merry คริสต์มาส !

.
it's Christmas day and I sit here at school, enjoying those most classic of holiday smells: burning garbage, deep fried fish paste and dog. I'm wearing a traditional holiday outfit: flip flops, chalk-encrusted pencil skirt and school uniform polo tee, and my hair is plastered back with sweat from the December mid-morning heat. I woke up this morning and found that I'd received a special visitor during the night... in the little yellow box I'd laid on the living room floor, two cockroaches had come to take the poison I'd left them and were gripping to their last moments of life. I also found a pile of dog shit on my doorstep as I raced out the door for work this morning!

Yesterday, in celebration of the holiday (the Christian origins of which none of the children - and adults, it would seem - here are aware of) the foreign teachers were asked to sing a song for the staff and student body. we elected the mercifully short Jingle Bell Rock. As we sang, Santa (teacher ryan) threw handfuls of candy out into the sea of screaming children.

Santa and friends sing before the student body

Santa fends off packs of hungry students

After the morning madness, we spent a good hour presenting gifts (from whom?) to members of the administration and getting our photos taken, we had a talent show of sorts. The whole morning long, groups of reluctant students got up on stage to sing carols about the birth of christ and eating figgy pudding and folks dressed up like eskimos..

the carolers

Then the high school students performed the grand finale performance, which was, of course, a sexy dance number to a popular (decidedly un-christmassy) pop/techno song.

yup, the one in high heels, make-up and tiny cutoffs in the front is a fellow

Now I leave for a school-free week on Ko Phi Phi!

Thanks for the christmas packages, emails, phone calls - they made my day today! Hope you all have a warm, safe and fabulously food-filled holiday and new year.

Until 2010!
.

pattaya beach "cleanup"

A couple of weeks ago the school decided to embark on yet another one of those strange, poorly planned, last minute endeavors which inevitably end up in confusion and discomfort. The idea this time was to have a "cleanup day" where we unleash hundreds of our delinquent students on a rocky ocean side area in Pattaya to collect rubbish for a day. what could possibly go wrong?

Pattaya City

As is almost always the case here, the other American teachers and I were essentially clueless as to the itinerary for the trip and what it was we were expected to be doing for the 9 or so hours we spent with the kids that day. The bus ride there lasted for two long, loud hours. Busloads of children tumbled out into the midmorning heat and immediately scattered.. we wandered around for much of the day watching kids lifting pieces of glass, food wrappers and splintery boards riddled with rusty nails up onto the shore. Leaving the 100s of kids running around willy nilly, precariously teetering on slippery rocks, and generally getting up to no good, teacher Katie and I stole away to Starbucks and got ourselves iced coffees and used their nice clean bathrooms.

a failing attempt at taking a group photo

At the end of the day prizes were awarded to groups of students who collected the most garbage. unfortunately, this was measured by weight so "most" garbage meant "heaviest" garbage and we had kids hauling up bags of rocks, coconuts and wet rope, the more ambitious ones dragging concrete benches and whole boats (i kid not) up from the shore.

weigh station

Above are wash buckets of hot, filthy water for the children to rinse off their hands before eating. For lunch, the kids got boxes of sticky rice and fried chicken to eat with the hands they had just moments before been picking up old milk cartons, dirty tissues, animal bones, with. We all sat on the ground by the parking lot to eat our boxed lunches (teachers got muu krapow, one of my favorite dishes) and wait for some sort of cue as to what to do next. I ended up finding some of my students who were able to communicate that it was time to leave..

a cheeky grade 5 boy taking advantage of the opportunity to stop working and pose for the camera

high school students loiter on motorbikes

watching, transfixed, as the grade 6 girls slip and slide
over sharp rocks in their flip flops

grade 5 boys trying to wrestle a toilet bowl out from under boulders and logs
- pattaya city in the background

stir fried children with hemorrhagic fever

.
In a scheme to get some laundry done for him free of charge, teacher ryan has taken on the task of translating Pi Pen's Thai food menu into English. He's been letting me help here and there, and it turns out it's an excellent way to get familiar with the Thai alphabet. From my few sessions sitting down with the menu and a thai translation/dictionary site I already feel more comfortable picking out and recognizing a lot of those little squiggles they have written everywhere here.

lots of confusing wiggly lines

The menu is only 16 lines long but it's a time consuming process to identify each character (the font Pi Pen uses on her menu seems to be a deliberate attempt to make the characters undecipherable) and then fiddle with different character/word combinations to finally come up with some kind of vague, incomplete translation of some of the words...
Ryan been more dedicated to the project, and has had much more success than I. He's translated menu items like "fried rice with chicken/pork/shrimp," "spicy prawn soup with or without coconut milk" and "pork sausage with rice and a fried egg." Here are some of the menu items i've translated so far:

- eyebrows in fish sauce
- larvae poured over stringy peasant
- crude oil unboiled water yarn on floppy disk
- earthenware pig having not yet entered monkhood
and my favorite,
- stir fried children with hemorrhagic fever

I've given up. I suspect he's having more luck without my help.
.

a laotian halloween

.
Teacher Ryan and I left BKK the evening of October 30 on a bus headed for Vientiane, Laos. The trip was fine, a bit strange as it turned out we had booked the wrong bus for where we actually wanted to go, but just fine once we sign-languaged and facial-expressioned our way onto the correct bus. it was beautiful getting to watch the sun rise over the hills of northern thailand. and they gave us lukewarm boxes of rice with ground pork and fried eggs for dinner (I actually love that stuff) and soymilk and cookies for breakfast, so that kept me happy as food has a way of doing for me. We ended up finally making the border crossing by late morning on the 31st. we staggered, sleep-deprived and blinky in the midday sun, out of the immigration checkpoint and into a taxi that a couple old British guys offered to share with us. Into Vientiane, with no plans for where we would stay and no idea where the Thai embassy (to which a visit was the reason for the trip) was, we ended up finding a great hostel (Mixay Guesthouse, I think) for an economical 40,000 kip (about $4 usd) each. Turns out the price included a massive breakfast of toast, eggs, rice, curries, laotian sweets, tea, coffee so - both of us in shameless backpacker mode - we ended up taking full advantage of this perk and stuffing ourselves early each morning before heading to the embassy to take care of visa business and then again right before they closed it down in the late morning. This gluttony, combined with the fact that there were several lovely french bakeries, a good cheap sushi place, a tex-mex restaurant and an indian food place along the very street on which we were staying resulted in what was quite possibly a weight gain of about one pound. PER DAY. for the 5 days we were there. awesome.

Returning to Halloween day and our arrival in the Laotian capital.. after the taxi ride and hostel hunt, we sat down at a riverside (this description is far too flattering in reality. it was more like mudflatside) eating establishment along the bank of the Mekong - the river which creates much of the border between Laos and Thailand. Sipping a fine Beer Laos, we looked around to see what the locals were eating (usually a good way to figure out the best thing to order) and saw them all with bowlfuls of whole eggs on their tables and eggshells littering the ground. So we ordered these "hatched eggs" as the menu described them, which we foolishly believed to be harmless hardboiled eggs. Ryan was the first to crack open one of the eggs and lift a chunk of shell off to reveal...


*** please finish eating, or abandon plans to eat anytime soon if you decide to continue scrolling down ***


seriously.

happy halloween from laos!!

We didn't actually take this picture, but it's just about exactly what Ryan's egg looked like.. though i think his had a few more coagulated blood clumps hanging off the fetus head.

This is the first food i've encountered in Asia that i've been utterly unable to even consider tasting. After a confused, then shocked, then horrified, then nauseated pause, we awkwardly stood up, left our beer glasses and fetuses on the table along with a generous tip, and returned to the hostel for a fetus-free meal of bread and cheese.

In the end, with only a few paperwork disasters, we finally got our visa issues worked out and were able to catch an international bus direct from Vientiane to BKK's Suvarnabhumi airport and be back in our neighborhood by 7am... just in time to leave for school at 7:20. it made for an awful day at school, but well worth it for a chance to check out our neighbors to the north.

sun and sand and massaman curry

.
Went out salsa dancing in Bangkok this weekend at La Rueda, an unassuming little place on Sukhumvit 18. They offer free beginner lessons on Saturday nights so Ivy and I, in our constant quest for free entertainment, put on our dancing shoes and spent the evening salsaing to Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Jose Alberto... It was like being in Latin America again. with lots of asians.

Now back to the October vacation...

From Ko Tao, we took a night ferry to Surat Thani, followed by a bus over to the Andaman sea coast, followed by a 4 hour wait at a remote little "bus station" - really a hut in the jungle full of travel brochures - then a minivan ride to Krabi town where we had another hiatus while the drivers' friends tried to sell us ridiculous transport/vacation packages, then a couple of ferry rides, a bumpy trip in the back of a pickup and then, finally, we arrived at Kantiang Bay View Resort. The word "resort" is, i think, a bit misleading but the place - a spot right on the beach with a restaurant, bar and 20 or so little bungalows - ended up being a great place to stay. As it was still technically low season, we got a good rate (about $4/night) for a bungalow with a fan, private bathroom and porch complete with rope hammock.

Kantiang bay from the bungalows at our "resort"

Ko Lanta was everything that Ko Tao was not.. Quiet, relaxing, peaceful, we spent most of our time swimming, reading/sleeping on the beach, snorkeling in the bay and eating. We barely ventured farther than Kantiang Bay - one reason I'd love to go back sometime and explore more of the island. Another striking difference between the two islands was that the culture of Ko Lanta has a very prominent Muslim influence. Most of the girls and women on the island wear head scarves and kept most of their skin covered whenever they were outside or in public. Alcohol isn't served at many of the restaurants because they're owned by Muslims. Our favorite food on Ko Lanta was the sweet, creamy, incredibly spiced Massaman curry, ubiquitous at restaurants and street stands on the island. The name Massamam is apparently thought to have derived from a variation of the word Muslim. It's a coconut milk curry flavored with cardamom, cinnamon, fish sauce, tamarind and chilies (and loads more I'm unaware of, i'm sure) and full of potatoes, toasted peanuts and chicken (or beef sometimes).

low tide

there was one ultra swanky, fancy pants resort in Kantiang Bay. some locals told us each year at the start of high season (which happened to be the last day of our trip) they construct this big plastic floating jetty so that their guests can be delivered directly by boat without having to get near the dusty dirt streets of the island. An unsightly blotch on the otherwise pristine bay, it was nonetheless kind of cool.

playing on the jetty

squinting in the afternoon sun - the fancy resort behind me

Same Same but Different Restaurant in Kantiang Bay

Four days later we reluctantly packed up and enjoyed another pickup truck-minivan-ferry-minivan-ferry-minivan-bus trip to the Surat Thani train station, boarded a sleeper car this time and were Bangkok bound once again...

.

backpackers, beaches and beer

.
Way, way back in early October, the school semester finally came to a close and teacher ryan and I made our escape from Samut Prakarn on a train bound for the southern town of Chumpon.

First, I'll back up a little.. when ryan and i arrived at the train station in Bangkok, we were descended upon by a herd of thais in blinding orange shirts asking us where we were going (I foolishly told them the truth) and then proceeding to insist adamantly, frantically that the trains to Chumpon were full and that we only had 7 minutes to book a private bus or else we'd be stuck "for long, long, long time" in bangkok. Despite their size these little guys were impressive in their ability to herd us away from the ticket counter and over to a corner of the station where i started to believe them and consider buying into their urgent orange shirty scam.. Ryan, luckily, broke free and found out at the ticket counter that trains to Chumpon were not, in fact, full and booked us two seats on the night train leaving an hour later.

Turns out we bought tickets for an "economy" car. this made for a memorable trip...

Hot and sweaty because the one ceiling fan in the car was broken, the two of us were smooshed in seats shared with disgruntled strangers in the back of the train car. The seats themselves were defunct, locked permanently in a severely reclined position, which would have been just fine if it weren't for the fact that all the cleaning supplies for the train were apparently stored directly behind the seats. A sullen man with shaggy twigs of hair obscuring his eyes shuffled over every (what felt like) 5 minutes to retrieve or replace another bucket or mop or bottle or rag, at which point I'd scootch my body up against the seat in front of me as he wrestled with the broken seat back, wriggling and jerking his torso in behind me. every five minutes. Additionally, as the train pulled out of the station there began a clanking noise - a really disturbing, terrible, something-is-breaking sort of sound - emanating from somewhere directly below my feet. The din continued for the entirety of the 7 hour train ride and dissolved any hope I may have had of sleeping that night.

Bleary eyed and in a shitty mood when we arrived in Chumpon, I trudged alongside Ryan out from the station to the waiting bus which carted us out to a waiting ferry which, finally, carried us to our island destination.

Finally in Ko Tao, we booked a bungalow at Blue Wind Resort (cheapest place we could find, at about $5 usd each/night), dumped our backpacks and perused the dive shop options on Hat Sai Ri. Within an hour we settled on Big Blue Divers and were on the next boat out that afternoon. Poor visibility and a big group made for a less than spectacular dive, but it was great to get back in the water again after almost 7 months on land..

the Gulf of Thailand (and a pitiful scrap of the thai flag)
from the diveboat

upper deck where we ate cookies and sunbathed between dives

big boulders on Laem Nam Tok

Laem Nam Tok again

The beach where we stayed on Ko Tao, Hat Sai Ri, is popular with backpackers and other young travelers looking to get scuba certified in what is perhaps the cheapest and most popular place on earth to become an open water diver. This means we found ourselves in the company on 100s of Americans, Europeans, Australians looking for (and finding plenty of) sun, sand and cheap booze. It was fun to eat all the western foods i'd been craving, drink cold beers at beachside bars, meet a few interesting travelers and get some diving in, but we eventually tired of Ko Tao's (more specifically Hat Si Ri's) frat party feel and were ready to move farther south to Ko Lanta.

the memorable pizza place where I tasted my first bite of cheese since leaving the states...
heaven.
greasy, salty, cheesy heaven.

Hat Sai Ri early in the morning before
last night's partiers emerged

Hat Sai Ri

longtails lined up waiting to take the first round of divers out for the day

Ko Lanta post to follow.

.

sweet mung bean mush

sdf

While family and friends at home are baking cookies, eating Thanksgiving leftovers, bundling up drinking pumpkin spice lattes, I'm rummaging for a tank top to wear that isn't already drenched in sweat, wishing I didn't need to go out in the sun to fill up jugs of fresh water, trying to keep an eye on a pot of little green mung beans and water threatening to boil over in the kitchen.

This brings me to my dessert of the month: Sweet Mung Bean Mush. It's got nothing on a nice spiced pumpkin pie with a good flaky crust and fresh whipped cream, but I've been strangely craving this sweet beany stuff daily for weeks now. The dish is pretty unexciting, if not downright unappealing to the average person, but really does hit the spot for me..

in all its glory

cookin up my mush

where i've been

.
It's week four back at school now, and i've been neglecting not only my blog but my laundry (some still left from the school holiday), house cleaning, test grading, leg shaving, you name it. It's been a busy few weeks with a last minute return from vacationing in the south, the arrival of new teachers from the states, an unexpected international jaunt, and a hectic start to the new school semester.

It'll take a little while to update the blog so i'm going to play some catch up in my next few posts. For now, here's a brief recap of the last month...

- finished semester one without grocery shopping for the last two full weeks. this resulted in some strange, sometimes embarrassing meals...

..take, for example, the fried bread, apple,
boiled sweet potato-like stuff and jicama melange

- welcomed teacher ryan to life in Thailand

- visited fun, beachy Ko Tao alongside hordes of other young travelers, became connoisseurs of cheap Thai beer and finally got a little bit of diving in

view from the diveboat

- traveled further south still to quieter beaches of Ko Lanta

kan tiang beach

- spent a sleepless night on the misleadingly named "sleeper" train back to BKK

- saw the arrival of 5 more new American teachers here at SB

- started school with 130 new students added to my schedule (unbeknownst to me, of course, until stepped into the classroom on the first day)

- in one day decided to go to Laos, applied for Thai re-entry permit, taught a full day of classes, received said permit, packed a bag and boarded a bus bound for Laos

- went to Laos

in Laos

- returned to a daunting pile of notebooks and tests to grade, lesson plans to create, emails to respond to, laundry to wash, gecko feces to mop up in the living room, etc.

Stay tuned. more details to follow.
.

street food in ayutthaya

.
I've finally reached my last post about our trip to Ayutthaya...

and, unsurprisingly, it's all about food.

At the riverside night market in Ayutthaya we explored the rows of stalls offering all sorts of wonderfully mysterious foodstuffs before settling on some seafood from this woman's stand..

grilled cuttlefish and squid-on-a-stick

To order, you point to the raw proteins you want (we chose squid, cuttlefish and some meat/veggie shishkabobs), she brushes them down with some sort of marinade, puts them on the hot grill and lets them cook for a few minutes. She tosses the grilled meat into individual bags and ladles some sweet/spicy/tangy sauces over the bags' contents before handing them over.


One of the foods that Ayutthaya is apparently known for is Roti Sai Mai. Street vendors all over the city offer these plastic bags of paper-thin green crepe-like roti. Along with the roti you're given a plastic bag of this green/pink/white sugar floss (similar to cotton candy, but chewier and denser). To eat, you pull off a pinch of the floss and roll it up in a sheet of roti. I think they must use glutinous rice flour in the roti batter because the result is chewy and elastic. and it's almost unbearably sweet.

amelia prepares a roti roll

roti sai mai

As an afternoon snack after our roti, we happened upon one of the millions of rolling deepfrying street vendors on a street corner by our hostel. We bought a styrofoam bowl of hardboiled quail eggs wrapped in won ton wrappers, deepfried to chewy, crispy, fatty perfection and drizzled with sweet chili sauce...

fried, eggy, doughy nuggets
.

cabbages and condoms food

.
I've finally unearthed photos of the food we ate at the intriguingly (if not unsettlingly) named, Cabbages and Condoms restaurant...

Wonderfully lemongrassy, light Tom Yam Goong


Perhaps my favorite thai dish yet - Som Tam Thai
with a shot of C&C's personalized dishware


a ravenous amelia attempts to restrain her claw from grabbing fistfuls
of the little pre-meal chip nubs we got
.

Last day of school.. as far as i can tell

.
From what I can gather (which, of course, is woefully little) today is the last day of school for the semester here. If this really is the case, then I'll be headed south in the next couple of days to spend some much needed time on the beach. I'm still undecided about where I'll go, but I've narrowed it down to Ko Tao, Ko Phi Phi, Ko Samui, or maybe Ko Chang. I'm hoping to get in at least a little decent diving and plenty of time with a book, a beer and a beach towel. I'm standing out more than ever here with my caucasian complexion growing pastier and pastier, so I'm looking forward to producing some melanin pigments again.

Being in tropical paradise means, however, that I won't be posting for a few weeks starting today or tomorrow...

I'll be back by the end of the month, so until then, sawatdee kaaa and have a good October!

RIP Karl

.
Karl, my family's beloved morbidly obese cat, died yesterday at the age of 19 (give or take.. we got him from the pound). While there are things we won't miss about our fat feline...

[the way he scratched small children, knocked down the Christmas tree and proceeded to urinate all over it, urinated on our houseguests' feet and belongings, left clumps of grey fur in piles strewn around the living room, broke into the catfood cabinet to eat all the kibbles and then vomited them up in the kitchen, and stole food from all the neighborhood cats' bowls, for example]

...it's going to be strange next time I sit in front of the fireplace and don't have a massive, purring ball of fur collapse onto my lap, or the next time we cook salmon at home and hear no crazed meowing from the black blob scratching at our shins.

Karl loved being dressed up Christmas,

and hanging out on the deck with us in the summer..



and trying to steal food from the table.

Karl Spatz, you will be missed.

.

makkaloons and a losing battle with the ants

.
I keep a grocery bag at school, full of candy to bribe my children into doing their schoolwork. I have to be careful about where I keep it, though, because of a number of predators...

The students are predator #1, but they're not terribly bright so if they can't readily see the candy they assume it's disappeared and forget about it. Next is my coworkers... mostly they're men who aren't interested in my strawberry loveheart sweets, but there is a certain candy-crazed teacher here whose name starts with "I" and ends with "vy" but she's so small she really can't eat enough to put a dent in my supply.

The most troublesome and wily predator, as it turns out, is the ant population in my office. They're a menace, they're multiplying and they seem to be getting smarter. I play a strange sort of game trying to stay one step ahead these horrible little creatures as time after time they discover each one of my new hiding places. I suppose I could just bring an airtight container to store the candy in and be done with it, but I think I derive some sort of odd satisfaction from watching the little guys scurry around in a frenzy each time they're foiled and I move the bag to another corner of the room.

I recently bought some tasty coconut sweets at the market by my house. Last week I brought them to school and, determined not to let the ants discover my sugary treasures, stashed them in my best hiding spot yet. On Friday I sat at my desk, 4 days with no sign of the ants anywhere near my sweets, and reveled in my cleverness..

Yes ants, you may have won the last 300 battles but look who's laughing now! You never though to look in the taped-up bag inside the sealed box that's tied up with dental floss, hanging from the ceiling fan! ha!

sweet, chewy, coconutty (and ant free!) thai "macaroons"

.

a soggy end to the rainy season

Each Sunday morning I walk the 25 neighborhood blocks from my house to the home of one of my fourth grade students. I tutor her, her father and her little sister in English conversation for a couple of hours each week.. it's great getting to spend some time with a Thai family at home, playing with the little girls, talking with the parents (as well as is possible with their limited English and my severely limited Thai) and taking advantage of the tasty treats they share with me. (this week it was thick slices of dense, chewy Chinese moon cake filled with a sweet bean paste.)

The girls' parents told me this week that apparently it's supposed to be the end of the rainy season now in Bang Phli, an occasion marked by the Rap Bua festival today. The monks at the temples, they told me, are required to stay within the temple walls during the entire rainy season... this festival, then, celebrates the day when they're allowed to roam free again. Apparently they're not allowed to walk around during rainy season because there are so many sprouting plants and little animals and insects crawling around on the ground that it's impossible for them to walk on the ground without accidentally killing things. at least that's what I gathered from our broken English/Thai conversation. The main event in the celebration is loads of boats floating down the river, into which all the people lining the banks of the river throw armloads of lotus flowers so that each boat ends up stuffed full of flowers and each boat's lone passenger (a big buddha statue) is essentially buried.

Well, I'm unconvinced that this is the end of the rainy season. It has been raining harder and more often than ever here lately. The neighborhood streets are more like canals these days and I never leave the house without an umbrella and a change of dry clothes. On more than one occasion walking home from school these past couple of weeks I've taken off my shoes and waded (almost knee-deep at some points) down the street, watching all sorts of interesting objects (a sofa cushion, piles of trash, a couple of school notebooks, chopsticks...) lazily float past my legs. At night the rain pounding on the roof, the cars, the banana leaves on the tree outside my window, is often so deafening I can't listen to my beloved npr podcasts or watch the arrested development dvds amelia brought me.. I can't even talk on the phone it's so ridiculously loud. To be honest, though, I find the stormy weather exciting most of the time. as long as I'm not caught outside in it, wearing my thin white work shirt, carrying my computer and cell phone, 30 blocks from home, without a motorbike in sight. (this has happened)

touring bkk

.
Some glimpses of the spatz sisters' roam around the Bangkok metropolis...

A rare quiet city street next to the Grand Palace and __?__ University

the infamous Soi Cowboy red-light district
- we kept a safe distance and got fantastic thai massages (100 baht for 30 minutes) at a little place across the street

Traffic on a main bkk thoroughfare in front of MBK,
a massive shopping complex right off the BTS line

farang-filled Kao San Road
where one can buy cheap aladdin pants, elephant tshirts, fake Ray Bans and other tourist favorites, drink buckets (literally) of cheap booze and spend a quality night with 500 of your favorite drunken British/American/Australian buddies
..needless to say, we didn't spend much time here
.

สุขสันต์วันเกิด mummy!

.
It doesn't happen often but there are times here when I desperately wish I were at home in Portland. I'll get an email update from the Portland Farmers' Market, hear a news story from the pacific nw, flip through photos of skiing at Mt. Hood or eating pizza in Corvallis, or I'll talk to my family at home about the way our garden is overflowing with ripe tomatoes... and ugh. it's like a punch in the stomach. This morning has been one of those times.. after talking with my parents on skype, hearing tales of beautiful fall days spent outside, working on the house, going for walks and brisk evenings enjoying happy hour at the neighborhood cafe, celebrating my mum's birthday tomorrow, I've been aching for Oregon.

Slightly homesick and facing massive amounts of end-of-term paperwork to complete, I was in ultra lazy self-pity mode this morning so, logically, i put my work aside and played with my computer's "paint" function in honor of mummy's birthday...

Happy Birthday MummyTummy!
Eat a tomato for me.

alright... back to work.

s

som tam and son-in-law eggs

.
On our second day in Ayutthaya, Amelia and I got up early to go look at the things we hadn't seen on day one. famished after hours of trudging across the town on foot, we abandoned our original plan to eat lunch by the river and ended up sitting down at a pink picnic table outside a streetside cafe. The small eatery was adorned with dozens of tropical potted plants that all, strangely, had hawaiian leis draped over them, making for an odd sort of jungle/PartyCity theme..

While the decor could have done with a makeover, the food was awesome. (though our judgment may have been skewed by our voracious appetites)

We ordered rice (of course - no meal is complete without it), som tam and khai leuk kheuy to share.

khai leuk kheuy, or son-in-law eggs

again, amelia's claw waits impatiently
before pouncing on the plate of eggs i'm photographing

These eggs are hard boiled, then fried so they're soft on the inside and sort of chewy and crisp on the outside. Then they're sliced in half and drenched in a sweet and salty sauce which seems to consist of caramelized onions, sugar, salt and some kind of fat. The dish is topped with chopped fresh cilantro.

sticky, salty, caramely sauce
this might be my favorite Thai egg preparation yet

som tam thai

Unfortunately, as often happens here, they saw our pale faces and made our papaya salad entirely not spicy. aside from that it was just fine - refreshing on a hot day.

s