In which food remains the center of my life...

Warning: minute details of eating in Thailand follow - none too fascinating unless you're as food-obsessed as I.

Thailand is a culinary mecca, with an endless variety of hyper-local cuisines and edible oddities to terrify the traveler. But I’m nothing if not a slave to ritual, so in keeping with my personal travel tradition, I went to McDonalds for lunch on my first day here. I do this foolish thing not because I so desperately crave their cardboard burgers, but because it always seems to tell me two things: one, a McD’s cheeseburger changes not one whit anywhere on Earth, and second, that the peripheral menu items give a surprisingly accurate picture of the culinary tastes of each new home. In Japan I found the teriyaki burger (delicious!) and the au gratin burger (which I never tried, to my boundless shame). In Costa Rica, the Mac Shack had a rice-and-beans Gallo Pinto breakfast and unappealing fried chicken drumlets. Here in Thailand I was aghast at their hot pie flavours – no apple or cherry to be found here. Instead they’ve filled that fine pastry with your choice of pineapple, corn, and taro root (a potato-lke starch, for the uninitiated). I know I have to eat one of those latter two at some point, but I choose to procrastination until I’ve had a short stretch to acclimatize myself to the Thai palate.

Going to McD’s on my first day serves another purpose – it provides a not-too-intimidating stepping-stone into the frightening world of foreign-language commerce. I’m not a very good traveler in a couple of really important ways. The foremost in my mind right now is that I’m terrified of speaking to people in another language unless I’ve got a reasonable certainty that I’ll be understand. Whereas other travelers are quite content to wildly gesticulate and spit out a charmless yet functional approximation of the local phrase for “green curry noodle soup”, I tend to freeze up and avoid conversation altogether. More problematic, I tend to get hungry since I don’t have any idea how to order food. In my first few months in Japan I ate half my meals from the local 7-Eleven rather than stumble through a conversation without functional Japanese. This mistake I refuse to repeat.

Lonely Planet redeemed itself once more for it oft out-of-date info, by directing me to another ideal stepping stone for lunch the next day: the immense MBK Food Centre in Bangkok. This cavernous, wondrous creation occupies a substantial portion of the seventh floor of one of the capital's major malls with stall after stall of food vendors of every conceivable variety. Lest mall food be seen as cultural heresy, Lonely Planet accurately described the MBK as having all the roadside food stalls in the city crammed into one place, with the glorious addition of English signage and without Bangkok's foul street-level air. All I had to do was exchange 200 Baht (about 6 dollars) into stall coupons, and had one of the happiest afternoons in recent memory. Though overjoyed to see that Indian, Arab, and various Western cuisines were available, I piously dedicated myself to Thai food with a slavish rite newly designed to maximize my culinary joy. I ate a meal, wandered the mall until marginally hungry again, ordered anew, and repeated the process. This availed me of wonderful servings of pad thai (fried rice noodles and a notoriously popular farang dish), tom yam gung (citrus seafood soup), a huge steaming bowl of pork leg stew, and an indescribable, unrelatable, untransliterateable noodle soup piled high with fried balls of ground fish.

I tried to phase it out with a bowl of durian and sticky rice for dessert, but cultural incompatibilities reared their foul heads. Durian is a peculiar fruit beloved by Thais and many elsewhere in East Asia. Having never tried it, I gamely dug in and learnt the first real lesson of my tme in Thailand: never eat durian, no matter the circumstance or reward. It reeks of ammonia, imparts a curious texture I imagine to match a mouthful of talcum powder, and tastes powerfully of pure evil. Unwilling to end on a low note, I ate around the remaining deathfruit and returned for a bowl of always-reliable sticky rice with mango, which did not disappoint. Four delicious lunches + two desserts - six dollars = one day very well spent.

Now that I'm in Chiang Mai, my Thai hasn't improved but my willingness to order food surely has. Thailand caters far more frequently to foreign tourists than Japan, and in a major city like Chiang Mai, many restaurants have English menus. I'm also suppressing my urge to clam up when talking to Thai speakers, and so have nt yet starved. I've taken to eating most of my lunches at a tiny hole-in-the-wall a few kilometres from the school where I work, and the place lacks menus in any language, so I've been ordering delightful Pad Thai and Pad Kapow (KAPOW!! It's like a Batman episode!) in mangled but comprehensible Thai. I've discovered, as well, that smaller though fully functional food courts like the MBK centre are scattered around the city. One sits a few seconds walk from my new apartment (the subject of a near-future post), and provides a large chunk of my daily sustenance.

The cuisine of Chiang Mai, 800 kilometres north of Bangkok, sports a number of regional peculiarities, some very charming, and some less so. I've become absolutely infatuated with Khao Soy, a coconut-curry soup served with tender chunks of chicken, soft egg noodles, and a joyful handful of crunchy fried noodles and shallots on top. It's the finest addition to my core diet since I discovered Hon's hot and sour soup a few years back. I fear terribly that, like the engawa-zushi I so prized in Japan, it will vanish forever from my life when I return to Vancouver.

Other local specialties will not be missed, nor even attempted. At one of the night markets near my home (also the subject of a future post) countless food stall appear between dusk and 10PM every Friday and Saturday. One of these sports a dozen dictionary-sized baskets, each heaped high with a different multi-legged delicacy. Grasshoppers, cockroaches, silkworms, spiders - all the things you never wanted to eat are here. I like to consider myself pretty flexible as regards new foods, but I draw the line at insects - and somehow I feel like a lesser traveler as a result.

I'll have content myself with bowl after bowl of khao soy, pad thai, and whatever non-crawling food gets put in front of me. Pretty healthy stuff all around too - despite eating four meals or so every day, I've lost 10 pounds since I arrived (thanks in no small part to my bike, the riding of which will amusy and terrify in a future post). Great food, good health, and rock-bottom prices... all told, a damn fine foundation on which to build a good year.