watermelon and my wallet at the water purifier

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A few weeks ago I walked the five blocks from my house to the neighborhood water purifier machine at soi 30, like i do every couple of days. It was refusing to take my 1 baht coins, so I set my wallet up on top of the machine and worked with both hands on wrestling the little coin accepter thing into submission. five minutes, several muttered curses and a bruised shoulder later (i was very thirsty and had no water at the house) I was eventually successful and left triumphantly with my water jug. and without my wallet.

It wasn't until the next morning when I went to pay the motorbike guy that discovered I was walletless and, of course, moneyless. I begged passing students for the 15 baht I owed the man, went to teach my first period, then borrowed money to race back to the machine to retrieve my wallet.

I arrived at soi 30 and was disappointed to find the top of the machine bare. Before trudging home I awkwardly stood there for a few minutes contemplating what to do, wondering if there was any way I could communicate my problem to one of my neighbors, trying to remember what had been in the wallet. credit card, debit card, passport copy, health insurance card, US driver's license, about 1000 baht...

I had my supervisor post a sign asking that whoever found it please return it to my house or her house or to the school. The sign stayed posted there for about three weeks until yesterday I saw a lady tearing it off the side of the machine. I figured after a few days that I wouldn't be getting it back since it was pretty obvious whose wallet it was - three different pictures of me, the lone white person in the neighborhood, in there - everyone knows where I live and still no sign of it. I had canceled the credit cards immediately, I would have needed to renew my Oregon driver's license pretty soon anyway and 1000 baht isn't a lot in the long run, so it's not a big deal, just a hassle.

On a happier tastier note, i gorged myself on some supremely satisfying fruit this afternoon.

i'd venture to say that this was
the most delicious watermelon I've ever tasted

crisp, juicy, dense and sweet i ate it in one sitting. and the whole thing put me back just 17 baht.

.

math and science day and a mangosteen binge

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This Friday was another baffling day at school.. it was Math and Science Day (discovering just this much was a real breakthrough) so all of the math and science classes prepared posters to display downstairs in our open-air auditorium/courtyard. The hard part of the day was figuring out who, what, where and when I was supposed to be teaching and what I was supposed to be doing when not teaching.

The day didn't start smoothly.. My first class (the horribly misbehaved fifth graders) I was told would be canceled so I went off to work on grading tests in my office, only to have one of my grade 5 students come running up to me at my desk... "teacher, teacher! teach! where? english class? free time, ok?" Turns out that the plan (if there had ever really been one) had changed and we all actually did have morning classes but none of us non-Thai speaking teachers had been informed. i grabbed a fistful of paper and markers and followed my student back to the teacherless class which, by then, had erupted into a scene of even greater mayhem than it normally is... boys riding on one another's backs, battling with classroom chairs, dueling with PVC pipe swords. The looks I was receiving from the thai teachers in neighboring classrooms were unmistakably ones of disapproval and were telling me, in case I wasn't aware, you're 15 minutes late to class and you need to get your screaming children under control. I ended up having limited success getting them under control as the courtyard below was filled with laughing, playing, screaming kids and a rock band, yes, a rock band, warming up on stage. The lesson plan I had come up with on the walk over was this: 40 minutes of "draw a picture of what you've learned this year in English." What actually ended up happening was 10 minutes of that, and the rest of the time spent sitting/laying on the floor, the 8 of us, drawing pictures of the most shocking monsters we could come up with, and the students teaching me, then quizzing me on, the names of different animals and objects in Thai.

The rest of the day unfolded in a similar haphazard fashion. In the end it turned out I had no other classes to teach so I milled around, watched the high school students perform dance/lip sync numbers up on the main stage [**side note: this dancing is unlike anything I've ever seen allowed, let alone encouraged, in a school. the members of one of the more provocative dance groups were clad in tight white tank tops, minuscule denim cut-offs and towering red heels and were made up with what probably amounted to a good 3 pounds of eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick between the seven of them. I should also mention that two of these dancers were males - cut-offs, heels, make-up and all. The dance they performed was certainly entertaining - they had obviously practiced and worked hard on their choreography - but I couldn't help feeling like I should be covering the eyes of the primary school children sitting in the audience.] and ate food that the students were preparing and selling at card tables set up by the stage. After lunch I played basketball with a group of the high school boys (i took em to school) and watched the final game of the high school girls' soccer tournament sitting in the ridiculous mid-afternoon heat, drinking from a plastic bag full of coke and cheering with the kiddos. a great day, all in all.

students looking happy
because they don't have to go to class


more celebration about the class-free day

high school students grilling up some meat-on-a-stick in the courtyard

After school I went to the market where a woman had a table piled with what looked like 200 lbs of mangosteens so I bought about 6 of those lbs and took them back to the apartments as an offering to the thai teachers in return for bites of whatever they were making/eating/drinking that night.

mangosteens before they were devoured


innards of a perfectly ripe little mangosteen
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farang in a tuk tuk

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finally having access to my photos from my nong sao's camera means that I can put up some posts from her visit...

On our second day in Bangkok, we started off with a bag of farang (guava, not foreigner). The fruit stand/cart guys often have a little condiment station on the side of their cart. They always have a chili flake, salt and sugar combo which I love on guava and pineapple and green mango slices. I'm unclear on what the other condiments are.

farang covered in salt, sugar and hot chili flakes

we took our bag of crunchy, salty, spicy, sweet farang chunks and hopped a tuk tuk to Sanamluang - the royal field out in front of the Grand Palace and site of a, then, recent protest by the red shirts.

our Oregonian, Chaco-clad feet in the tuk tuk, sitting in Bangkok traffic
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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

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