Day 257: Always make sure you have the correct cutlery for the job
Really wished that the ground would just swallow me up at dinner this evening.
Ordered noodles and pork. Chopsticks in a pot on the table. Scoffed it down with them but at the end the bits were small and I didn’t want to be a farang and ask for a spoon so I pushed forward. It got more and more fiddly, so eventually, I just got the bowl up and was tipping it into my face but the spices caught my throat and I did a huge cough right into the bowl, spluttered stuff everywhere, made even louder because the bowl was cupped right to my face. Totally lost control of my body for about 5-6 coughs, and didn’t have any water to fix things with.
Looked around absolutely mortified, expecting to see disgust on everyone’s faces, but nobody was batting an eyelid. Wait staff still on their phones, family next to me still just eating their meal.
I’m not sure if it was really just something that happens to every Thai sooner or later, or if I had blasted so far through the social norms that they didn’t even know how to deal with me any more.
As a British person, I absolutely need the eye contact of at least one person to roll my eyes and shrug off the faux-pas or it just makes it ten times worse.
Decide its time to make a hasty exit as I’m going bright red, and as I stand up I realise that in the same pot on the other side of the chopsticks was a stack of the spoons that I now realise everyone else in the room is busy using to correctly eat their food.
I guess the lucky thing about Bangkok is that you are very unlikely to ever see the same person twice.