Bulgarians never smile

13 January 2010

I told Peter about the Bulgarian restaurant, the complaint that the woman never smiled. Though beautifully redone in wood we avoided the place. Oh! Peter said, Bulgarians never smile. I once asked the manager of the Bulgarian airline why their air hostesses never smiled. What is there to smile at? He asked. So in we went to this restaurant and the woman actually came up to Peter and smiled. Yiong got hold of a booklet from her desk and it was full of jokes about Bulgarian stinginess. Substitute “Penang” and it could have been all about Penangites!

We were at Kroh late one night with a group of enthusiastic visitors I had brought to Betong and were looking for a place to eat - it was past 10 om and surprise. surprise, a Malay woman directed us to a Chinese coffee shop at the corner
unsmiling bulgarians

I have in the car Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions which I read whenever I wait for KH in the car. I thought it highly entertaining and thought the kings and gods in her story were surely from Indian legends. Now I have received the Penguin Mahabharata and discover that hers is a very ingenious version of a story simply told of the Mahabharata but through the eyes of Draupadi, the doomed princess and very feminine.

At Telok Bahang at a restaurant the owner said to me dont come this way Thursday to Sunday the traffic jam sometimes stretches back as far as here. She complained the place was now full of gangsters and illegal structures.