Birthday present?

I found what would have been the perfect birthday present, except for the fact that, even though it folds, it wouldn’t have fitted inside our luggage.

I broke my new reading glasses – probably from reading in bed – and I didn’t have a tiny screwdriver to fix them. In a department store, I found an optician’s.

A nice man came up and asked, I assume, if he could help me. He didn’t speak much English, and I don’t speak the local language, so I used Google Translate, whose photographic text recognition has been used a lot thus far, to ask if he could fix glasses.

I gave him my phone to type his answer; he could. He took me to sit at a little table, and I showed him the loose screw in my glasses. He twigged straight away, of course, and took them away.

In due course, he came back, and I let him use my phone again. It was fascinating to watch what words came up while he was typing; ‘cucumber’ being most memorable. He said he’d fixed them. I was delighted.

I asked how much; he waved his hands in a no-charge sort of way, which I thought was very kind of him.

‘Arigatō,’ I said, bowing more than I thought was necessary, just to be on the safe side. I don’t know how many bows are needed or who is supposed to bow last. Afterwards, I hoped I’d bowed enough. I didn’t want him think I was ungrateful.

I’ll be more careful with the glasses in the future.