Eating alone in public brings with it joys that often have little or nothing to do with the food. While beginning my evening with a gin and tonic at the pavement terrace of a restaurant in the Suriwong Road I was interrupted, happily, by two women of a certain age from California who had arrived in Bangkok two hours earlier on their first ever excursion beyond the United Sates of America.
They were enthusiastic and charming and full of wonder and curiosity about everything. As part of a tour group they were going to be well looked after in terms of the places to visit but, this being their first night and free of the group, they wanted to experience a little of the ‘real Thailand’.
I think that any experience of anywhere is ‘real’ within its own terms but I didn’t go into the philosophical basis of my ideas on that and after we’d chatted about Thailand its history and culture I pointed them across the road to the food stalls and market of Patpong and reassured them that Thailand in general and Bangkok in particular is remarkably safe. They went happily on their way to encounter this new reality.
Later, while eating at the food market, I had a long conversation with a waitress I’d seen a few times before. She had established that I was a grandfather, eight times over, and was single. She had informed me that she had sons of fourteen and ten and was also single. This evening she told me that she thought we would make a good couple and that she was not interested in any short term arrangement.
After some conversation between her delivering beer and bowls of food to various tables we agreed that it probably wasn’t going to work and that we were each ‘good’ people. She also pointed out to me that the braces on her teeth were not to straighten her teeth but were a fashion statement and showed that she could afford to have her teeth straightened if she needed to, which she didn’t.
At a neighbouring table were three young women, Eastern European or Russian I think. The back of one of them, she was naturally beautiful, was covered by a tattoo of a skull with guns behind it. When she turned to take the paper table napkins from my table to theirs I saw that her mouth was disfigured, to my eyes, by over enlargement with Botox. More fashion statements.
Later I was joined at my table by a fifty five year old Saudi man carrying a can of Coca Cola. The place, being very crowded, he had nowhere to sit. I indicated that I was happy for him to join me. Discovering country of origin and age seem to be acceptable ways of beginning a conversation. He was unfazed by my eighty two years and told me he was leaving Bangkok the next day to return home. He wanted to go out on the town and invited me to join him. I regretfully declined on the grounds that it was ten o’clock and past my bedtime. He bade me a fond farewell and went off into the night.
Altogether a rather ordinary evening of eating alone in public in Bangkok.