Travel Destination: Sout-East Asia, Street Food in Thailand
After traversing every aisle of food carts and woks on my mission to find the freshest, most interesting and tasty-looking dishes, I was often met with earnestly shaking heads or “No, you don’t want that - that’s Thai food!” by English speaking cooks or bystanders when I pointed and gestured and tried to ask for a meal I knew I truly wanted. On my first such adventure, I did not know that the custom was for the cook to show the ladle with the amount of the garlic and chili for you to indicate how much you wanted: thinking she was simply asking if I wanted those Thai ingredients, I nodded vigorously at the heaped display, and in it all went! Yes, it was Thai food, and I enjoyed every sizzling touch to my lips under the watchful, laughing eyes of the vendors and bystanders who had gathered.
A Guide to Living in Asia’s City of Angels
I spent as much time learning about, admiring and experiencing the food as I did with major tourist attractions, often spending hours strolling through streets and markets taking in the sights and smells and sounds: quiet clucking rising up from a heap of vibrantly coloured roosters or hens tied together at the feet - a Thai rooster’s plumage is extraordinarily beautiful; plastic tubs and buckets just full enough of murky grey water to keep the fish, frogs or turtles alive until a sale was clinched; mounds and mounds of green and red, and purple and orange; the pleasant stench of durian and jackfruit - pleasant because I was just so thrilled and in awe of it all!
I tried deep-fried grasshoppers at a carnival in Kanchanaburi during a sound and light show of “The Bridge On The River Kwai” that ended with a fabulous fireworks display recreating the Allied bombing campaign that destroyed the bridges of the Death Railway in 1945. I tried a few tiny roasted wood worms offered by a very thin host in a northern hill-tribe village near the Myanmar border, and feared that I was eating his family out of house and home. I discovered countless traditional dishes I had never tasted and savoured authentic versions of some I had had in Toronto’s newly arrived Thai restaurants. As often as I could, I watched their creation so that I could try to replicate them when I got home and got a kitchen again.