No Jumbo!
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Still in Bangkok.
No Jumbo!
Lee used to follow a bunch of travel blogs—nowadays, he mostly prefers to watch a carefully curated handful of travel vloggers on YouTube. It’s one of the ways we divide the labor of nomading. I rely more on books, websites, and Instagram. Between us, we’re constantly absorbing information about the place we are, places we’d like to go, and other places that we’d never even heard of.
One of those blogs, back in the early days of our traveling, was written by a young American couple, not so different from us except in their age. The wife wrote a post about trying to buy clothing in Thailand; it was hysterically funny (I only wish I could be so funny), and completely memorable. At some point, she had gone into a shop and was immediately bustled back out the door by a salesclerk waving her arms around and yelling, “No jumbo! No jumbo!”
Now. I just want to be clear: this did not happen to me. It was in a blog. It happened to someone else. If Lee, bless his heart, has ever told you this story about me, he is misremembering. If, in future, you meet him somewhere and he tells this tale, remember: it was not me! No one has ever (yet) yelled “No jumbo!” at me. At least, not in so many words.
However.
It began in South Korea last summer, when I needed new sneakers. We schlepped in and out of sporting goods stores; no one had what I wanted, in my size (anything other than black or white, in a US 8.5 or 9–ie, sneaker size). At first I thought maybe bright colors had fallen out of fashion, which was/is probably true, particularly in South Korea. South Korean clothing tends to heavily favor neutrals and earth tones, as far as I can tell.
But we finally found a sales person who spoke English, and were told that 8.5 is the largest women’s shoe size in South Korea. If I wanted a 9, I’d have to go to the men’s department, where the colors are even more drab.
I found an 8.5–just the one pair—and bought them. Problem solved.
Fast forward to this week, in Bangkok: I need long pants. I only own one pair, and for reasons that will (hopefully; see #stillapandemic) become clear in a few weeks, I would like to have some more. The first problem is that it’s boiling hot in Bangkok, and why would anyone buy long pants in this climate, but that’s actually not an insurmountable problem. It does occasionally drop below seventy here (only at night, of course), at which point people break out sweaters and jackets—and long pants. My Miami-born spouse thinks this is perfectly reasonable, of course.
No, the bigger obstacle to my pants-quest is the fact that nothing is long enough for me. Honestly, I had sort of forgotten that I’m the tallest woman around, until I tried on ten pairs of pants in a row at Uniqlo, and every. single. pair. was at least an inch too short. The whole time, while my frustration and my core temperature were rising, I was giving some serious stink eye to a sign on the fitting room wall: free hemming! I came out of the fitting room exhausted and sweaty and perplexed; Lee told me to look around. He was right—I was taller than all the women, and a lot of the men. Oh, right. I need to find the Big & Tall store for farang women.
Now, this doesn’t bother me at all. It is what it is—people come in all different shapes and sizes, yada yada. On Bonaire, I was the short one, compared to the Dutch women. Whatever—I just need some pants that will cover my ankles, and I will find them, even if it means I have to wear sweatpants or jeggings.
But a couple of days ago, I went to buy—of all things—some of those lightweight paper dental masks. They’re all way too gappy on me; if I’m going to wear a mask (which I am), I want it to fit properly. I’ve been tying knots in the ear loops and folding under the edges (look for a demo on YouTube if you want a visual), which is a brilliant way to eliminate all gappage, but it makes the whole thing look like I have huge duck lips. Toby’s girlfriend solves the gappage problem by wearing a child-sized mask, so I thought I’d try her approach. The vendor (this was at a market) was having none of this. She insisted that I needed adult masks, pointing at the smaller ones and saying, “No, no no. Baby! Baby!” Finally, she wedged herself between me and the children’s masks, so I gave up and wandered away.
I happen to know that I have a weirdly small face (the rest of my body notwithstanding)—our first argument as a married couple was on our honeymoon, when my snorkel mask kept leaking, I kept stopping to dump it out, and Lee accused me of not knowing how to breathe properly. Riiiiiigghht. I finally got a children’s mask, and we all calmed down.
To reiterate, none of this bothers me in the slightest (except for needing pants, which is a purely practical issue). I just think it’s funny that this thing Lee and I joke about—No jumbo! No jumbo!—actually came true.
Be careful what you wish for, folks.
From my writer’s notebook:
The Frans Hals painting, “Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer,” was stolen (back in August) from the Museum Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden, in a small town in the Netherlands. It was the third time this particular painting was stolen. I loved this quote (from the New York Times): “It is indeed surprising, even mysterious, when any work of art is stolen multiple times. Does its brushwork contain some clue to hidden treasure, or a secret code? Could it be coveted by some cult that worships Hals, or perhaps beer?”
Well, no—the general assumption among art theft experts is that art thieves gravitate toward art that has already been stolen. It’s a sort of twisted variety of social proof, I suppose.
The piece of this story that really piqued my interest, though, is the museum itself. According to the article I read, it’s (present tense) an almshouse for unmarried women. I don’t know exactly what that means in the Netherlands in 2021, but if it doesn’t call for a Dickensian tale of penury and chilblains, I don’t know what does.
An almshouse with a theft-worthy art collection—you can’t make this stuff up.
Take care,
Lisa
P.S. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if someone forwarded this to you, thank them for me, and go to https://bookwoman.com/ to subscribe.