rain and ramblings

I'm really behind on posting here. I can partly blame the storm that went though one week ago. Incredible wind, rain, and lightening - and the storm lasted for hours. Our electricity was out for at least seven hours. No air conditioning in Thailand in April is a rather uncomfortable situation for our foreign selves! The next morning, I went out for a walk around our lake and counted the number of trees that had fallen down. Even more had limbs blown off. One of my friends had part of the ceiling of her apartment collapse, and the big international school was closed because of electrical problems and because many of the tiles on the roof had blown off. Life is usually really uneventful here, so this was quite exciting. Except that part about no air conditioning. Our local grocery store was without electricity for over 24 hours, and I'm still a little leery about buying dairy products and meat there. I'm not sure that their inventory has turned over yet!

I had another weird experience this past Monday. I was out with my friends to celebrate a birthday, and before we went for afternoon tea at one of the hotels on the Chao Phraya, we stepped into a jewelry shop to browse. I'd never been jewelry shopping in Bangkok before, so I was a little intimidated to step into the shop and be greeted by a fleet of salesgirls dressed in identical pink suits. I never counted how many sales associates there were, but it seemed like at least two dozen. At the time, the five of us were the only customers in the shop! As I wandered past display cases full of incredibly large and ostentatious bling, I was trailed by two or three of them. I had never seen customer service like this before in my life, and I was a little weirded out by it. It became a little cool when, after I'd found some style that I actually liked, the salesgirls kept finding similar pieces to show me. Can I say how much I love coloured sapphires? There was a bracelet there that I still think about ...

A couple years before I started blogging, I'd had a completely different experience shopping for fine jewelry in Calgary. I'd wanted to get Chris a really smart-looking titanium wedding band, and the only place to buy them locally was at the Birks store in TD Square. It was convenient; TD Square was where I got off of the train and caught a bus back to our apartment on Spruce Drive, and the store was never busy at all.  Anyway, I stepped into Birks, after work, to purchase this ring for Chris for three consecutive days.  It was a big purchase - the titanium rings they had were all priced at over one thousand dollars.  On each of those days, I lingered over by the display case for a good ten minutes, only to be completely ignored by the sales staff who weren't busy with other customers. The store was pretty much empty, as usual. I'm not really sure why no one asked me if I required help. Maybe it was because I was carrying a backpack, holding leftovers from my lunch and my gym clothes? Maybe I looked too young to be able to afford anything?  On the third day, I thought about speaking up and asking to see the ring that I wanted to give to my husband, but I was also tired of Birks and figured that maybe I just wouldn't shop there anymore.