The perils of public transport

A THAI woman who was lost for 25 years after catching the wrong bus home was finally reunited with her family thanks to simple song.

The last time Jaeyaena Beuraheng saw her seven children was in 1982 when she left the southern Thailand province of Narathiwat on one of her regular shopping trips across the nearby border with Malaysia.

She disappeared, and police later told her family that she had apparently been killed in a traffic accident.

In fact, Jaeyaena had simply taken the wrong bus home - an error that would have been easy to fix except that she only speaks the local dialect of Malay known as Yawi, according to officials at the homeless shelter where the 76-year-old has lived for two decades.

On her way back from Malaysia, she mistakenly hopped on a bus to Bangkok, some 1150km north of her home in Narathiwat province.

Unable to read Thai and speaking a language few Thais can understand, she again took a wrong bus, this time to Chiang Mai, another 700km further north.

There she ended up as a beggar for five years, until she was finally sent to a homeless shelter in the central Thai province of Phitsanulok in 1987.
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Papal lace-makers now producing G-strings

(From CathNews earlier this week)

Catholics in a Polish lace-making village that produces altar cloths and robes for priests - including the Pope - are in uproar after declining demand for their products led women to develop hot selling new product lines including sexy G-strings for international markets.

The Age reports that the radical adaptation of the traditional skills of the women of the southern mountain village of Koniakow has proved a huge success and online sales of items costing over $100 are soaring.

But the Catholic Church and other critics say the new products including tight little tops, pants, bras and G-strings, known as stringi, are bringing shame on a respectable craft.

Malgorzata Stanaszek, who set up Koni-Art underwear and is now supplying Japanese, American and European customers, said: "We weren't selling much lace, so we had to think of something. It wasn't one woman's idea, it was more like a collective idea."

However, Mieczylaw Kamieniarz, who runs the lace museum in Koniakow, says that "all of Koniakow is ashamed".

"We have made Koniakow lace for altar cloths, priests' robes, even the Pope himself. And now people are going to wear Koniakow lace on their bottoms."
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This actually made it into the daily paper in Melbourne. Makes you wonder really...