Hungry Hungry Hannah (and Leah)

One of the primary reasons that Leah and I decided to spend thirty days in Thailand was that we wanted to spend thirty days eating in Thailand. So far, the food has not been a disappointment, especially in Chiang Mai. In fact, I'd say that food has figured so prominently in our experience of Chiang Mai that it deserves its own blog post. I understand that by devoting a blog post entirely to describing and displaying pictures of food that you can imagine but not taste, I risk being infuriating in the same way that Guy Fieri is whenever he takes a bite of a delicious, delicious sandwich from a Diner, Drive-In, or Dive that's two thousand miles and ten states away. But because I am secure in the knowledge that no one could possibly be more annoying than Guy, that's a risk I'm willing to take. So, without further ado:

Chiang Mai, My, My, This is Tasty: A Post in Three Meals (Plus Some Snacks)

BREAKFAST

I wake up earlier and hungrier than Leah, so in Chiang Mai I went straight down to the hotel breakfast buffet before she got up. I was, consequently, the only one of us who got to watch the daily 6:45 feeding of the Giant Chinese Tour Group. For those of you who have never seen a Giant Chinese Tour Group at a breakfast buffet, know that there is a simple way to distinguish it from a Giant American Tour Group in a similar environment: where the American Tour Group proceeds in orderly yet interminable single file through the buffet, the Chinese variant will only move as a single entity between stations. First, everyone has to get rice--all at once!--from the giant silver rice crock. Then, the action shifts and everyone has to get pork and vegetables--all at once!--from the pork and vegetable tray. The actions shifts again and we're moving to chicken curry. Huddle around the teacups! Veer left to the tea! Conclusion: the Giant Chinese Tour Group is a highly gregarious species that exhibits a group locomotion similar to that of a team of five-year-olds playing YMCA soccer, complete with the few daisy-picking dreamers who drift over to the American section of the buffet for some French toast and jam.

The disadvantage of eating at the same time as the Giant Chinese Tour Group is that it's really hard to break through and get some tea. The advantage is that the tour group introduces so much chaos into the dining room that the kitchen staff are too distracted to notice me filling up four giant water bottles from the cold purified water dispenser. In Thailand, that stuff is liquid gold.

LUNCH

Leah and I generally do most of our sightseeing and activity-ing during the first half of the day, so by the time we get to lunch, we're starving and I'm pumped up in full-on adventure mode, ready to order a lot of something colorful and spicy. Now, i have a pretty high spice tolerance for a white girl (a tolerance no doubt enhanced by the past four years of dumping Cholula hot sauce on half my food at Princeton), so I've actually been able to handle most of the dishes I've been served here so far (though I'm pretty sure that the waiters here aren't really serving me "Thai spicy" when I ask for it). The problem is that I think so highly of myself and my ability to take the heat that I invariably overuse the condiments that grace every Thai restaurant table.

"Look at you, Hannah. You managed to haggle down the price of that songthaew (taxi) ride down by a whole ten baht," I'll think to myself, lifting the lid off the little ceramic jar of chili paste. "Thai-level bargaining skills merit Thai-level spiciness."

On goes a spoonful.

"And now you're eating at what the guidebook says is the most authentic northern restaurant in Chiang Mai! And you managed to navigate here with only one wrong turn!"

Another spoonful, along with the whole bowlful of raw onions that comes with the khao soi. 

"Yep, Hannah, you're no average tourist. You are one adventurous motherf***er."

I'll take a bite.

Because I am not, in fact, that adventurous a motherf***er, I can't know this for sure, but I imagine that eating really spicy food must be something like doing drugs. The first few tastes you have are great. It's only once you stop for a moment and give your body a chance to really react to what you've just put into it that you begin pay for what you've done.

AFTER-LUNCH MISSION

Armed with the liquid gold stolen from breakfast and the side of rice served with my curry, II can usually make it to the end of my adventurous lunch. Once we leave the restaurant, though, internal burning catches up with me, and external heat and humidity catches up with Leah. These are unmistakable signs that it's time for the after-lunch mission: fruit shakes.

We in the U.S. have a truly bizarre, fraught relationship with liquified fruit. At one end of the spectrum, we accept that any juice from Jamba Juice should contain at least four different kinds of fruit, and some sort of mysterious "boost" that may or may not be edible and we publicly ridicule the proliferation of juice cleanses while privately feeling guilty that we're not doing them ourselves. At the other end of the spectrum, we process the pulp and nutrienta out of pureed fruit, decry the juice product as empt calories, and then serve it at snacktimes nationwide without thinking twice. But somehow the rest of the world (or at least all of the countries I've been to outside our hemisphere) has figured out that all you need to do to turn ripe fruit into one of the most wonderfully refreshing beverages you could imagine is to blend it up with some ice and a little sugar syrup, and you're done.

Fortunately, Thailand has the art of fruit shaking down pat.

Unfortunately, Leah and I sometimes get overexcited by the simple pleasures of fruit shakes and end up suffering from their only drawback: brain freeze. 

DINNER

Dinner is our wild card meal. Sometimes, we get Thai food, and I'm a little less ambitious with the seasoning. Once, we got Mexican, just to see how it compared to San Francisco (conclusion: tortilla was overfloured and the cheese was a little unusual, but my God, can Thai chefs make a mean salsa). Because Janet told us to, we had French. And then of course one evening we ditched regular dinner altogwther and instead made a meal out of snacks from the stalls at one of Chiang Mai's famous night market, just as all of the guidebooks insist we do.

Eating at a night market, Leah and I agreed, is a lot like eating at a high school club fundraising festival, a college dining hall, or Hometown Buffet. You walk in there and see all these things that you think you'd like to eat, and you can't imagine how you'll ever decide between them. You walk around for a while, scoping out your options. You get hungrier and hungrier, but are afraid to eat anything for fear of spoiling your appetite for the really good dish that you're sure is just a few steps that way. You realize that these are embarrassingly first-world problems, and get the next thing you see. It's pretty good--not great, but at least good enough to whet your appetite for the next thing you have, which will be even better. You try something else. And something else. And something else.

And after an hour trying a whole bunch of disparate things (some of which--summer rolls with green chili sauce

--were worth it, some of which--whatever mysterious brown paste was wrapped up in the banana leaf on the left

--were definitely not), you discover that you're full but not satisfied, and you're out the same amount of money or more than you would have been if you had just had a regular sit-down meal. And you know that there's only one solution to this, again, embarrassingly first-world problem.

Dessert. 

Sweet corn with butter, salt, and sugar? Delicious!

Fried banana crepe on a stick with powdered sugar and caramel sauce? Tastes as good in Thailand as it does at the Texas State Fair!

Steamed bun with custard filling? I don't even really know what custard is, but it's heavenly!

Durian ice cream? I don't quite think that durian is tasty enough to deserve its nickname as the "king of fruits"**, but ice cream is ice cream!

{No photo available, unfortunately.}

Chocolate banana waffle? Enough said!

Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Michael Moss released a best-selling book titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. I may release a spinoff titled Salt Sugar Fat: How to Save a Confusing Dinner.

In the time it's taken me to write this, Leah and I have moved from Chiang Mai to Krabi, an estuarine town on the Andaman coast of southern Thailand, where we'll be for a few more days before heading east to the Gulf coast. It is astonishingly beautiful.

*Which, side note, sometimes comes charmingly molded into the shape of a heart or a star, like this:

Rice: It's magically delicious!

**In case you were wondering, mangosteen is the queen.***

***In case you were wondering, this is what durian and mangosteen look like.

Durian

Mangosteen

They do kind of seem to go together, don't they?