Week three of noodles...

Even before arriving in BKK I knew that I was going to be face to face with a lot of noodles in my future.   Part of my strategy was to eat a lot of Cuban food in Miami before heading over.   And when we arrived here I was ready for the battle. 

It turns out that I may have had my countries confused.  Thais don’t eat noodles as much as I wished.  I think it must be the Japanese that I was thinking about.  I mean, is not that they don’t eat noodles here, they do have their fair share of rice and wheat noodles, is just that is not in every meal as I suspected.  What I end up eating more of is some sort of soups called “gaang” also translated as “curry”.  The gaang style soups are delicious don’t take me wrong.  The flavors of the chili-paste, lime zests, shrimp paste, lemon grass, the ginger and the coconut milk in some of them, form a beautiful and pungent blend of flavors that when you sip some of the hot and spicy broth (and they are usually VERY hot), the fragrance and the tanginess fills every cranny of your mouth, nose and esophagus.  Maybe because the broth is rather thin or light that sometimes it goes straight to the back of your mouth and I sometimes start coughing as if I swallowed food the wrong way.  Of course, it may also have to do with the fact that the soups come with a hefty amount of chili that if I happen to pick up a piece of chili in the spoonful, that alone will make you flare up in combustion.  But I just can’t stop.  The more I’m on fire the more I keep on inhaling the stuff and when I’m finally seeping the last of it, I’m looking forward to being hungry again so I can have another shot at a variation on the theme.

I got carried away with the curries and forgot about my noodles.  The thin white noodles can be ordered on the side of your curry or you can order the ever-present white rice.  I’ve seen that Thais either add the curry on top of the rice on a side dish where they eat from, or the add the noodles and/or rice into the bowl of the curry to eat it from there.

Come to think of it, maybe I’m the one that usually adds the noodles or the rice to the bowl.  For the most part, every time I see Thais eating, they are eating in a group.  Even when we are invited to eat with a group of Thais, we usually just end up buying a bunch of food and everyone serves themselves or you help your neighbor nearby, but the original bowls and dishes where the food comes in from the kitchen are not used for eating directly from, but just to serve yourself from.

Except when I’m in the table as I find that at the end of the meal I don’t feel like wasting the curries and I take possession of the bowl and use it as my own plate.  And that’s another thing. Thais like to order a lot of food and as I understand it, it’s a good sign when you leave food on your plates and the bowls as that’s a sign that your hosts are wealthy and that they treated you well.  The food doesn’t really go to waste as it goes on to feed others.  After all, that food in the bowls was never really dirtied up with your utensils so it should be good.  So I need to get on with the program and try to leave some food in the bowls without trying to clean up as I go.  That should help me be more empathetic with the culture and it will probably help my waste line also.  We’ll see if I can keep myself from “finishing up” the last curry at my next opportunity.