a peek inside the fishbowl

In my last installment, I wrote about finding solace at the 7-11 near our place in Phuket, Thailand. We grabbed dinner, ate, and conked out.

My daughter slept so hard it was almost as if she was in a coma. I woke up around midnight with a splitting headache. I groped around the darkness for Advils, chugged some water and somehow fell back asleep, waking up around 5 a.m. for good. She woke up about an hour later. We made toast and went to relax by the pool in our complex.

Our plan was to eat lunch in the restaurant there (the website promised a swim-up bar as well) and gather up our strength. By 1 p.m. we realized the restaurant wasn’t going to open so we set out on foot to find something to eat.

The main street here is narrow and busy, with lots of traffic. Unless you are closer to the beach and the main business area, sidewalks are practically non-existent. The streets are lined with shops and restaurants and there’s one right after another, crammed together, almost spilling right onto the road. It quickly became clear that staying focused and watching our step was a key point to our survival, but it was hard not to be distracted by the sights and sounds around us. Oh, and did I mention it was absolutely stinking hot?

Lunch was our goal but in truth, our appetites were put on hold and at the moment, I didn’t see when/if I’d ever be hungry again. But we had to eat, right? We found a restaurant nearby that had patio seating overlooking the street, sat down, and ordered. The youngest opted for a Coke (frankly, she needed it) and I chose hot tea. It was delicious. We both ordered Pad Thai.

She took two bites and I noticed she was almost swallowed up by the sheer exhaustion of it all so we took it to go. I wasn’t feeling great either.

On the bright side, at least we had dinner.

We trudged back home in the steaming heat of the day and dropped back into bed. Possibly we had taken on too much too soon.

Later we sat on our balcony and watched as evening fell and the sounds of life unfolded below us in soft layers. Baby cries, a ringtone, a shout, the buzz of a moped, punctuated the steady hum of the jungle behind our building. A whiff of smoke on the breeze drifted up towards us as the heat of the day slowly slipped away.

I am very pleased to report that the Margaret Trudeau Butterfly Garden at @TheRoyalMHC had dozens of visitors today. I couldn’t even count them all. ????? Backstory: https://t.co/aeDXBEHCVG #myOttawa #mentalhealth @MargaretTrudeau @JustinTrudeau pic.twitter.com/yqsPT9Lkgu

— andrea tomkins (@missfish) August 9, 2019

• Woke or Not, the Caftan is Sexy, nytimes.com
• Why Doesn’t America Know More About Gun Safety? nytimes.com
• Filtered images and unrealistic expectations: social media’s link to depression and self-harm, thenational.ae
• The trauma of high school gym class, macleans.ca
• Why getting enough bright light during the day is just as important as avoiding light before bed, theglobeandmail.com

On the nightstand: Magic Hour, by Kristin Hannah

In my previous update, I was trying to put on a brave face and hold it together.

I had lost all sense of time. I had no clear idea what day it was, or what time it was. Patong, our holiday destination in Thailand, is 11 hours behind Ottawa time and I think our brief stint in Paris only added to my very confused internal clock.

We were exhausted but we knew we had to pick up a few food items to tide us over and fuel our very weary bodies. We had passed a 7-11 on the way in, so getting there became our top priority. We learned later that there is a 7-11 on almost every blog here in Phuket.

I didn’t know if we could trust the drinking water so bottled water was at the top of the shopping list.

We walked down the hill, somehow managed to cross the street (seriously, every little thing was a big challenge at this point), and as the automated two-tone electronic tone signaled our entrance we quickly found ourselves in a heavenly state of air-conditioned bliss.

We went up and down each aisle slowly and deliberately, filling our lungs with cool air and letting the sweat that had been pouring down our bodies and magically evaporate. I could have spent a long time here, not just to cool down, but to examine all the products on the shelves.

Some of these we tried during our stay, some we didn’t, but it was so different and interesting. The raw eggs were on a shelf, not in the fridge. Milk containers were tiny compared to our giant 4L bags. What is “Beauti drink”? I was fascinated by all of the potato chip flavours. If you followed our adventure on Twitter you already know how many we sampled. :)

There was a cold food section with all kinds of packaged dishes but my stomach wasn’t up to experimentation. Later I would buy onigiri here for a quick dinner (it’s a triangle of rice wrapped in seaweed and sometimes features a filling that is Japanese in origin ) but I didn’t know what to trust.

We each selected ramen noodles for dinner. We thought those were a safe bet, and we didn’t have much of an appetite. We also bought sliced bread and what I thought was a block of butter but was actually “butter product” a.k.a margarine. The soups were 20 baht each (less than a dollar) and so were the big bottles of water we bought.

Something about being at a 7-11 on the other side of the world was absolutely surreal. The brand is so familiar and iconic but it was as if someone took the store we knew, turned it upside down, shook out the contents, and replaced everything with something entirely different. Yet the sound of the register, the gum on the counter, the transaction itself, were still the same. It sounds strange, but there was comfort to be found there.

We took our groceries home and made our dinner. We ate, unpacked a few things, experimented with the A/C settings, and watched a minute of Bugs Bunny’s Thai cousin on a snowy TV before we collapsed into bed.