In which I muse droolingly about the foods I must eat when I land in Vancouver...

Thai food is delicious and healthy, and apparently there's a wealth of various European restaurants on offer in Chiang Mai that I have yet to sample. There's no lack of variety here if one is willing to pony up the cash, and restaurants are truly everywhere, on every street corner and hidden in every alleyway nook. I'll never starve here.

But the novelty of daily pad thai and moo ga-tiam is rapidly fading, and even the beloved khao soy curry noodle soup is wearing slightly thin. My first attempt to get an honest sit-down, non-McD's hamburger ended with me accidentally eating a live earwig (I think) and somewhat soured me on what I'm told is otherwise told is Chiang Mai's best burger joint. So I found myself idly drafting (as oft occurs when I travel) a list of foods I miss terribly, and upon which I will gorge myself within moments of my holiday return.

An honest-to-God gigantic barbecued hamburger. Even the famed burger restaurants here, high earwig content notwithstanding, are sunk by their insistence on frying burgers. Yuck.

Sushi! Of course. Chiang Mai's well inland, and I've thus dodged the seamy-looking sushi joint in the mall next door to me.

A gargantuan slab of steak. Surely available here, but not at any of the micro-budget restaurants I frequent...

Anything from Simba's. The less bloodthirsty East African spices seem like a mild daydream compared to the vicious Thai peppers.

Tacos. Definitely tacos. Apparently there's a great Mexican restaurant around here somewhere, but I have yet to find it.

A proper Reuben sandwich - smoked beef is an unheard-of concept in Northern Thailand. The simply astonishing number of New Yorkers I've met here all seem to share this hankering.

A Nanaimo bar and a Timmy's donut. Speaks for itself.

Beef shawerma from the Babylon Cafe on Robson.

Mango ice cream from Mondo Gelato - if there's a real ice cream shop here, I haven't found it.

A Caesar! Duh.

Uncle Fatih's 99 cent pizza, a Vancouver institution I only discovered days before my September departure, to my lasting shame.

My trademark panang curry. It seems odd be salivating over a Thai curry, but I haven't been able to find the stuff here, so I'll have to make it up at home. In fact, I think I'm mostly looking forward to making a meal of my own - a grievous sin forbidden in my current apartment. I've eaten out for every meal (aside from breakfast cereal) in the last three months, and a self-cooked feast is something I sincerely miss. Methinks I'll need a new apartment soon.