Spent some time today in the employees only break room at a fine hotel at lunchtime. One plastic folding table and a few chairs for all the people that hotel must employ? And yet it was full, but not crowded. We found the last two seats and I had to situate mine in front of the little sink and hope no one needed to get there before I was done gulping down cauliflower curry (only 1/2 an hour for lunch). Directly behind me at the table, a young woman with long, blonde, straightened hair sat completely absorbed by her cell phone, looking like she was trying to escape from everybody (Angry Birds?). A young black man, who we had seen earlier in the lobby emptying the garbage cans, sat across from her, rhythmically bobbing his head to whatever music was coming from his headphones. Across from me, in the awkward extra seating, sat two Burmese women, one of whom had been microwaving a container of rice-and-something when we had come which she immediately took out of the microwave as soon as she saw that we wanted to use it too. I hope it got hot enough. A younger woman sat next to her, eating some kind of salad out of two stacked styrofoam bowls with an un-styrofoam-bowl-like wavy rim. I wondered if she had microwaved something in them at some point that caused them to warp like that (shudder to think of what's probably being leached out of those bowls now). Occasionally, they would say something to each other in a language I didn't understand (Karin?), but quietly. Everyone in the little break nook seemed to have a fear of being overheard, and the place was subdued, a room full of strangers, and me.
