Thai food anyone

One of our great joys in traveling is the opportunity to discover and enjoy all types of food. Certainly Carol is a little more experimental than I am, she’ll eat stuff that I won’t even smell, but the vast array of foods is a wonderful benefit to our travels.
Naturally, that would hold true to the nth degree here in Thailand. Thai food is so popular nowadays everywhere in the world, and justifiably so. What a wonderful variety of tastes are available. We’ve had red curry, yellow curry, green curry, coconut milk dishes, and lots of different peppery dishes. You will get served an assortment of condiments: something sweet, something sour, something salty, and something hot. They are served in small bowls and you just choose the one which you think will go best with your meal.
Some of the dishes are beef, but chicken and pork, and, of course, lots of choices of seafood are most common.
One interesting thing for us is the fact that they don’t use chop sticks. They are never placed on the table, and it’s not just because the Gringos are in town. People eat with a fork and a soup spoon. One is used as a pusher and the other as the feeder, as it were. People will use one or the other without any special rules about which is to be used for which purpose.
I love to eat off the street, with the hundreds of vendors which we pass on any walk down any street in any town. Food is always available. I particularly like the chicken or pork slices served on sticks with a red pepper sauce cooked on like barbecue sauce which are just munchie food to me.
Each area has its own regional dishes and we love to experiment with the local dishes. However, one choice is a particular favorite of ours because we’ve had it several times, and each time it is completely different. Pad Thai can be vegetarian, made with tofu, chicken, beef, or seafood. Spicing seems to be different each time so that you never tire of having the same dish.
Sometimes we eat in more upscale restaurants where the menus have pictures of the dishes, sometimes we eat on the streets, sometimes we have stopped along the road while traveling from point to point where we look into the pots to see what it looks and smells like to decide what’s for lunch. But the point is that we have never had a bad meal, and because each time we share food to increase our variety, we seem to always say to each other, “Boy, that’s really good.”

As we’ve traveled to the far north of the country now, we are in Elephant country.
We’ve stopped twice to do the touristy “Elephant center.” Interestingly though, it‚s not just the western tourists that attend. Elephants are very important in Thai culture. They are a symbol of royalty and the kingdom, and a white elephant is still worshiped as a living divinity. They represent wealth, prosperity, and power, and there are more Thais than Europeans at the shows. The elephant is no longer used in the logging industry as they had been for generations, so the shows and demonstrations of training are just for demonstration purposes, they still hold a fascination for all. There are literally dozens of centers. They call themselves by different names: Training center, preservation center, Young Elephant camps and other such titles, they are all well attended.
They have areas where the elephants all go onto the water for bathing (a particular favorite of the crowd), logging techniques, marimba playing, elephants doing painting (you can buy the pictures for about $12, proceeds go to helping the elephants, so they say), and they demonstrate variety of other “skills.”
After the show you can ride an elephant, but that was just toooooo touristy for me. One thing that I would have been interested in doing, but no time, was to take an elephant trek where you ride elephants to areas that you basically couldn’t walk to, and visit some of the various hill tribes and see villages that are to difficult to get to by foot.
In one center that we visited, you could stay at the camp and do a kind of “Mini-camp.” Where you learn how to give commands, ride them like the mahouts, bath them in the rivers, and do a variety of things, all of which simply alleviate the elephant fixation which many of us have. The Asian elephant is smaller in size, and seemingly more trainable than their African counterparts, although they have signs put up for the tourists where they tell you: “When feeding the elephants, give them the whole bunch of bananas at a time so that the elephants will not become impatient.” Yeah, that would be a good thing. Nobody wants an impatient elephant who’s getting one banana at a time.
It‚s all very hokey, but good fun, none-the-less.

Thailand is a very Buddhist country and Wats, or temples, abound everywhere. There are over 300 of them in Bangkok alone. One of the interesting aspects of the literally tens of thousands of monks in their saffron robes, is that they eat only when offered food. That is one of the tenants of being a monk. To that end, they go to the market area each morning where they simply stand there stoically with their metal bowls until somebody stops and puts food into their bowl. Women do not touch monks under any circumstances, (Don‚t know what that’s all about) but they certainly do offer food to them. The people offering food will then, usually, kneel, whence the monk will bless the person/persons offering the food or say a prayer for a departed one. The short blessing and prayer being finished, the monk will continue to wait for more food, with the process repeating itself until he has enough food for himself or his “Household.” I haven‚t seen any fat monks, but nobody seems to go hungry. Giving food to the monks brings good karma to the giver. Some monks will eat once a day, some twice, but not more. Eating after noon is prohibited. Nothing that can be chewed can be ingested, but liquids are okay. That’s a good thing in this heat!
At the various monasteries that we have seen there are individual little houses where three or four young boys live in one very austere room. In Sukhothai we saw a whole line of boys, some of them really little munchkins about 6 years old. Quite a sight to see them all carrying their bowls off to the market. They are usually the children of poor families who turn the boys over to the monks for education that they would otherwise not have. They stay a minimum of three months, but are free to remain as long as they adhere to the teachings of the monks. We talked to one person whose father started as a boy and stayed for 20 years eventually becoming a lama. I’m not sure how that works, I think that the monks can marry, or maybe they just leave the “Monkhood.” I need more clarification on that issue.
The boys always have a bright smile on their faces though. They are not dour, downtrodden types who are deprived. They seem thoroughly happy, interacting with all aspects of society. It is considered quite an honor to have a monk in one’s family or a boy who is under the care of the monks.

The friendliness of the Thai people is legendary, and we’ve not found anything to dispute that. When asked where we are from, we have learned to say: “The United States,” because as has been pointed out: “Canadians, Mexicans, Peruanos, and everybody else in the hemisphere is an American, can you be more specific, and less self-important.” But here when we say the United States, they just look at us blankly. We quickly reply: “America.” At which point, faces light up and people have lots of stories about relatives who live there, travels to the US by themselves and others, etc.
I was asked before we left home if we ever said that we were from Canada because of the Anti-American feeling around the world. We’ve never done that for several reasons. We are who we are and there’s no reason to try to appear otherwise, and since we don‚t do the “Rah-Rah, America” thing that people should see that some Americans do try to be citizens of the world, for example. At any rate, in spite of the fact that we as a nation have a checkered past here in the region, there is no obvious dislike of the country. This week, for example, marked the 30 year anniversary of what is called here, “The American War.” The fall of Saigon ended that horrible part of our history. What a sad commentary that we seem to be making the same mistakes all over again, with another country in the cross hairs, literally and figuratively, of our limited view of the world and the people who live in it.
At any rate, people here in Thailand are incredibly warm and friendly. We’ve been told about not touching the people that it’s not part of their culture, but they reach out, take your hand, pat your arm and just show a natural affection person to person.
The faces of the people are never far from an easy smile. It really seems to be the more natural configuration of their face. Relax the muscles of a Thai, and the face just goes to a smile. Give them any reason to be happy and they just beam. Whether its people on the street or people in shops, it’s so nice to be amongst such people.
The biggest problem that we’ve had is just not enough time!!! We knew that to begin with, but it’s even harder when you are here with so many things that we want to do, and we just don’t have the flexibility to do them. We leave Sunday for Nepal and THERE’S JUST NO TIME!!! I mean, here we are in the heart of the Thai silk industry and Carol‚s not going to have time to check it all out. When looking at our schedule we had the choice to do more and see less, or concentrate on one area. Carol had never been in the region and it was decided to do this as an overview, since she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do. Yesterday she said that she could spend an entire month up here in the north. So it looks like another trip back to the region is in the offing. There are so many different ethnic peoples in the area it is hard not to visit the small villages and see the origins of so many of our students from our teaching days.
Plus she wants to do the elephant thing with her daughter and grandson. Surprise, surprise.