Milk, please?

I just watched a commercial on television that extolled the virtues of a nice cold glass of milk. The milk looks wonderfully white and clean in a clear glass on a wonderfully white and clean background. One can almost forget that the milk came from a somewhat smelly animal in a barnyard. And milk comes out out the cow very warm.

When I was traveling in Asia, I landed in Bangkok coming from the beach area of Phuket. Beautiful beaches – I highly recommend them to anyone adventurous enough to go to Asia. But I digress…

Anyway, I landed in Bangkok – and why would I land in any city in Asia during the day??? Just never seemed to happen – at night. I was a bit leery being on my own, so I grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to a hotel than wasn’t too far down on the price scale (that would come later). I got to the hotel at around 11pm and, after the staff chased a four-inch cockroach out of the room, I realized I was hungry.

I perused the English room service menu and didn’t recognize a thing except toast and milk. So I ordered toast and milk. I couldn’t figure out why it took 45 minutes for it to arrive. Until it did.

The toast was bread that it appeared they’d waved over an open flame for a minute. And then there was the milk. I took a sip of it and found it was very warm, body temperature warm. And something got stuck to my lower lip. Hmmmm. I pulled the offended piece of whatever it was off my lip and gagged.  

It was a hair. From a cow. The hotel obviously had a cow somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchens and they had milked this cow for me. They absolutely gave me what I asked for. I poured the rest of it down the drain, nauseous and definitely not hungry any more.

Now I realize that any dairy farmers reading this are going to scoff and say, “So, what’s the problem?” But for me, that was about on par of being chased around the room by a four-inch cockroach.

I refused to drink milk for a long time after that. I took calcium supplements. For the past several years, I’ve seen commercials encourage people to drink milk – ice, cold milk. So I started drinking milk again but every time I see one of those commercials, I think ‘cow hair’.

Ugh.