English tea, Muay Thai and IKEA

Gotta love a big city. For my birthday, English tea with my roommate. The day after, taking my first Muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) class. The day after that? Ikea, of course. English. Thai. Swedish.

Oh, and don’t forget going to watch the Superbowl at 6am on a Monday morning! Have now discovered that it’s very common for bars to dilute their alcohol here (stick with beer/wine) but I’m sure I got more than my needed sodium intake by drinking a few bloodies at sunrise, in hopes the Steelers would pull off a win.

Ikea was a madhouse at 2pm on a Friday afternoon! But cheap and wonderful.  A sweet older Chinese woman adopted me at lunchtime, allowing me to sit at her table — even though there ended up being 4 in her party, and there were only 4 chairs at the table.. The cafeteria was completely packed! really not an empty seat around and there were probably at least 400 of them. I see this empty table, and go and hover with her.. She raises her pointer finger…”one?”  I assume she means. I nod. Previous sitters depart, and we sit. I have a small salad and chocolate mousse, tonic water and coffee. I think she enjoys watching me prepare my coffee and such.. Maybe a little cultural exchange for her? I had no napkin (all dispensers were empty). She pulls out her little packet of scented tissues and hands me one. “xie xie” – I thank her. She pulls out another, puts it in her pocket, and slides the rest over the table to me. “xie xie” I say again. While I had some in my bag that I forgot about, I wanted to accept this loving gesture, and I don’t know if I could actually use the tissues, these little tokens from my temporary Chinese grandmother.

As I eat my food, she keeps looking (I think for her husband) but her children (I assume) are who come  to the table. Oh, how funny to see the expressions on their face to see their Mother sitting with the only white girl in the house! We move and adjust things, her giant purse still sitting on the seat next to me.. The daughter sits to her left, across from the purse. The son, stands around, doesn’t want the seat and walks off. Eventually another woman, perhaps in her 60s comes to sit. Again, smiles at their new friend for lunch.

I look through my pocket phrasebook, but can’t find anything that reads “you are so kind”. So all I can do is smile. The man pulls up another chair, given by the table next to us, and they are all eating now too. With my small meal, I’m already done, and ready to head back into the swarm of shoppers to see what I can find. Sometimes, you don’t need to know more than how to say “thank you” to express gratitude. But I swear, I would have given her a hug if it would have been OK.. You see, with such a dense population, people really just push to get through, and some common courtesies that we have in the U.S. just don’t exist within this culture (nothing wrong, of course, just different). It can be trying at times when in crowded areas, still trying to figure out basics of the language, to just do the simplest of things (like getting food in Ikea, or grocery shopping) where it’s common for someone to just push in front of you and place an order, go through a door first, etc. It certainly takes some getting used to, and perhaps it’s good for me to drop the courtesies for a while, and just be a survivor like everyone else. But for this moment, there was kindness, in her eyes and her heart, and no longer was I just trying to survive, but sharing a mid-day meal with a kind soul.