The teachers made us lunch today after our morning classes, and it was the best food we've eaten so far in Thailand. I'm not going to lie, I went to lunch with a lot of apprehension, because most Thai people eat a lot of meat and fish that I'm just not sure about, but man--was I blown away.
We walked into the room, and there was a huge table laden with all kinds of delicious-looking goodies: soups, noodles, identifiable meat, fruit, pretty much everything. I started with a very tentative scoop of the noodle dish, and from that first bite it was love in my heart and heaven in my mouth. I think I had four helpings. There were two giant plates of it, heaping up like mountains, and it was all for us--the teachers were eating something else at the other end of the table, but I didn't care, as long as that wonderful, unnamed entity was sitting in front of me. It had noodles, fried egg, onions, some green vegetables, and some leafy stuff, not to mention whatever genius blend of spices were in there. There was a small bowl of pork soup sitting next to the noodles, and after Robbie confirmed that the soup was 1) very good, and 2) very spicy in a good way, I dumped some of that on top of the noodle mixture and it was like my own small piece of Nirvana.
After the first few scoops of noodles, Robbie decided to branch out and try the beef soup from the other end of the table. After he did, I could hypothesize why there were two distinct groups of food, one on our end and one on the teachers' end: there was "Westerner" spicy and "Thai" spicy. That beef soup was definitely Thai spicy. He took one spoon full, and as Maggie and I looked on, his face became redder and redder, eyes got big, and we lost it. We were laughing so hard, and the 3rd grade teacher was just looking at us, so I said "spicy!" and pointed to Robbie's watering eyes, and all of the teachers started laughing too. To his credit, Robbie did finish the soup and I'm sure it was really good, but there was no getting better than those noodles for me. And Maggie doesn't make friends with spicy easily, so we left that untouched.
The fruit here has given us all a taste for the exotic. Mango is the most popular, followed by lychee, mangosteen (which is AWESOME), pineapple, banana, dragon fruit, papaya, and passion fruit. Those exotic fruit stands at stores like Whole Foods pale in comparison to the fruit here--you can buy a dragon fruit that's about five pounds. (And you can get it for about 50 cents).
All this talk is making me crave a fruit shake, which is basically the Thai smoothie. Unlike American smoothies, these are readily available almost everywhere, and there are street vendors who specialize in these frosty delights. A fruit shake will run you 20 baht (60 cents), and a smoothie with some dairy/yogurt added in is 25 baht. Ah, the smoothies are just what is needed on a blistering day like today (110 degrees) and they're plentiful for the picking.
In fact, I'm going to go get one now.
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