A trip to Thailand with spouses (1): The shoes

Dear friends:

following yesterday's subject, I'm in the debt of inform you that, actually, there are women like Nuria Esther that, in addition to her hard work, she takes care of her children and uses the washing machine, but she knows how to fix a plug and is handy with the drill too (Alberto Marugán dixit). This huri­ of the Spanish Plateau, I have to add, is SINGLE, a complete bargain you just cannot leave, wether your name is José Antonio or not (and I say this name just to say one, I could have said Jose Alfredo). To be honest and true, I will say that she knows nothing abut cooking.

The encounter with Thailand, among other things, has been a freedom trip. As you know, the reason to go to so distant beach was not other than a wedding, the one of my brother-in-law Diego with Wenneke, a tall, pretty and smart Dutch that, I am afraid, does not know to handle the drill (or wimble), although she cooks very well. I just have to say that my brother-in-law knows exactly what he is doing.

For so big event, taking place in a barefoot paradise, I bought a pair of well-known shoes in an expensive shop in Madrid, which have never seemed to me much my style, that is the same one since I was fourteen (and what?), satisfying therefore the will of my wife, to whom I obey in these circumstances, mainly because I don't like being an added problem to the many that, no matter how hard you do to take it easy, are derived from any familiar celebration. I proved on the expensive shoes in the store in Madrid and they were my perfect size, they came into my feet softly as if I had greased the foot with butter and I certainly have to recognize that they were comfortable and they had threatening dot neither to cause me blisters nor gallings, so I got them, in spite of its price. What the hell! It is less than my brother-in-law deserves: good shoes for his wedding.

The great day arrived, I took my new footwear, but, fuck!, I couldn't find the way to put the fucking shoes in the foot (or better the fucking feet into the shoes). You can't even have a certain idea of the titanic fight I had. I attribute it to the fact, as I said, that the trip to Thailand has been a freedom one for many reasons. I have always criticized those who take off the shoes in the minimum opportunity, but Bangkok was too much, is a feet suicide. Too much heat and too much humidity, at the end your feet look like sausages (the white ones), which gives a more disgusting aspect to them, if I can say, to those ten worms that culminate our body. I paid attention to a good advice I had and bought a pair of slippers in the Janujak Market, but, for sure, because of the disgust that have always produced feet to me, I am not used to wear anything but closed footwear and, all day long walking, I wasn't able to get used to the feeling of the strap nibbling to me the interstices, causing me a pair of bothering and painful gallings, very attractive for flies.

Is this disgust, not doubts about it, that push me to walk (not in Bangkok, where I held with the slippers) by Relax Bay, Koh Lanta, all the day barefoot. My feet felt, then, the sensation of recovering their lost freedom, refusing to go again into the narrow discipline of the leather, no matter how expensive and comfortable were the shoes.

Minutes before the wedding, dressed in shirt and trousers of linen, in impossible escorzo (the one thar my belly allows to me that is not, indeed, the curve of Praxi­teles) I fought with the shoes like Laoconte against the snakes, but it was in vain. My feet rejected to return to jail, my wife was hurrying me, my kid did not want to put the trousers on, we were going to be late, mmmmmmmmm, the fucking feet... Nothing in hell to manage with them, the heat was tremendous, the suffocating humidity... The sweat began to extend by my linen shirt, as if my pride bled stabbed by the oppression of last minute.

I must say that, as I am a tenacious guy, I won. I put the shoes on. I sweated a lot, I ruined my unpolluted aspect, but I left my hut the way it has to be: with the shoes on. In fact, I only had to give a rest to me in the fight, breathe deeply, take impulse, realize that the cords were not an adornment (but true abutments), undo the knot, put them on at last and tie them up. That was everything. A pirric victory, without a doubt, but victory in the end. Sweated, but happy, we went the three of us to the ceremony of the wedding that took place in the same beach, under a leafy tree whose name I do not know (and either I could not find out, although I asked).

There, in that small barefoot paradise, the hotel staff had put some carpets for the assistants since, according to the rite, all the guests must remain bent or seated at any moment and always below the height of the monks. When I arrived at the carpets, dear friends, the first thing I had to do (someone told me to do it), was to take my shoes off.

My feet have become to the buddhism.

Those expensive and stubborn shoes were used only throughout twenty meters. No more. And I did no longer put them on in all the afternoon-night. On the following day I had to look for them, because it did not remember where it had left them (in what point of the island). I found them buried in the sand. They are in good state. I guess I still can give them back to the store.

X.Buddha-Murguía