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)