mango salad and a misunderstanding

kjlkj
I set aside Saturday morning to clean my house (yes, i do this sometimes) in preparation for amelia's arrival on Thursday. After about 30 minutes, I'd had enough and left to go for a swim at the school pool.

It was a ridiculously hot day and, dragging my feet down the scalding pavement, I was thinking how lovely it would be if some kind person would take pity and pull over to offer me a ride. Well lo and behold, just moments later a truck slowed, stopped beside me and the driver looked over and tapped his horn. the universal signal for "hop in, I'll give you a ride wherever you'd like to go!" right? this was my interpretation. so I jovially opened up the door and hopped up into the cab, grinning and bowing and thanking my new friend who, I was somewhat surprised to see, seemed a bit alarmed and confused. Ecstatic to be out of the heat and getting an air-conditioned ride, I told man (who was certainly acting strange, for someone who just volunteered to give me a free ride) where I was headed, he gave me another puzzled look and slowly pulled away from the curb.

It was only then that I noticed the bed of his truck. full of fruit and vegetables and hanging scales and price cards.

It quickly became obvious that this man had not, in fact, been offering a ride to the sodden girl on the curb. he was trying to sell me fruit. Unable to say "never mind" or "oops," let alone, "oh sorry, I thought you were offering me a ride because you stopped and honked and I was hot and wishing for a ride at that precise moment, but now I see you weren't so I'll get out right here, thank you," there wasn't much I could do, so I just sat next to this little man in his fruit truck, bumping down the road, smiling hugely at him when ever he glanced over perplexedly, until we got to the school. He let me out, I bowed and grinned some more, and he turned his truck around to continue with his day's work. In hindsight, I should have bought a big bag of fruit from him, but at that point I was so relieved to be getting out of this supremely uncomfortable situation, I all but ran down the street to the pool.

somewhat embarrassing but hey, free ride!


Well, on a foodier note, I've taken to eating a salad of slightly unripe mango, sliced, with shredded cabbage and red chilis and dressed with lime juice, fish sauce, sweet chili sauce. It's crunchy, cool (I normally put it in the freezer for a few minutes before eating), spicy, tart and slightly sweet (depending on the mango). Goes beautifully with a hot rice, curry or soup dish..

salad improvised from what was left in the fridge one day

chalk kid

strange kid
I have one kid in the speech club who, instead of preparing a speech during class friday afternoon, spent no less than 45 minutes doing this:

...with an entire box of chalk.
(that's his name)

Needless to say, this unique child won't be representing the school at Wednesday's speech competition.

meticulously inscribing "pookao" "pookao" "pookao" into each clean new stick of chalk, i'd be fascinated to discover what was going through young Pookao's head for that entire class period...
was it territory marking? (this would be odd.) was my lesson that mind-numbing? (quite likely, especially for a child who barely speaks english.) does he have such a dearth of playthings, he's resorted to white chalk? (i know this one is not true. he's 10 years old and owns an iPhone.)

countdown until amelia arrives: 4 days

khanum buang and airborne keys

sdf
This post could, alternatively, be entitled:

I am somewhat frustrated today and need to rant for a few paragraphs

**please scroll to the end to skip the rant and read my brief comments on delicious khanum buang**

The gremlins in grade 5 made off with my keys (house key, office key, desk key) today in class. Tossing them back and forth (while I sat with one of the especially inept students explaining to him how to spell his own name. i am not joking.) the keep-away game got out of hand and the last I saw of my keys was a glint of silver as they sailed out the open 4th story window. I spoke with my supervisor about this little incident, and she told me the same thing she says when anyone voices a concern: "Oh iss hokay, iss hokay, iss hokay, iss hokay, hokay, hokay, hokay" repeated again and again over the top of me while i'm attempting to explain to her the issue at hand. I get the same response when I explain to her how these children tell me that they're going to "bing gun at school. keeell teeechas" or say "fauk you teeecha. go to hell" to the filipino teachers... "Oh, hokay, hokay, hokay, hokay, hokay." They're just children, she tells me, "don't worry, maybe they say sorry.." hmmmm. say sorry? superb solution. i'll be waiting in my office for an apology.

Aside from the beastly children, my day was just fine...

• The school van forgot to come to my street this morning (it's not entirely uncommon for them to forget whole neighborhoods sometimes) so I was a half an hour late to school and drenched with sweat from the 45 block walk in the 90 degree, 80% humidity weather. nice.

• My supervisor informed me at lunch today yesterday that the district-wide speech competition for my kids will be held on Wednesday of next week. Yesterday was also the first time I had been given information about speech topics, speech length, format etc. and I am now confronted with the task of preparing these children to stand in front of hundreds of people a week from now and humiliate themselves terribly. These kids can't even prepare a 30 second speech about their family and pets, let alone a five minute speech about global warming or rice. (yup. "rice" is one of the topics.) half of them struggle with the question, "How are you?"

• Today, as always, my kitchen was infested with ants and other fascinating insect comrades who kept me company as I cooked dinner. Crawling across my feet and up my legs (and a couple into my ears, i think), they were particularly profuse today, as the screen on the open kitchen window fell out at some point last night, welcoming all sorts of neighborhood critters inside.
  

• The brightest spot in my day (aside from the literally blinding sun beating into the stifling un-air-conditioned classrooms) was remembering that my lovely sister is coming to visit me in one week!
  

**The rant is now complete!**

I will now return to my regularly scheduled, predominantly positive, food-related posts...


The day before yesterday I made a purchase that I've been meaning to make for ages. There are vendors everywhere, selling these miniature treats which look like tiny hard-shell tacos filled with sour cream and topped with lemon zest. this is not what they are, as it turns out. They are, of course, Khanum Buang! Wonderful little slightly crisp, paper thin pancakes topped with a dense, creamy filling which I could only describe as something between uncooked meringue and marshmallow fluff but with a strong sweet flavor of coconut, and then sprinkled with... ?? I think it's something called "golden threads." I'll report back after further research.

a happy surprise!
khanum buang. not sour cream lemon tacos

sdf

seafood surprises

arrrrr matey
Being an adventurous eater in Thailand nearly always ends up deliciously.. But every once in a while, I'm afraid, this is just not the case. I recently ran across one of those rare items that made my stomach fall to its knees and beg me not to ingest another mouthful...

fishy, juicy seafood carcass medley

The way this stuff was neatly packaged in the grocery store with the dark, vile contents of the little baggie hidden from view - and the way it was displayed alongside packets of sweet mangoes with sticky rice and other desserts - was terribly misleading. Additionally, they had the nerve to write the entire label in Thai, leaving me oblivious as to what I was purchasing and to the fact that it was one of the more disgusting foods ever produced. in my humble opinion. This stuff is a fishy, salty, oozy, crunchy melange of what appear to be skins, bones, carapaces and legs of various sea-dwelling creatures, most of which smelled and tasted as though they'd been out of the ocean for a few months too many. This dark, drippy bag of rotting seafood scraps was served alongside a styrofoam tray of crunchy sliced green mango, which could only mean that they're meant to be eaten together... I bravely tried a mouthful of this combo, but not a bite more. The feral dogs who live amongst the garbage bins on my street corner got to enjoy the remainder of this dish.


The second seafood surprise of the day was far less repulsive. In fact, it was almost delicious. At the market this evening I ran across a woman selling lovely little single serving packages of god-knows-what wrapped in banana leaves and topped with something white and something green. So... I asked for "song" (two) and she laughed (most likely at my butchering of this simplest of Thai words) and packaged them up in styrofoam (EVERYTHING is packaged in styrofoam here) and took my 40 baht.

I thought this was some sort of steamed curry dish at first, but it turned out to be a lot of slippery steamed/boiled cabbage layered in the bottom of the parcel and topped with a thick layer of spongy, reddish brown, distinctly fishy-tasting, eggy stuff. not curry. Throughout the seafood sponge layer were whole prawns and calamari, which tasted fresh and weren't completely overcooked. Overall, the little seafood parcel was fine - i ended up just picking out the prawns and calamari and eating them with the coconut cream that was squeezed on top. I had trouble with the slick, flabby boiled cabbage leaves and the grainy, overwhelmingly fishy sponge layer...

interior of the fishy cabbage bundle

scrabble and adobo

sdf
School was back in session today at SB and the kids, despite having just enjoyed five days off school, were as unwilling as ever to get any work done ...which doesn't phase me at all anymore. I just let the motivated students work in one corner of the room while I work on herding the other little monsters into their desks, keeping them from cutting too much of my hair off (that's been a favorite with my grade 5 class lately) and combing out most of the obscenities and violence from the work they're bringing home to their parents (each day I have to remind them on the chalkboard of the rules... NO weapons. NO killing. NO warfare. NO obscene words)

Back at the apartments where most of the Thai teachers live, Ivy planned to cook adobo, a traditional dish from the Philippines, for dinner. No motorbike drivers to be found in today's sticky late afternoon heat, I walked the 20 blocks over from my house, my clothes and hair drenched (no, it wasn't raining) by the time I arrived. The neighborhood was astir with the usual characters, done with work and school for the day - squealing kids pushing each other on tricycles or riding 5 at a time on little motorbikes, grandmothers sitting together in groups on the curb in the shade of droopy tropical trees, street vendors selling the last of their meat-on-a-stick or noodle bowls or baskets of lychee and guavas - and I waied and "sawatdee kaaaa"ed my way down the hot streets to dinner...

the chef, ready to eat

adobo with chicken, potato and onion

Adobo, I think, is traditionally made with a few basic ingredients (pork or chicken, garlic, onion, vinegar, water, soy sauce and cooking oil) all simmered together for a long time until they make a thick, hearty sort of stew. Ivy's version was cooked up in her one-room little unit, in an electric frying pan set up on the floor. She just worked from memory, browning the chicken (chunks of bone-in dark meat) and adding potatoes, chilis, and splashes of soy sauce, pours of vinegar and oil and several cups of water, then letting it simmer and thicken while she prepared rice in her rice cooker (plugged into the only available wall outlet - in the bathroom).

The dish turned out beautifully - hearty, savory, salty with a mild sweetness and a bit of spice.

after dinner game of scrabble
(not a terribly fair game, as i had a distinct advantage over the non-native english speakers..)

happy father's day!

i love you daddy!!
Cheers to my peerless pappy for his love, humor, wisdom, support and encouragement - how lucky I am. And cheers to all the other first-rate fathers and father-figures who have had, and continue to have, a tremendous impact in my life...

I raise my bag of soy milk to you, men!

xox

i love you daddy!

swine flu and som tam and it's still hot

asd
Following an announcement that several students in surrounding schools had been diagnosed with some sort of new H1N1 strain, public health officials came to the school on Monday to distribute surgical masks to everyone. They (I think, though I never actually understand a word that's said here) mandated that all students and teachers wear the masks and they closed the school for the remainder of the day. And then at lunchtime yesterday my supervisor told me that the decision has been made to cancel school for the remainder of the week. woo hoo! It's like having three snow days... except instead of snow it's infectious disease. I'm taking good care to wash my hands and steer clear of the ill children, so I'm sure I'll be just fine.

donning the ridiculous surgical mask this afternoon.
If the heat isn't stifling enough already, we now have to wear what feels like a chunk of wool sweater over our mouths and noses all day.

On a lighter note, I enjoyed some fabulous som tam (spicy green papaya salad) yesterday:

som tam with little crunchy shrimp and toasted peanuts on top

green things

sdf
Two new green dessert finds in one day:

"kalamae", i think
(glutinous rice flour, sugar, coconut milk, water and toasted peanuts on top)

I believe that this is basically a giant slab of the stuff that those little blue and yellow balls (see Sunday's post) are made of. It's thick and sticky and coconutty, sort of like the sweet green sticky rice they serve here, but in ultra dense form. Apparently, you just tear chunks off with your fingers and pass it around. I love the stuff, but it's so heavy I can't eat more than few marble-sized nubs at a time.

not a clue what this is, but it was delicious.

If I understood the man at the market correctly (which is unlikely) this greasy green sombrero is actually made out of some part of a lotus. Texture wise, the closest thing I can think of to this dessert is maybe a dense, hot, deepfried crumpet. Thick and sweet and chewy, with crunchy caramelized edges, I couldn't resist. I ate three.

frog or toad

sdf
I nearly stepped on this fellow this morning as I lurched downstairs, half asleep, to make a cup of tea. He's a good 3-4 inches long. A new pet for my home.

a night in BKK

Went into Bangkok the other night for a brief break from my little town. It was dark by the time I finally arrived, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. the city has a different personality at night and it's nice to be wandering around when I'm not struggling to find something I need or rushing to meet someone.

Soi Thonglor
a great side street with street food vendors spilling out past the sidewalks, into the road.

I bought a plate of sticky rice layered with thick, creamy sweet slabs of bright orange mango, the whole thing doused in coconut milk. No picture - I was too hungry to stop and take out the camera.

Ivy was in town too, visiting friends of hers who work at the American embassy. They have a condo right in the heart of the city, so I leapt at the opportunity to go visit, eat some free food and swim in their rooftop pool (!)

blurry rooftop pool with a view of downtown Bangkok

friend, market, desserts

After a frustrating exchange trying to buy credit for my mobile at the local 7-11 Friday night (it resulted in all of the employees, shoppers and several volunteers herded in from the street all speaking to me rapidly in Thai, taking my phone, pressing buttons..) I resolved to teach myself Thai.

After a lovely swim in the completely deserted pool, I spent the rest of Saturday morning cleaning the house, doing laundry, grading tests... all the while listening to and parroting this "learn thai" podcast i've discovered.. it's essentially just a series of simple audio thai instruction lessons The houses are so close together in the neighborhood here that I can tell when my neighbors are peeing and showering and shaving in the morning, so I'm confident these same neighbors could hear me, the crazy american, repeating phrases in thai like "turn left. turn left. turn left." and "yum, it is very delicious. yum, it is very delicious." all morning.

By mid afternoon i decided it was time to go try out my new linguistic skills, so I went out to visit the local market. I tried with varying success to use my the words I'd just learned but honestly, by the time I arrived at the first fruit stand I'd forgotten about 99% of them. nonetheless, I had good fun exploring and learning (then promptly forgetting) new words for the foods I encountered.

I think, as a foreigner, the key to success in the markets is assuming that everyone is laughing along with me. not at me. I meander through the maze of stands and the vendors and shoppers stare, giggle, talk amongst themselves or directly to me and i just grin hugely, and bow and say "sawadee kaa" (hello) and when they show me what they're making/selling I smile even bigger and rub my belly and say "arroi! arroi!" (delicious! delicious!) and laugh and bow and spew out a few words that I think may be thai (though from the reactions I get, i'm beginning to think they're not). no doubt i look incredibly ridiculous, i'm just hoping it's a sort of endearing ridiculous..

Still, after repeating the phrase over 50 times by now, I can't quite figure out the right way to say "what is this called?" so i normally just point to things and try to convey my question by wrinkling up my eyebrows, tilting my head to one side, shrugging my shoulders and raising my hands in the classic "huh?" pose. and it normally works. eventually. this is how the typical transaction pans out:

First, the person I'm talking to will laugh and say something to me in thai.

I then proceed to try to speak thai to her/him and that really gets them laughing.

So they call their friends and family over to watch the "farang" (foreigner) struggle to buy a kilo of limes

and all at once they start speaking to me in thai, confusing me all the more and resulting in further uproarious laughter...

at some point someone normally pushes a shy child from behind all the adults and they poke and prod until the child (surely taking some sort of a basic English course) slinks forward and says a few words to me in what is clearly a valiant attempt at English, but which I can't understand to save my life. I speak back in English, the child says a few more unintelligible words, I say "good! good! thank you! kap khun kaaa!" and the adults are satisfied. I get my bag of limes (or mangoes, or curry, or bag of mystery liquid, or, or, or) and move on to repeat the scene at the next stall.

During one of these transactions, a man came up to me and asked (in English!) if he could help me with anything. I leapt on the chance to have a someone fluent in Thai and English show me around the market and said, "Why, yes! Shall we go buy some mangoes?.." I had a fantastic afternoon learning thai words and phrases (all related to food. and let's be honest, that's the topic I'm really interested in here) and trying things I might not have otherwise discovered...

sweet, hot, mysterious dessert-in-a-bag

boua loy kai wan (kai wan= with syrup poached egg)



boua loy kai wan, again

I was skeptical, to say the least, when my new friend suggested I buy this bag of thick white/grey liquid, full of pale blue and yellow chunks and an egg bobbing around in the middle...
Turns out, it's fantastic - chewy, sticky little nubs made from glutinous rice flour and water, floating in sweet hot coconut milk with an egg (poached in a thick sugary syrup) floating on top. Ended up my favorite food of the day.

second mystery dessert bag:
chunks of pumpkin boiled in sweet coconut milk. self explanatory. a little too sickly sweet for my liking. didn't stop me from eating the entire bag after dinner with leftover rice, though.

My other favorite purchase of the day was a little tub of spicy, salty, tart and slightly sweet dried tamarind. The texture of these salt, sugar and chili flake/seed encrusted chunks is a bit like the meaty slabs of dried mango I buy at trader joe's back home. My friend, when he suggested I buy this stuff, told me he keeps some in his desk at work, "for the time I need to feel like a want sleep in bed but must work so I put it in my teeth and, wow! i can work until evening." a good description.

chewy, spicy tamarind snack

Now I'm stuffed, and headed to bed.

groceries, mushrooms, rainstorm, reptiles, and it's hot.

The weather here is always pretty steamy, but the past few days have been especially hot, and yesterday was the first time here that I've wished for the temperature to drop just a couple of degrees. I, the queen of down jackets in 75 degree weather, hat and gloves at the 4th of July picnic, 5 fleece blankets on August nights, have encountered weather too hot and too humid for even my liking.

The day today was cloudless, bright and hot, hot hot. I sweat through my classes (no a/c and sometimes no fans in the classrooms) and through my speech team practice after school (I showed my students a clip of an Obama speech as an excuse to come into the air conditioned computer room, though I'm confident they didn't understand a word of it). On my walk to the pool in the afternoon I ran across a strange lizard by the road.. it was 3-4 feet long and moved kind of like a crocodile...

unidentified reptilian creature lurking in the lawn

At FoodLand, a cheap store just outside Bangkok, I picked up groceries for next week. the sort of things that at home would be rare and foreign ingredients, but now are daily staples. it's telling to look at the shopping lists I make here next to what I'd put on my lists in Portland, and on my lists in Honduras. all three with such different culinary traditions...

standard Thailand shopping list:
- curry pastes
- coconut milk
- baby eggplants
- bean sprouts
- sweet basil leaves
- green mangoes and papaya
- mangosteens, lychees and rambutans
- coconut yogurt
- limes
- oyster mushrooms
- tim tams, of course
- rice
- rice noodles
- fish sauce
- bottles of drinking water

standard Portland shopping list:
- apples
- pears
- breakfast cereal
- oatmeal
- sliced sandwich bread
- cheese, cheese, cheese
- pasta
- zucchini
- bell peppers
- onions
- garlic
- bottle of wine
- bread from the local bakery
- plain organic yogurt

standard Roatan shopping list:
- plantains (maduros and verdes)
- bananas
- pineapples
- bag of refried red beans
- tortillas
- cilantro
- garlic
- onions
- mangoes
- LOTS of avocados
- tomatoes
- 6pack of Salva Vida
- bottles of drinking water

..hm. maybe that wasn't entirely fascinating, but I find it interesting.

On the way out, I bought a white little egg shaped bun, topped with black sesame seeds and filled with a thick paste made of sugar and ground black sesame seeds and ? The slightly bitter taste of the sesame paste just doesn't do it for me (and there was so much of the stuff) in what should be a tender fluffy sweet treat.. but at least I got a (blurred) picture of the little guy.

black sesame bun

Possibly the biggest surprise I've had in terms of typical foods here, was discovering just how many mushrooms thais use in their cooking. I don't know if it's just the region where I live, but [you'll be pleased to hear, Ryan] I've seen mushrooms of all sorts in much of the food I eat here. The classic tom yam goong (spicy prawn soup) always has small white hemispheres bobbing on the surface - I think these are sort of like button mushrooms at home - and other soups/stews often feature a smaller, feathery mushroom as a main ingredient. The ubiquitous mushroom here, from what I can see, is one that they translate as "baby angel" but is extremely similar to what we call oyster mushrooms. Chewy, savory and meaty, browned in some hot oil, they're the epitome of umami.. I use them instead of meat in a lot of dishes.

baby angel, or oysters, mushrooms on my dining room table
I paid 18baht (about 50 cents) for a full pound

On the motorbike ride home this evening foreboding black clouds were rapidly taking over the blue sky, the wind was picking up, and precisely as I stepped through the door into my house, the downpour began. I'm upstairs now, surrounded by the deafening din of raindrops the size of cats' heads (this may be a slight exaggeration) plummeting to earth, landing on banana leaves and tin roofs and pavement. I think I'll stay in tonight..

Tarn Tip phra ram meets its match

To those of you with whom I used to frequent Tarn Tip back in Corvallis, you know the affinity (obsession, perhaps?) I have for their Phra rahm (a plate of veggies and fried tofu or chicken smothered in a sweet, spicy peanut sauce). After more than a month here, I have finally eaten a bowl of this glorious stuff. They don't call it Phra rahm as far as I can tell (it seems that this is actually the name of one of the characters in ancient Thai folklore) but what I had was almost exactly the same stuff as at Tarn Tip! A thick, sweet, savory, peanutty sauce ladled over a bowl of rice noodles and topped with chopped fresh green beans, bean sprouts, chili flakes, fish sauce, sliced chilies - it was wonderful, and far more similar to the Corvallis version than I would have imagined (though much spicier, of course).

big steaming bowl of sweet, salty, spicy, crunchy peanutty bliss

I scarfed down the entire bowl in about 15 minutes and then, a little bit too full already, waddled over to the grocery store and bought myself a box of Tim Tams. I'm not sure if it's just the fond memories I have of eating these chocolate coated, chocolate filled, chocolate biscuits in Australia or if it's the fact that they are chocolate coated, chocolate filled, chocolate biscuits, that make them so appealing. probably both. Regardless, I was ecstatic to find them for $1/package in all the grocery stores here. In a country with a terrible dearth of cacao, these decadent little nubs are the only cure for a chocolate craving.

arnotts tim tams. the real deal.

สุขสันต์วันเกิด !

Yesterday marked my 23rd birthday. Many thanks to my lovely family and friends for their calls, mail, emails, etc. I'm a lucky girl.

My students were as mischievous as usual, though most of my classes did attempt to sing me "happy birthday" (turned out more like "ah-pay bahdt-dai") and a few of the kids gifted me stuffed animal keychains, which they kindly helped me to attach to my cellphone and backpack. If I didn't stand out already as the tall whitey at school, now I'm especially noticeable with my clusters of accessories dangling from me as I walk through the halls. I'm like a mutant 4th grader.

lovely little gift from one of my 9th grade girls.
As I do have a real affinity for pink, sparkly, fluffy things, I wore this around my neck all day

After school, several of the other teachers and I went to the market and, at my request, purchased armloads of fruits, vegetable dishes, curries, rices, desserts, noodles and drinks for dinner. The goal was to try as many new things as possible, with a few of my favorites thrown in. I had great fun roaming the rows of stalls, trying tastes of foods, pretending to understand what people were saying to me and buying bag after bag of mysterious goodies.

rambutan man,
selling his fluffy fruits from the back of a pickup for 10 baht/kilo

everyone carrying home at least 3 pounds of food. each.

jackfruit, mangosteens, rambutans, longans, boxes of unidentified sweets, grilled chicken and fish, corn on the cob, green mangoes, fried chicken skins, bags of curries and soups and noodles and rice and sticky rice and fresh, hot soy milk and dipping sauces

In the end, I'd guess we paid a grand total of between $11-13 for everything - enough food to feed at least 12 people with leftovers.

We came back and ate outside on the community balcony at the apartments where most of the teachers at the school live. We sat for hours with the feast spread out along three tables, random people wandering over to sit down and join in now and then, communicating with me mostly in body language and laughs and broken bits of thai and english. I was almost full by the time I'd taken just one (ok, maybe three or four) bite of each item on the table, but everyone persevered and we nearly got through all the food.

The brave survivors who made it through to the very end of the night were rewarded with bites of the itsy bitsy Winnie the Pooh cake that they surprised me with...

birthday cake sequence

just the way a good birthday should end.

so stuffed you can't speak.

a lazy sunday

Sunday morning bright and warm. I woke up to sunlight pouring through my blinds, little birds twittering in the banana tree outside my room and... the sound of one of my Thai neighbors wailing into the microphone of a karaoke machine. volume turned all the way up. [Be aware that this is at about quarter to eight in the morning.] Karaoke is a national pastime here and I've become accustomed to finding these public humiliation opportunities almost everywhere, but in a quiet neighborhood, early on Sunday morning? It was all the incentive I needed to wriggle out of the sheets and get into the shower (more to drown out what now sounded like a horse enduring a slow death, though, than to get clean).

After a full 30 minutes with no respite from the "singing" I had to escape. I wandered through the neighborhood, greeting ("Sawasdee kaaa" "Sawasdee kaaa") and bowing to everyone.. the construction workers, policemen, groups of women with strollers and parasols, grandmothers hanging out wet laundry, old men weaving down the road on chidren's bicycles (I don't know why, but they all seem to ride kids' bikes here), street food vendors sweating over vats of wonderful smelling and completely unidentifiable foods, packs of motorbike drivers sprawled on the streetside, lounging in the shade..

I worked up an appetite swimming at the school's pool, which is always completely abandoned because, I've been told, no one here knows how to swim. [this begs the question why they would build and maintain an Olympic sized swimming pool, but I've learned to stop searching for conventional logic here.]

breakfast
sweet, cool mango with juicy little (paper-flavored) dragonfruit cubes

My papaya tree
(they wrap the fruits with plastic bags when they start maturing...
to help them ripen? keep bugs/birds away?)

I ate breakfast out on my little patio in the shade of my papaya tree, surrounded by last week's laundry hanging from the clotheslines. I lounged there with my book for a couple of hours before wandering out for some lunch...

lunch
Spicy, tangy soup with lots of lemongrass and lime, crunchy bean sprouts,
fresh green beans and chewy, meaty little oyster mushrooms

The rest of this day was entirely unexciting. cleaning and preparing lesson plans. dinner was scrambled eggs with rice and fish sauce. mmmm.

wakeboarding in Bangkok

Weaving down congested city streets on a motorbike yesterday afternoon, whizzing by electronics factories and seafood packing plants, i was becoming more and more skeptical of Ivy's assurance that there was a wakeboarding center just a few blocks away.. but then, a left-hand turn and just 2 or 3 kilometers later down a dusty unpaved road, a brownish body of water came into view. Here in the middle of this urban, industrial area in greater Bangkok was a giant (relatively speaking) lake surrounded by green marshes and palm trees. There are no boats here; towering metal scaffolding rises from the water, supporting a system of constantly turning cables, dragging wakeboarders in a circle around the lake. It's similar to the horrible rope tow I remember from my childhood, learning to snow ski.

We ducked into a little shed, handed a woman 300 baht and got handed a couple of somewhat dodgy looking boards. No release to sign, no paperwork whatsoever. Without any sort of instruction (especially for me, as I don't speak the language) you strap on a board, shimmy up to the front of the line and - still standing upright on the wooden dock, a good 4 feet from the edge - get handed your rope which is unattached to the cable whizzing overhead, for the moment being. And now, while everyone eagerly watches, you wait for a clip to come whooshing around, which will snag your rope and yank you out into the water... if you're lucky. I saw several unfortunate people lurch forward spectacularly at the initial yank, get violently whacked down, face first into the dock, and then continue to hold onto the rope as it raced along, scraping them along the dock and into the water.

I won't pretend that it wasn't a fantastic spectacle to watch, and I saw no serious injuries (except, perhaps, some shattered egos), so I don't feel bad for pointing and laughing. I, luckily, am somewhat used to the feel of standing up and getting pulled around on top of the water, so I got to avoid most of the embarrassment and came away generally unscathed.

waiting with trepidation at the starting dock

wakeboarder chicks

ivy and me...
mere moments before I performed a graceful faceplant (into the water) for the gathered audience

Floating jumps anchored throughout the course.
I avoided these at all costs

some surprises

Last week, the students in speech team voted (it's very odd the way they let the children make these sorts of decisions at this school) on who would be their new coach and, clearly unaware of my lack of speech writing/giving skills and experience (and probably just because they know I give candy out to my classes), they chose yours truly. So now each Thursday and Friday afternoon I'll be spending preparing my students for speech competitions in which they'll be competing with nearby schools. The Thai government provides the list of possible speech topics, some of which are good, interesting, appropriate, while others are just strange and, I'm guessing, written by someone with a limited grasp on the English language. (#34: Thai rice betterer than all!; #12: the world withnot sunshine; #19: let's hear mothers.) It's going to be a challenge to prepare these students, some of whom, frankly, are horrendous at English, for these district-wide competitions, and with topics like these.

So, after a meeting with the group on Thursday I was famished and needed a snack to make it the 35 blocks to my house from the school. There's a wrinkly old woman out on the street every day as I go to and from school and I'd never bought anything from the little blue card table she sits behind. so that afternoon i purchased a skewer strung with bright yellow parcels stuffed with a mystery filling. She dumped the neat little row into a plastic bag and squeezed sweet chili sauce over the top.

after school snack

Sitting sidesaddle, like the Thai women do, on the motorbike ride home I bit into one of the parcels - crunchy on the outside from being fried, the dough was slightly sweet and chewier on the inside. And the filling was...

a minuscule hard boiled egg.

I also picked up some fruit on the ride home, after struggling for too long to ask the driver to wait for a moment as I made my purchase. Same fruit lady as always, today she had the weird and somewhat wonderful dragon fruit:

martian eggs, or dragonfruit

I've eaten dragonfruit before, but it continues to take me by surpise when I cut through the soft pink casing to find...

bright white and black insides!

This is one of the more surreal and beautiful foods I've seen here or anywhere but, I'm afraid to say, its looks are pretty much all the dragonfruit has got going for it. While the texture of the fruit is juicy - sort of like a more dense, less crisp watermelon - the taste is lacking. The closest thing I can think of that resembles the dragonfruit's flavor is, perhaps, notebook paper. it's sort of like eating a really juicy post-it note. Sort of.

moanKEY! moanKEY!

Bashful and coy at first, my students used to stay in their seats, look away when spoken to, giggle and bury their heads when asked a question. Now, at the end of week three, things are different. I've got children climbing on tables to jump on my back, children yelling out unintelligible (and usually entirely wrong) answers to questions, children throwing scissors like darts. simply a joy to have in class each day.

and now a couple of the little boys in my grade 5 and 6 classes have taken a liking to the hair on my arms. It started with Mon (a 5th grader) who'd walk up next to me and casually run his miniature fingers along my arm as he sidled by in the hallways. Getting bolder and bolder everyday, he now will get up while I'm speaking in front of the class to stand next to me and stroke my arms. I do believe that it's pure fascination on his part, so i mostly just let him pet a couple of times and then he'll go sit back down. some of the boys will call out to me when they've finished their work, "Teacher, teacher! arm, arm!" I'll go over and let them yank on my furry forearms for a few seconds and then they're satisfied. It's hilarious to watch - weird, but hilarious.

fuzzy object of fascination

The best reaction yet, though, was from a grade 4 boy who, seeing my arms up close for the first time, yelled "moanKEY! moanKEY! moanKEY!" (his pronunciation was, of course, poor but he got his point across.) I'll tell you, nothing makes a girl feel more special than being called a hairy monkey.

illustration of the day

As they were finishing their tests on weather and seasons today, my fifth grade students were getting rowdy (well, more rowdy than normal) so I told them all to draw a picture for teacher Michelle on the back of their test. I got pictures of cats and bunnies and flowers and asian cartoon characters.. a couple brown nosers drawing an asian me ("beautiful teacher", they write) and rainbows and I LOVE YOUs. Other kids haven't got the fine motor skills down, so I got some black and grey blobs which maybe resembled cars, maybe radishes, hard to tell. One kid, though, drew me an elaborate scene in which an elephant wearing a top hat is targeted by a band of poachers wielding machine guns and grenades...

Mr. Elephant
(I've edited out most of the gratuitous violence)

running shoes and streetside sweets

My running shoes arrived in the mail yesterday (thank you mummy!) so I got to go for a run this morning. At 5am the weather is just right for running. A little more balmy and humid than I'm accustomed to in Oregon, but there was a slight breeze and the sun wasn't beating down on the neighborhood just yet. I didn't see many of my neighbors out at that hour (I was thankful for this, as I've noticed that women here don't tend to do anything but walk for exercise and they certainly don't wear little running shorts and tank tops. With the importance they place on modesty and "politeness" of dress here, I was afraid my running would create a neighborhood scandal..) but I did have plenty of company from the packs of feral dogs trotting along with me for a few blocks at a time.

Outside the front of the school this afternoon, and every afternoon, is a woman standing behind a little yellow cart, selling sweets. She has jars of toppings lined up along the front of the cart: brightly colored sprinkles, little brown spheres (chocolate?), cubes of white bread, fresh corn kernels, peanuts, unidentifiable black jelly cubes, and more. One of her most popular offerings, it seems from the number of kids trundling around the school grounds with these in their little fists, is what I think of as the ice cream dog...

The self-explanatory ice cream dog.

On the way home from school, I bought a hot little steamed bun from a woman on the street. It turned out to be filled with a sort of egg custard - a rich, sweet, thick paste tucked into a slightly chewy, pillowy dough puff.

steamed egg custard bun on the walk home

Ivy turns 23

Monday was teacher Ivy's birthday, so we went to an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant to celebrate. The dining area at this place is just a great big open-air space filled with at least 100 picnic tables and benches on a concrete floor. Up in front is the buffet - a good 200 sq foot area filled with rows and rows of options for stuffing oneself. One buffet line, which stretches about 50 feet, is full of all raw meats, seafood, tofu to be cooked on the "barbecues" set up on each table.

These round metal contraptions (below) have a shallow moat filled with broth, encircling a searing hot dome in the middle and the whole thing is heated by red glowing coals piled underneath. The experienced members of the group instructed me on the best plan of attack...

One of our "barbeques"

First, herbs, vegetables, meats, spices and noodles are gathered from the front and added to the broth. While these cook into a hearty soup, you go back up to the buffet and load up plates of raw meats (chicken, pork, livers, chicken feet, fishcake, squid, etc.. marinated in all sorts of different sauces), bring them back to the table and leave them with the designated cooker in the group who sits at the table, sticking hunks and slabs onto the hot dome to cook.

The rest of the group, meanwhile, is loading up plates of all manner of prepared dishes (fishcakes with fried sweet basil, springrolls, thai meatballs, salads, fried rices, bowls of tropical fruits, spicy green mango salad, sushi rolls, wonton things, grilled pineapple and onion on skewers, spicy noodle dishes, vegetable stir frys, and on and on) to snack on while the main event is cooking. Once every square inch of the table is filled with a plate or bowl of something edible, everyone sits down and the binge begins. To all of you Corvallisites, this place gives our little Evergreen a run for it's money. AND it's only 100 baht ($3 USD) for a full night of gorging.

the table at the start of the night



One aisle of raw nibbles to cook
(on the bottom right are tubes of tofu that you just squeeze into your soup. I avoided these.)



birthday girl on the left, obligatory thai karaoke station behind
and me, grumpy because I've been told to stop eating for 30 seconds