More adventures at the Thai restaurant - By N.L. Belardes

Chingpea stood rather haggardly from the city’s latest and most fashionable chest cold infestation. She wheezed, smiled and we soon sat with steaming bowls of soup placed before us—flakes of ginger swirled in the bowls and steam wafted gently into our noses.

Such delight!

Just moments before I thought, It’s funny how I can write a little blog entry and it circulates around town, and makes its way to one of the cast members who I never would have known would read the article—though I’m not surprised.

We had walked into Bakersfield’s Thai Garden restaurant on Brundage Lane between A Street and Oleander, only to politely be confronted by the restaurant owner who had read the recent piece, “At the Thai food restaurant”. In fact, the piece had been printed and handed to him. By whom? I don’t know. A mystery reader I’m guessing; another thomasjacksonwalker (read comments) lurking the site from afar. He thanked me for writing the article while I was just happy to know that another blog made enough rounds to touch a few people’s lives in and outside of Bakersfield.



I learned something new about the restaurant owner. While Chingpea sat and ate the soup I munched on spicy chicken and listened to some entrepreneurs talk with the restaurant owner about textiles: fabrics, shirts and imports from overseas. Chingpea knows a lot about such topics as well—she’s always doing work to help organize tradeshows. She practically puts the clothes on sales teams and organizes shows from booth placement to travel arrangements. She even works with big display companies. She helps negotiate prices and so forth for very expensive booth operations at global tradeshows. She’s a steal for any company to have on their team as she also knows the ins and outs of ordering various types of clothing and promotional items.

Many people don’t know Chingpea and I work with each other during the day. Where she does a lot of the planning, I do a lot of the creative work to help build company image through design and creative direction, blogs, writing, online strategies, etc. It’s a team effort.



I even put my resume online recently to see what kind of feedback I might get from companies in Bakersfield, Fresno and beyond interested in such exciting image-building…

And so we sat and listened to the restaurant owner talk about his specialties other than Thai food. He clearly knew of the textiles he spoke of. He even explained the 5-stitch process of the shirt he was wearing, while I simply got stuffed on my spring roll.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Thursday, July 27, 2006. You can leave your response.