[Continued from "Thailand, Revisited, Reworked (Part 1)."]

Before I left San Francisco, I had arranged to have my new boss – and landlord – meet me on the day I arrived in Bangkok.  By this time I had a cell phone in the US, but it was nothing that would have worked in Thailand.  It was 2001.  After some confusion we finally met at a hospital.  Coincidentally, it was the hospital where Jesús had had a couple of stays the summer before.

I met my new boss who took me to the office where I met my coworkers.  My coworkers were a Thai secretary and a Thai (for lack of a better term) paralegal, both women.  To paint them with a very broad brush, Thai women are generally quiet, diminutive, and pretty.  My new coworkers fit the stereotype.  A lot of the “quiet” is due to the language barrier; they had nothing to say to me that I’d be able to understand.  While I had taken a Thai language class in San Francisco, and had learned a few choice phrases the previous year, I certainly couldn’t carry on a conversation in Thai.

Other than the boss, there were no attorneys in the office.  I wasn’t sure what it was I was to do for work, but I didn’t care much.  I had done a lot of internet surfing the year before when I worked at a law office so I figured it’d be about the same.

My boss showed me around the building where the office was.  The building was mostly residential, and it was obvious that our office was built as an apartment; his office was the bedroom and the rest of us shared the common space.  The building also had a pool, where I was told I could swim any time I wanted.  The pool was outside, but covered so it was always shaded.

For those of you who’ve not been to Southeast Asia, you might not understand just how important a shaded pool was.  A pool in the open would have been hot and uncomfortable, and the water would have evaporated at a very rapid pace.  As it was, the covered pool’s water was almost bathwater warm.  I swam in the office building’s pool a couple of times.

The office building itself was shaped like a pyramid.  Bangkok has a number of architecturally questionable buildings; I can’t imagine the equivalent of a city planning commission can’t be paid off.  It is, after all, Thailand.  The office building was a pyramid.  A building close to my summer home looked like a robot.  I wish I were kidding.

After a tour of the building, my boss took me to the apartment that was to be my home for the next three months.  It was within a cab ride of the office, and close to my friend’s restaurant/home.  It was on a tiny road, which was off a slightly larger road, which was off a slightly larger road, which was off a six-lane divided highway.

My boss parked in front of an auto mechanic shop.  A lot of the residences in Southeast Asia are shophouses, and my new home was to be no exception; the ground floor was an auto shop with room for several cars parked tandem and an office, and above were four floors of apartments.  We walked through the shop’s gate, past the shop’s office, to a stairwell.   We walked up four flights of stairs and past a few apartments; each floor had one to two apartments.  Finally, on the top floor there was only one door.

My boss walked me into a spacious studio apartment.  Some may think “spacious” and “studio apartment” are mutually exclusive, but they are not.  At the time, I still lived in a studio apartment in the Tenderloin.  It was pretty large, with a separate kitchen and a walk-in closet, but my summer digs were much larger.

The main room contained a queen-size bed in a platform bed frame.  The mattress sat flush with the frame, which consisted of a foot-wide ledge at all but the head of the bed.  The ledge at the foot of the bed held a small television.  The room’s only other furniture was a low dining table.  Low so one could sit on the floor to eat.

There were three doors opposite the apartment’s front door.  One went into the roomy bathroom, one into the tiny kitchen, and one to the closet.  My boss showed me the tiny kitchen, which was only big enough for a small dorm room-sized refrigerator.  He was nice enough to have stocked the fridge with yogurt, butter, bread, and jam so I could have breakfast.  He explained what the peculiar thing in the back of the fridge was.

Inside a plastic bag, which was inside a plastic bag, was a foil wrapped block of densely packed … pot.  There was a brick of pot in the refrigerator.  Uh, ok.  My boss told me that I could smoke as much of it as I wanted.  Between that and the international long distance phone calls I could make whenever I wanted, my boss was very generous indeed.

[To be continued ….]

I swear.  True story.

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