By: Iris P. Concepcion
One thing that I love about the environment in Thailand is its latent marriage with the wryly humorous.
I find myself always on the throes for small grins out of the peculiarity of people and their almost queer and strange ways of unimpeachable existentialism.
Right in the house, the clothes have gone into transformations. Earlier, I went to a place for suits just to modify my future, wardrobe outlook. The man on the post, a guru of fashion who had probably survived Burma, kept on giving me ill-fitting blazers. He kept on going on and on and on and on and I had to express my dismay over the cuts. I had picked one and it suited me just fine. He wrote down the prices as is the new trend catapulted to fame by this blogsite. I no longer minded him but he still kept on pointing at huge attires that do not fit me. I excreted a chortle. I did haggle, nonetheless. That is the reason why I did not look for words to translate in Thai first but to memorize its numbers.
There is a million-dollar-buck velvety blue blazer pegged at 120 baht and it looked priceless. It says Louvre on the tag with a small necklace (minus the chains) on it. It is just too short for my physique but it is a dazzling son-of-a-gunfabric. It looks like art. I chose the not so loud top, for easier matching.
I travel miniscule-ly light. But, as one of my forefathers had advised, you must at least bring one respectable business attire for interviews. Bill Gates might just be lurking in one corner and snatch you from oblivion to become Master Of The Chips. I went to this area once, a corner of car wheels sold and displayed in a very tasteful way. I saw here a Gap blazer looking like a jewel and vowed to return with a sealed purchase.
Besides, I have noticed that some of the vendors here are meticulously attired. I wanted to enter their mindsets. I had my photo taken by a guy in starched polo. He showed me his shots and some are just plain hilarious I had to stop myself from further commenting. I was not able to haggle for a lowered price but the end- product was as pristine.
I looked like myself and not just some frizzed bear.
I passed by Orientals slicing sirloins. One of the sellers was pegging it just below a hundred baht. I fancy he had resurrected himself as a tenor in an orchestra since he looked a hell lot like the late Rolando Tinio of the cultural scene.
Even the servings of Pizza Hut here are mass-friendly: huge and filled.
There is a woman who sells shrimps and she is called Maria.
I think these people had numbed themselves onto the idea of material excess and had channeled their energies into building great structures and novel ideas without thinking first of profit. I saw a mobile learning vehicle and its science school is equipped with new models of computers. These people are engaged in professions, worthy as they are to the calls of mentoring young kids, and they had sustained their families through this honorable means.
I love Thailand's "teleserye" television programs. Their news anchors talk like voracious declaimers with stage actions. Their studio backgrounds have flowers, the Alps and mountain ranges and they present news in veritable touch screens. I saw a woman who was interviewed for a news event. Changing her clothes, she was still the interviewee on the second news item. I presume she is a one-woman news catalogue.
I asked my brother if it is truly a news program: the anchor was speaking like a preacher as if talking to an herd of sheep. They are adventurous and it seems that they never follow any rules in creativity. I wish our own networks in the Philippines would be this less staid. They breed contented people, as I had observed here.
A chance and leap to the future and it is all good. Thinking out of the box is a reality here and the creative perpetrators swim to this niche like what fishes do in seas. It is natural, unburdened and automatic reflex.
I am still stitching together all the loops for a coherent wholeness to this kind of living but it does work in a weird, mutually beneficial way.
So far, I wish these things transposed to my country.