Kornography

This weekend Pee Ann invited me to come with her to Wiang Haeng, a TINY town Northwest of Chiang Mai, about 15 km(~9 miles) from the border with Burma. It quickly began clear that this trip, although purporting to be work-related, was a complete boondoggle for Pee Ann to visit her friend (Pee Oot) who had moved to Wiang Haeng. I was all for it, and life soon took the form of the perfect vacation: sleep, wake, eat, repeat.

Pee Oot lives in a wooden house, and in a way much closer to the way of life of most people in Thailand than I was living in Chaing Mai. At Pee Oot’s house, the kitchen was indeed the center of life and I expect that I spent well over half of my waking hours in Wiang Haeng there. The kitchen is closer to a porch than how I usually conceive of a kitchen—with a roof and a railing up to waist height all the way round and a slotted floor—but I came to understand that this had its root in how her kitchen functions differently than mine back home. For instance: cooking was done on a ceramic hearth with a wood fire, from which the smoke readily escaped out the sides of the room; dishwashing was done in a bucket filled from a tap and then dumped out down through the floor; and extraneous organic material from food prep. was tossed out the side or pushed through the slots in the floor, to be consumed by the small flock of chickens and sole rabbit that Pee Oot kept.

It took me about a day to adjust to the marked differentness of Wiang Haeng, but after that I really embraced the way of life and began to love its pace. These were lazy mornings spent chatting, and playing with Pee Oot’s puppy sipping coffee or warmed soy milk, and snacking on some combination of Thai donut-like pastries and leftovers (the Thais do not see breakfast food as sacred, and fish and rice at street restaurants is the Dunkin Donuts of Chaing Mai). Then, we would walk around the neighborhood to “go vegetable hunting.” It turns out that this consists of walking through Pee Oot’s neighbors’ yards and picking any number of vegetables and fruits, a brilliant testament to the merits of small community living.

I ate any number of fruits and vegetables, some of which I had had before (I probably ate 15 passion fruits over the course of the weekend), and others of which I had never even seen. Pee Oot’s son (Ong, 8 years old) is studying English and has a number of worksheets of food with images flanked by both Thai and English names, which provided remarkably little insight into what I was eating, because—just like my Thai teacher’s efforts to teach me the Thai names for fruits I have never seen, by giving me the made up English names, (what is a custard apple anyway?)—it wasn’t a problem of translation, but of the fact that these things do not exist in America, or at least I had never encountered them.

That being said, the food that was without translation provided much more amusement, as one stalk-like vegetable was explained as “tastes like sponge”, and indeed upon trying it, I couldn’t come up with a better explanation, it tasted as advertised. While I was happy to try these new things, some of which were much more delicious than others, Nicole—the other American working for Gabfai, who also came to Wiang Haeng—was faced with some bigger challenges to her palate. After explaining the extent of my vegetarianism, Pee Oot was happy to oblige with strictly vegetarian dishes, so that I was able to dodge the need to “just pick out” the bits of frog in the curry, that Nicole dutifully crunched on.

More amusing though, was another of these moments when the correct translation could not be found. In explaining what was for dinner Pee Oot said that the man who takes care of her cows had shot an animal this morning and brought her some of the meat.

Pee Oot: It’s like a cat but lives in the jungle

Nicole: (looking somewhat worried) A cat?

Me: (causing trouble) Like a leopard?

Nicole: (looking more worried) A leopard?!

Pee Oot: No more like a cat cat.

Nicole: (undoubtedly thinking of her tabby back home) o…kay

Pee Oot: (excited in remembering the English word) No, no it’s more like…. a big raccoon.

Me and Pee Oot: (laughing) Nicole: (making a face the face of someone simultaneously seeing a ghost and holding back tears, starts laughing as well)

The meal turned out to be delicious, just like every one we ate there, and Nicole actually enjoyed the raccoon, which I said she should call a Lynx; she said it was actually delicious (once she got control of it in her mind), better than the crunchy frog the day before. The notion of gin kaew was definitely pertinent at Pee Oot’s house, as every meal was accompanied by a big handful of pink sticky rice. Dishes were arranged on the circular kitchen table about 5 inches off of the ground, and we all sat around it, a makeshift family eating in the krua. Like Pap or Sudza, sticky rice is molded in ones hand and used as a vessel for eating everything from chili paste to bamboo shoots to frog curry.We did eventually stop eating and got out to sample the beautiful local scenary of rice fields and mountains. We also visited a town of Chinese immigrants and hill-tribe people close to the border, looked across a valley to Burma, visited a wat (of course) and trekked through the jungle to waterfall. I did all of the traveling on the back of a moped, (mom stop reading here) and I was happy not to have to navigate the muddy/rocky/pot-hole-ridden roads that alternated between >50 degree inclines, which more than once required my getting off and walking up, and precariously steep hills, before whose descent Pee Ann frequently gave the warning “Don’t move.” However, Pee Ann did encourage both me and Nicole to practice our moped-ing, much to the amusement of the local kids.

A dessert that Pee Ann insisted was traditionally Northern Thai, despite it necessitating a packet of Chinese-made Agar powder, accompanied Sunday’s dinner, our last big meal in Wiang Haeng. In preparing the dessert Pee Ann chopped up a large stalk and put it in a mortar, handing me a pestle and I resumed my assigned duty as the go-to-guy for labor-intensive crushing—here it is important to note that every single dish that we ate all weekend–and keep in mind there were frequently more than four in a given meal, and more than four meals in any given day–started in a mortar with chilies, garlic, shallots and salt, and usually with me grinding them. Upon starting to grinding, I was overcome with the smell of a freshly cut lawn, and upon examining the plant again, couldn’t help but notice how much it looked like GIANT stalks of grass, and Nicole agreed.

Next came the problem of deciphering the few Thai instructions on the Agar packet, of which most words were in Chinese. Eventually Pee Ann settled on the fact that the recipe called for 1.5 kilograms of water, and soon realized the inherent problem: not only is water usually measured in volume rather than mass (crazy Chinese) but also there was no means of measuring volume, let alone mass, in Pee Oot’s kitchen. What followed was a brief lesson in the metric system by yours truly (my 11^th grade Chemistry teacher would be so proud) followed by the unveiling of my exactly 1.5L water bottle. The grass flavored gelatinous dessert apparently incorporated egg yolks as well, so when it was discovered that the last egg had been used, I was sent to the market to get eggs.

Now I don’t doubt that Pee Ann recognized and relished in the cruelty that was this proposal, and I willingly obliged, much to her amusement. My first extended solo ride on the moped was to go and get eggs, and quickly. Pee Oot explained that I should get one pang of eggs (whatever that meant), making me say it in Thai to her before I left, and then sent me off, content that the lady at the market would understand. Well, it quickly became clear that a pang is 36 eggs(one layer in the picture above) as the women proceeded to load 36 eggs into a plastic bag. Over bumpy roads and beaten paths I rode, carefully coaxing the bike around turns and over ruts, to save the precious eggs. But alas, the final step to returning to Pee Oot’s house is crossing a rickety bridge made of loose logs resting atop two joices, and with no longer enough speed to keep the bike from veering off the narrow bridge, I revved the engine, the sound of which was accompanied, to my dismay, by the sound of cracking eggs. Inside I surveyed the damage, and the three casualties, all of whom were still in suitable shape to go right into the Jello, represented a survival rate that I was comfortable with.

Oh, and I got my first T-shirt from Thailand at the Sunday market in Wiang Haeng, a Chinese nock-off of an Abercrombie-esque pseudo-thrift store T proclaiming “life never stoRs” and “you win perfect”.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 10:18 am and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.