The other day I discovered an underwear shop near the Warorot market. My ancient pink bra has been giving up the ghost for a while now and poking me horribly with its underwire. So I decided to replace it. Inside the underwear shop (no, let me rather call it a lingerie shop – it sounds much nicer) I found myself in a treasure trove of beautiful colours and laces and satins and prints and patterns. The bras were piled up in mounds (yeah, yeah - pun intended) – it was a tiny warehouse of pretty items. We pay so much for clothes in South Africa. You can get a stunning bra here for less than 100 baht. That’s about R25. We’d pay between R200 and R300, at a conservative guess, in SA. (Yeah, choke in horror.) So there I was, pawing through the piles of drool worthy undies like a dirty pervert when the Thai lady shop assistant approached me and cheerfully steered me over to the other side of the store, saying “Big sizes this side only!” Humph. I’m really not that big. In SA I’m kind of average, perhaps tending towards the smaller side of average. Turns out that in Thai bra sizes I’m a 38. THIRTY EIGHT??????? Holy crap! I feel like a porn star. The rest of me is not a thirty eight. Even when I got really porky and put on twelve kilos a few years ago (courtesy of dodgy home cooking supersize portions, a hectic schedule at Varsity, torn ligaments in the ankle and the resultant year and a half off exercise) I was still not a 38. 36? Perhaps. 38? Never.
Vanity leads me to append here that I have since lost ten of those twelve kilos. The two that refused to vacate my thighs, citing entitlement to permanent residence as a result of squatting rights (quite trendy in SA) remain a thorn in my side from which I cannot seem to rid myself. But even these two unwanted residents do not push me into serious plumpdom.
Now, at the end of last year, I changed my method of birth control due to concerns about whether or not I would be able to access the stuff in small and strange countries. Glossing over the itty bitty details, I noticed some changes. Some of these changes were good. Two changes in specific made me very happy. My boobs. Freed from their hormonal prison, they got bigger. Yay! But they did not get huge. They are far from what I would call huge. Which is why I was so startled to learn that I am a size 38 bra in Thailand. To me, a size 38 bra implies huge. It would seem that size 38 also implies huge to the Thais. Because the vast majority of size 38 Thai bras are engineered to control dangerous criminals. Straight jackets are also rendered obsolete - you strap a psych patient up in one of these things and there’s zero chance of self-inflicted damage. The Thai size 38 bra is stunning from the front – a symphony of different colours of lace. And then you turn it around to see straps that could be used to tow ships. Clearly size 38 breasts need to be drastically controlled, in case they whip out machine guns and lay waste to cities. (I’m getting an Austen Powers reference here…) It’s a bit mad. Looking at the back part of those bras I felt like Giant Western Freak Lady.
Pretty lace bra:
Egad! The other side! Those straps are thicker than my wrist:
All was not lost, however, and I did manage to track down a few pairs of massive-huge-step-aside-Pammy-quick-call-in-the-military-these-things-are-out-of-control-size-38 bras that had pretty cups and semi-normal straps. Chortling with glee I paid my R19.17 (at today’s forex rates) per bra and raced home to try them on one by one and stare in fascination at myself in the mirror. The other thing about Thai bras is that they are all padded. All of them. Really padded. Like – a lot. Thai bra manufacturers seem to believe that unruly size 38 breasts need to be controlled with industrial strength webbing and a cattle prod. Why then, WHY (I cry) do they pad them? Surely these (in the minds of the bra manufacturers) obscenely, abnormally huge protuberances don’t actually need to be emphasized and encouraged? But logic has clearly deserted them (perhaps temporary insanity induced by the thought of such massive gazongas) and size 38 bras are indeed padded. So yeah – I went home and put on my padded bras and little vest tops and peered at myself in awe in the mirror for the evening.
N told me the other day that he thinks that maybe, just maybe, the padding makes me look a little bit too large. I think he may be right. But hey – hopefully that will be remedied soon. When I lose weight. Because I appear to be getting fat. Gah! Not again! How can this be happening to me? (I shall ignore the obvious explanations, which involve the incredibleness of Thai cuisine and the utter lack of exercise over the past month and instead plump for the Moon being in Venus. Or somewhere. Or something. Because then maybe it will sort itself out without me having to stop eating or start exercising.)
Over the past week or so, I found myself to wondering (idly) whether I should perhaps be doing more exercise. Then last night I was changing (yes, to go to dinner) and I caught sight of myself in the mirror, in one of the new padded bras. “Hmmm”, I said to N “They do seem to be bigger than usual, don’t they?”
“Yes” he replied appreciatively, glancing up from his work.
“Hmmm. Well as long as the rest of me isn’t also getting bigger.”
And then I saw his quick, almost guilty sideways glance and I KNEW!
“Oh god! I am! Aren’t I?”
Slightly alarmed “Uh-oh – am I in the shit now?” look from N.
“No really – am I getting fatter?”
(What’s a guy supposed to say?)
He said “Um, do you want the truth?”
This elicited a squeal of dread, shock, horror, dismay and total and utter panic.
He handled it quite well, though. I was reassured that it “isn’t much, just a little bit all over and not all in one spot” and that it “doesn’t look bad” and that it “feels nice”.
This has tempered my initial horror but a low level dread remains. I am faced with the terrifying prospect of curtailing my intake of delicious Thai food. I really don’t want to have to do that. But the alternatives are too alarming to consider. I cannot swell to a size 40 bra! If I went into a lingerie shop and asked for a size 40 I might be captured by the shop owner and sold to the Thai Bra Lords for scientific experiments.
