dental decay in a bag and to do lists

kj

I always have great expectations for my weekends here. Not important social engagements or spectacular nights out in Bangkok. No, I have grand visions of completing detailed lesson plans for the remainder of the term, of sweeping, mopping, disinfecting and waxing the floors, of finally deciding what I want to study in graduate school, of mastering 10 new songs on the guitar and preparing myself a fabulous dinner. and that's just Saturday. I keep thinking i'll learn to drastically lower my expectations but somehow, as each friday afternoon creeps up on me, I look down to find my hand scribbling out another ridiculously unrealistic list of Weekend TO-DOs!

Some weekends are more successful than others, though all are ultimately failures when viewed in terms of [# of items actually completed] as a percentage of [total # of items on list]. Last weekend I did manage to eradicate my house's rapidly multiplying ant population (for now, anyway), create a good two days' worth of lesson plans, and floss my teeth twice a day on Saturday and Sunday. These two days were a relative success compared to this weekend, as far a productiveness goes. Midterm exams are coming up next week and I have to submit my exams to my supervisor by Wednesday. nine exams to write. at least 50 items each. it is Sunday night and i have completed about 50%.. of one exam. This will be a busy week.

Friday night I stayed up late with a group of the Thai and Filipino teachers, taking part in that beloved Asian tradition: awful karaoke (i realize this description is redundant but the karaoke is especially awful when I'm holding the microphone). Waking up later than I'd hoped yesterday morning and feeling an utter lack of motivation, I started my day with 2 hours of half-assed pilates and lazy yoga poses while listening to reruns of Car Talk. On days like yesterday when I can feel impending unproductiveness, I end up including things on my long ambitious lists like, "take dirty dishes downstairs," "eat breakfast - eggs expire 7/26!" "take shower - remember: behind ears!" and "get dressed [white stain t-shirt and brownish shorts?]" just so I'll have something to cross off.

Aside from spending hours writing useless TO-DO lists for myself, I went to the nearby Buddhist temple to check out the weekend scene there. I'll post about this trip in the next couple of days, but for now I'll just mention the bag of sugar water I bought on my way out of the gates this afternoon...

I saw a man by the road feeding giant spears of sugar cane into this shiny metal contraption. Out the other end of the machine came the squashed remains of the spears and from a tube on the side flowed a stream of cloudy yellowish liquid. The tube deposited the liquid onto a cheesecloth filter, which was suspended with clothespins over a bucket that looked just like the ones we use at home to store laundry detergent and wash the cars.

the juicer

To serve the sugar cane juice, the man scoops a few handfuls of ice into a small plastic shopping bag, ladles in a few cups of juice from the wash bucket and sticks a straw in it. Its flavor isn't particularly good nor interesting but it sure is sweet.

final, cavity-inducing product
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fried bananas and how on earth do they stay thin?

sdf
An aspect of eating in Thailand that surprised me when i arrived was the profusion of fried (especially deep-fried) foods here. that, and the constant appearance of hot dogs on the culinary stage. At school most of the snacks the kids buy from the cafeteria have, at some point in their preparation, been bathed in a vat of scalding oil and they're usually drenched in some sort of thick, sweet sauce. Walk for five minutes down a street in Bangkok at lunchtime - or breakfast time for that matter - and I would bet you'll see at least that many vendors selling some kind of fried comestibles. and yet, roam the city for a week and you'll be hard pressed to find even a single obese Thai person. There's the occasional chubby adolescent girl, squat older woman or potbellied man but nothing on the order of the massive weight problem we've got back in the states.

From the vendors I passed on my walk home just this afternoon I saw:

deep-fried bananas, deep-fried chicken, deep-fried fish cakes (served with deep-fried basil leaves), deep-fried dough-wrapped quail eggs, spongy deep-fried squid cakes soaked in sweet chili sauce, deep-fried battered slices of white sandwich bread wrapped around banana and strawberry slices (I find this one particularly intriguing), deep-fried chunks of chicken skin,
AND
hot dogs prepared in about 10 different ways [none of which involve a bun, ketchup or mustard]... some wrapped in white bread and deep-fried, others wrapped in a sweet waffle and skewered on a bamboo stick, most of them (in colors ranging from pale pink to vibrant orange) just chopped up and served in a plastic bag, covered in sauce.

you can't help but wonder.. how do they stay so thin? I'll report if i get any leads.


on the morning of Amelia's first day in Bangkok, after enjoying our rice/coconut balls, we ventured down a tiny alleyway bordered on one side by a chocolate milk canal bustling with long tail boats, row boats, canoes. We passed about 5 vendors, all right next to each other, selling som tam (the famous spicy green papaya salad) - the women pounding away with their giant wooden pestles making that distinctive pok pok pok sound as they worked. Farther down the street was a woman whose dinted metal cart was devoted exclusively to deep-fried coconutty battered slabs of banana. We hadn't stopped to look for more than two seconds when she handed us each a slice to try. Burning hot, crisp on the outside, smooth and sweet on the inside and delicious as always, we bought about half a kilo for 10 baht.

fried bananas

packaged in what looks to be paper recycled from some kid's math homework
kjh

coconut balls and i'm back

sdf
After a brief hiatus during which I enjoyed the company of amelia, my little sister, temporary travel partner and most importantly, eating companion, it's back to life as usual here.

During millie's visit here I took advantage of the opportunity to use her little cannon PowerShot sd750, neglecting my ancient battered Nikon for the entirety of her trip. It was great fun working with a camera that was manufactured more recently than george W's first administration and which reliably turned on (!) whenever I pushed the power button.

The downside to my using millie's camera, however, is that the memory card she had been using was unreadable on my laptop for some reason. So, after an utterly failed attempt at sending the pictures over skype, deciding that attaching 100s of photos to emails was a waste of time, and quickly reaching capacity on millie's flikr account, we decided that our best option would be for her to burn them onto cds and ship them back over.

So I'll postpone the bulk of my posts about millie's visit until I get my hands on those photos. But for now, I do have a couple of photos from our first day of eating in Bangkok...

After a late night fueled by mangoes and sticky rice, singha and noodles, millie and I were up early... dormitory rooms in backpacker hostels aren't popular for the tranquil atmosphere they offer and our Bangkok accommodation was no exception. We rode the BTS - Bangkok's monorail portion of its public transit system - a few stops down, into the heart of the city. Just one long stride from the crowded, filthy stairway leading up to the Siam BTS station, was a woman selling all manner of thai sweets from a tiny, dented metal cart. After a few seconds watching us marvel over her wares, the woman started to rummage in her apron pocket. She pulled out two bamboo skewers, stabbed them - one in each fist - indiscriminately into her piles of sweets and presented the impaled goodies to us as samples. I got a strange, starchy banana slice which had a texture like maybe a boiled plantain, left out on the counter for a couple of days - not bad, really. Millie got what I think was simply a ball of sweet sticky rice with coconut. I noticed that she was selling the squishy coconut balls which I've become so fond of, and which I describe here, so after exclaimations of "arroi! arroi mahk kaa! kahp khun kaa!" we bought ourselves a bag 'o balls and wandered off to a nearby bus station to take photos of our sweets...

coconut balls in white and purple - the two typical glutinous rice colors

outside. bite. inside.

three sweet, chewy, nutty, sticky nuggets each and all before 9am. much more eating to come...
fin

farang

sdf
The word farang here means two things: foreigner and guava.. and maybe more that i'm unaware of. In any case, I can always get a laugh by walking up to a fruit vendor, pointing to the lumpy softball-sized green guavas saying, "farang" and then pointing to myself, "farang!" and then repeating it a couple times as they figure out what i'm saying in my atrocious accent. This is probably one of the lamest jokes these people have ever heard, but they're all wonderfully good-natured in humoring me and laughing along. as I walk away, however, they're probably muttering under their breath something to the effect of, "What is up with that strange, smiley farang?"

Well the farang here (the fruit) are far different than any guava I've eaten before. They're quite crunchy, sort of like an unripe pear in consistency, and not juicy whatsoever. The flesh is bright white, unlike the pink fleshed guavas I got accustomed to eating in Ecuador, but they do have the same annoying rock-hard little seeds embedded in the center of the fruit. Flavorwise, they're not very sweet but they do have that unmistakable guava taste. Lately I've been eating them almost daily.

farang, the fruit

In other farang news, my sister and I are receiving double the attention I normally get here, as now there are double the number of white people in the neigborhood. It's great fun having her here and introducing the neighbors to my little nawng sao.

Soon we're off to Bangkok for a few days, then to the ancient city of Ayutthaya for some photo ops...

sdf

two apples that aren't

sdf
The news today: Amelia is finally here in Thailand!

I have no tales of adventure to recount yet since Ivy and I picked her up at 11pm just last night. The three of us, after hugs and a full rundown of the flight over (who she sat with, what she ate, how her digestive system is treating her.. all the crucial information), fell promptly asleep on the taxi ride home. After being awakened by a concerned taxi driver gingerly prodding my knee with his finger, we staggered into the house with amelia's luggage and collapsed onto our mattresses and fell back asleep. Now I'm watching her drooling on the pillowcase I just washed as she works on sleeping off that jet lag - we'll see how long it takes her...

For breakfast here I usually eat some white rice and a fried egg with chilies and fish sauce, but this morning I have fruit in honor of millie's arrival. One of the fruits on the breakfast table today, and of my top 5 favorite fruits here, is the rose apple, or chom poo in Thai. A good rose apple epitomizes crispness - crunchy and incredibly juicy with a slightly sweet, subtle, floral sort of flavor, it's like eating dessert and drinking an entire glass of water at the same time.

rose apple:
#1 most refreshing fruit

Another fruit on the menu this morning, is another "apple" which is absolutely nothing of the sort. It's the custard apple and I have no idea what they call it in Thai, but when I lived in Spain I'd eat a variation of these things almost every day - we called them cherimoyas and I think they might actually have been grown locally there near Granada. The flesh of these Thai custard apples is segmented into slippery little white pods, each surrounding a smooth, hard black seed. The flavor is almost cloyingly sweet and isn't nearly as mind blowing as I remember the cherimoyas being, and the flesh to seed ratio (at least on the one that I'm eating now) is about 50/50, making it a frustrating and ultimately unrewarding little fruit to try to fill an empty belly with. I'll give it another chance sometime when I'm not ravenous.

custard apple:

one of the least satisfying (and least photogenic) fruits i've run across here
asd

ก๋วยเตี๋ยวน้ำ: kuaytiaw naam

sdf
One of my favorite foods here is the mild Chinese-style noodle soup called kuaytiaw naam. Kuaytiaw refers to those white rice noodles we're all familiar with in the American favorite, phad thai. At the soup stands you have the option of two or three different noodle widths: sen mee - very thin vermicelli size not always available; sen lek - a bit thicker, the classic phad thai size (about 5mm wide); and sen yai - big 'ol slabs of noodle (about 2.5 cm wide) classically used in dishes like pad see ew. I usually opt for sen lek but I branched out today and ordered mee. Naam translates as "water" or "liquid" as far as I can tell, so saying naam just means that you want the noodles in soup form, not dry (like phat thai, for instance).

The portable noodle stands with bright yellow and red signage are ubiquitous here. it's hard to walk for more than 15 minutes in any direction and not run into one.. good news for me.

The dish, as it's served to you, is basically just a bowl of a mild, vaguely sweet, subtly flavored broth (chicken, I assume) with your noodles, green onions and/or fresh cilantro and small chunks of whichever meat(s) you choose. [Instead of meat I did once have some incredibly spongy cubes of fried tofu, which were delicious though I haven't run across them again, since.]

Something about this warm soup is incredibly appealing to me, even when sitting streetside on a concrete bench in the lunchtime sun. I think it's partly the simplicity and "cleanness" (not referring to hygiene) of the dish, partly the mysterious, subtle, savory flavor of the broth and partly the way you get to tailor the dish to your liking with the available condiment options (chili flakes, sugar, vinegar with fresh sliced chilies and fish sauce).




This particular bowl was served topped with ridiculously tender duck meat, chopped cilantro, a couple of crispy deepfried pieces of some sort of dough (?) and, of course, the omnipresent Thai fish balls. An excellent mid-morning snack to fuel my trip to the market for, yes, more food.

Amelia arrives tonight!
sdf

noodle boy speaks and an after school snack

sd
The district-wide speech competition was held today at a nearby rival school, and who was chosen from my classes to compete? none other than noodle boy, himself. The two minute speech about his family was three minutes short (a five minute requirement for this age and ability is ridiculous) and included such inspired sentences as, "My mother he my advertise in New York and tom yam soup clean." and "My dog will have fifteen when I..... um.. breakfast is always good." Even though their public speaking abilities are somewhat *ahem* lacking, and they can't speak English at the best of times, let alone when they're standing in front of over 100 audience members, it was great fun watching our kids compete today. Noodle boy even earned second place in his division and without a single mention of noodles!

Rewarding myself for a hard day's work sitting in a school auditorium, I bought a smoothie, of sorts, from a neighborhood woman on my walk home this afternoon. It seems to be made of blended ice, sweetened condensed milk, coconut water and some sort of simple syrup. Cool, creamy, coconutty and refreshing in the 95+ degree heat.

typical baffling Asian English-language labeling
"Hat Family!"

and when I got home, I even had some left to enjoy a couple of slammers with a package of time tams in my freezer. if you're unfamiliar with the joys of the tim tam slammer, this little girl can show you how it's done.

a delicious union:
cold, sweet coconut drink and a tim tam.
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