looking at this woman that she was going to question the price of everything, produce a bunch of expired coupons, fight over the coupons, and then try to pay with a debit card that won’t work. There’s a certain type of woman that always does this in a 7-Eleven.
Anyway, the world seemed to be trying to tell me to just relax and enjoy my free milk. Which I did.
The other interesting moment of my day was having lunch at the guest house restaurant. I tend to ignore that place because it always seemed to be empty, and it was difficult to find the staff. But yesterday, I saw that a couple of tables were occupied at lunch time, and I could see staff roaming around. So I went over there and had lunch. I ordered two lunches, in fact. One dish was crispy pork with kale and rice. The other was more of a spicy veggie dish with rice. And my lunch came with a nice bowl of broth. The food had a surprisingly nice presentation on banana leaves on top of wicker baskets. I’m a bit sad now that today is a Skinny Doug Fasting Day. I’d like to go back there for lunch again. But I can’t today.
Of course, like the entire world, I’m busy monitoring the events from Ukraine. What is there to say about that? It all seems so crazy. It feels like a throwback to the middle of last century to hear about a full land invasion of one European country by another. It sort of felt like the world had moved beyond traditional war like that. But I guess not. The effects are being felt even here in Thailand. Thailand is a very popular vacation spot for Russians. In the last month or two as Thailand began to open up, a couple thousand or more Russian tourists entered the country. And now they are stuck. There was an article in the news about this yesterday. Their credit cards and bank debit cards won’t work anymore, so they are cut off from their money. And there are no flights to Russia, of course. They are stuck in Thailand and they don’t have any money. Same thing for Ukrainian visitors. Imagine dealing with all of that on top of the covid restrictions.
A funny thing is that with all this coverage of Ukraine, I’m learning that I’ve been pronouncing the name of their capital city wrong my whole life. Or maybe I haven’t been. I’m not sure anymore. I noticed the new pronunciation everywhere, but now I’m hearing that even this new pronunciation is wrong. We’ll see what the world eventually settles on.