Too bad they already made the movie

Dear reader,

With the arrival of the new year, I've picked up a new hobby. Sure, sure, I really ought to be doing something useful like learning Thai or figuring out how to teach but, instead, I'm cooking. Specifically, I've enrolled in a 150 hour night class at the Phitsanulok vocational college. We meet every day. It's serious. And by serious, I mean seriously awesome. My favorite dish so far is gang masaman gai, or masaman curry with chicken, but the most amusing was blaa dek mamuang, which translates roughly to catfish clouds with mangos. It's sort of like catfish that's been minced and then whipped to the texture of cotton candy, and then deep fried.

Here's my friend and colleague P'Add. After bringing me along to her painting class at the vocational college, she continued her streak of benevolence by deciding to enroll in cooking class with me. I'd be lost without her.


And here's me, chopping the fins off my first ever whole fish.


It turns out that there are a lot of very basic procedures in Thai cooking that I, having only the knowledge of an amateur American kitchen-user, am totally inept at performing. For example, deep frying anything, or using a mortar and pestle. That last one is especially unfortunate as traditional wisdom holds that the better you are at using the mortar and pestle, the better wife you make. And, due to my fair-weather vegetarianism, I am also totally inexperienced at cooking meat. The teacher is pretty forgiving of my kitchen dysfunctions, but I did get reprimanded for washing the pork too slowly.

Here's that fish, and a companion, a little later. This is the first thing I've ever deep fried!


I'm learning lots about Thai ingredients and such. This is the shopping list for gang kiew wan gai, or sweet green curry with chicken. Please note P'Add's helpful translations. And also the last ingredient, congealed blood. Note of caution should you travel here: cooked blood looks dangerously like dark tofu, so much so that one could innocently consume it for quite some time until being informed that it is, in fact, congealed chicken blood.


And here's us shopping for supplies at the market. I still miss Whole Foods, but this definitely helps ease my homesickness. Also at Whole Foods you cannot buy an entire pig's head, so really, Whole Foods-0, Thai market-1.


The final product: the most delicious green curry I've ever eaten. Perhaps I have to say that because I spent so very long pounding out the fresh curry paste with the pestle that my arm was sore the next day, but I think I am only a little biased.



Tonight we cooked sticky rice and shredded pork. Tomorrow is a spicy salad with glass noodles. If you tell me your favorite Thai dish I'll learn how to make it and cook it for you when I return.

Okay, I should sign off, dear reader, before I get any more unbearably Julie&Julia on you. I just wanted to keep you abridge of my daily life. I hope you're doing well. And happy belated Martin Luther King Jr. Day! I tried to explain to my students that Monday was a holiday celebrating the life of an activist who fought against racial discrimination, but this prompted one of my students to start calling another (more tan) student "black" in a taunting way. I tried to correct them, but I think something was lost in translation.

Yours truly,
R

HOMESTAY

I have my first Thai friend! Her name is Nong Mae, and really I guess she is more than a friend because she is also my Thai sister. She is seventeen, speaks incredible English, is an excellent hairdresser and loves Korean boy bands (especially Big Bang). I spent this past weekend with Nong Mae, my new Thai Ma and Paw, and my other little sister Nong Mook. The family was so very kind it was sort of outrageous. They took me to ancient ruins, to the cinema, to no less than six temples, to an island, to an elephant show, etc., etc.

Here’s my family:



Saturday night I had the honor of joining their extended family for dinner at grandmother’s house, and was taught to cook (“tam-a-han”) several Thai dishes. Here’s the recipe for one of the dishes, Tom-Yum-Goong, which is a traditional shrimp soup, so you can make it:





-add ¼ cup each of diced lemongrass, purple pearl onions, chopped kaffir lime leaves and an herb called “ka” into boiling water; wait three minutes
-add ½ spoon of salt
-add ½ cup diced straw mushrooms; wait some more minutes
-add shrimp; wait maybe eight minutes
-add hand-crushed red and green chili pepper and lime
-eat with rice

I spent the weekend butchering the Thai language in an effort to communicate with the rest of the family. Nong Mae (who is able to speak English because she attends a private and costly English language program outside of school) was an excellent teacher and gave me detailed and lengthy Thai vocabulary lists. She thought it wise to give me a list of the bad words so that I could reprimand my students for using them:



Calling someone a monitor lizard here is a really, really big deal.

Nong Mae was really a delight. She and I are pretty much thick as thieves. She introduced me to what a cultural powerhouse Korea is becoming. Her favorite movies, television shows and bands are Korean rather than Thai or American. Most of the Korean media she showed me seemed derivative of American pop culture circa late 1990s through now, but I’m sure a lot of the Korean nuance was lost on me. To explain to me her most favorite band, Big Bang, Nong Mae took out the plastic-wrapped concert brochure that she carries with her at all times. She lovingly flipped through the glossy pages and described each member’s personality, role in the group dynamic, and level of appeal.





Here are Nong Mae and I on an elephant. The whole elephant show experience added another layer for my ponderings about animal-domination/anthropomorphism-tourism (for lack of a better word). Both here and in South Africa, taking animals from nature and training out their wildness is a serious industry. It’s sad but also it’s weird. How and why is it that people somehow end up paying to see elephants trained to bob up and down to Black Eyed Peas?

Now it’s back to classes. It’s getting rather tiring sitting through seven hours of class a day. This doesn’t bode terribly well for my impending career as a teacher, nor does my inability to speak the Thai language and my continued ignorance of how to teach. Oh well.

What else is new with you, dear reader? You haven’t been e-mailing me as I requested. And no one ever comments. Is the comment feature broken? My sister thinks so.

And what’s happening in the news? I think maybe I’ve never been so disconnected from American news in all my life. Did you know that over here they call the recession the “Hamburger Recession” because it was started in America?

Yours truly,
Rebecca