Behind the Noodle Curtain

Everything goes into the pot in poorest Thailand

If you want to know what living off the land means, read this item at blog My Thai Girl: Her Papa's a Hunter Gatherer. It's something I've never read before. The author lives in Surin province,  in northeastern Thailand, an area  known as Isaan.  Here live the poorest of the poor in Thailand. So the folks there are used to hunting and foraging in the forests. Only the forests are gone, given over to vast rice fields and some fruit orchards.

But there lies a considerable amount of food in the grasses and fields of northeastern Thailand. If it crawls, hops, plods, walks, runs or swims, it can be eaten. Author Andrew Hicks describes everything that goes into the pot, all collected by his partner.  It's a fascinating and revealing piece. Really! And there are pictures!

Want to know more? Go to the link below featuring a study in "nutritional anthropology," at the United Nations University. It lists  everything local people gather and hunt, who does it by gender, why they do it and how expertise is passed down through generations. The Thai words for the animals and plants are expressed in English phonetics of the Thai words but with very few English name equivalents given.

Interesting finding in the mid-1990s study:

Most people, both rich and poor, preferred wild food to cultivated food. Therefore, wild foods were not only for the poor. People who did not hunt or gather wild foods purchased them from those who did. Some villagers also sold wild foods in a market in the town. Examples of wild food eaten daily are wild plants with jeaw or pon (spicy dips), fish (usually boiled with vegetables, curried, or roasted), frog spicy soup or dip, mushroom soup, and roasted insects.

(Note, to find the study, it's grafted onto a study in Mongolia. Use Find function and use the keyword Thai. It'll take you to the Thai wild food study lower on the page.)

• "Indigenous knowledge of wild food hunting and gathering in north-east Thailand"
• My Thai Girl is lively blog on village life in Surin province, Thailand (northeast)

Images: bars and other features in Surin, Thailand, Part 2

Back in Surin, but this time my photos show the streets and other features of the small city. Most of the photos were taken in March this year, during the hot season. Whoa! 38, 39, 40 C every day.

I stayed at the Thong Tarin for two weeks and just wandered around, relaxing mostly, going for espresso at a shop closer to the bus station, owned by a Lao-speaking  lady and her sister, and one on the other side of the station, owned by Canadian Brian from Vancouver. Then it was brekkie at the Farang Connection or  N & N's on soi Kola. That got me to 1 in the afternoon, then it was back to the hotel to cool off for a while and a nap.

Then I was back out around 4 or 5 for a beer, then my second and last meal of the day.  Then a break at the hotel for shower and bit of TV watching. Then it was out to the bars on Sirirat and Kola till the wee hours. Sometimes, I had a noodle soup or other meat and rice dish in front of the 7-11 on Sirirat  very early in the morning. Good food. And just sat there watching the arrivals and departures of the local female population on their motorcycles. Strange but most of the travellers were girls.

Couple of curious Bangkok buddies came up for a few days to see what Surin was all about. I don't think they were impressed but were happy to check it out anyway. Or at least that was what they told me. After two weeks, I was ready to pack it in because touring in the heat of the day was just too harsh, as my friends found out one day when we walked the city. I was going to go on to Sisaket and Ubon Ratchathani, toward the Lao border.  But I'm keeping those visits till this coming winter when the daytime temps are under 35.

So here we go (by the way, all pix were taken by my trusty Canon point and shoot, namely SD850is):

 

Brian and partner, shown, at their espresso shop, which drew a lot of Thai businessmen and ladies. It faces the Majestic Hotel and bus station. It's also a 10-minute walk to the train station, behind this building.

Walk away from the bus station to the rail station along this soi and turn right.

       

 

Hmmm, came across this on a tour of town.

     

Left to right, the Surin Mall that looks like a KFC (pix 1 & 2); a Chinese temple near a night market; and the sign of an elephant, the city being famous for its annual (November) elephant roundup.

  

Came across this spectacular dinner setting  being readied  for the evening. Don't know what the celebration was for. Anyone read Thai?

   

Must transportation in Thailand, motos are used for everything and anything, this one being modified for hauling whatever.

 

I came across this "temple," still under construction. Don't know what it is for as there was no English on the signs. I asked several residents and they could not tell me -- or they didn't understand me, which is the more likely. Anyone know?

   

   

That's it for now from Surin.

I leave you with a bit of "elephantics". I had a barside view of our be-trunked friend eyeing our beer on our table at The Oasis in Surin. And, no, that's not his scooter. Photos taken with iPhone so not so great.

 

 

Invasion of Bangkok: Plight of Asian elephants in Thailand

 

Image shot in Pikto photo gallery, Toronto. The current featured artist is Brent Lewin, who has focused on the plight of Asian elephants in Bangkok, Thailand. His exhibit is entitled Urban Jungle.

Who can forget their first view of an elephant? Mine was at the Metro Toronto Zoo way back in time, almost 30 years ago. I was with a buddy and a couple of English nannies we met. OK, at a bar, all rght! We ventured out to the zoo, which was a substantial car ride and fortunately my friend had just got his first one. A yellow Chevy Vega. The less said about this "economy car" the better. (Which is pretty bloody bold of me to say since I did not have a car and he did.)

There they stood in the distance, these magnificent African elephants. We moved toward the high fence and moat and one of the girls noted something about their size. As I looked closer, well, let's just say one elephant was male, the other female, and the male was in, uh, full bloom, shall we say, making us guys feel a little, well, it would be like bringing a butter knife to a samurai match.

This mural is on the side of an abandoned building off Rama 4 Road in Bangkok. The image below is a closer look so you can read the wording.

My first view of Asian elephants was in Bangkok. You know the ones, ambling down the street late at night, with the mahout aboard and two or three followers with bags of cane or bananas to hand to tourists to feed the animals for a 20 baht "donation." The first few times the experience was freaky. These huge animals mixing with tight, chaotic moto and taxi traffic along Sukhumvit and the bar sois.

Expats told me not to feed the beasts.I never did. Not once. I didn't want to encourage them to bring the beasts into the city where they do NOT belong. But it's getting worse. The last two trips, you could look into the street and almost always spot an elephant arriving or leaving. I remember being at the Corner Bar (soi 23) in  soi Cowboy and see not one, not two, not three but four elephants on this block long space.

Many stories are told as to why these animals come into the city, even though the law forbids it. It's mostly about the fact that there's now no work for the animals up north. Business in the logging industry has been either decimated by the world economy or local forests have been overlogged. Anyway, the mahout's family has to make money somehow to eat and feed the animal. So they truck them in or walk them in to tap into the tourist industry.

Must be good business because there's more and more of the animals. And it must mean tourists are buying into the deal.

This long intro is about a compelling photo exhibit by young photographer Brent Lewin who spent a lot of time in an elephant village, located in an abandoned housing project in a suburb of  Bangkok, Bang Bua Thong. He's spent two years studying the issue, photographing the beasts in their suburban home and upcountry habitat to create a large format book.

You can see images of Lewin's photographs at his website, or if you are in Toronto, you can visit the Distillery District and drop into Pikto. Calling Pikto a photo shop does it a disservice. It's been leader in innovative services to amateur and pro alike, and it also has a gallery that is refreshed ever few weeks. BTW, they serve great coffee there, too. I know, I'm a customer.

Things that make you go 'Huh!?' in Thailand

[Update: images added]

I'll just list a bunch of things that made me go "huh?" -- or words to that effect -- as I wound my way through the days and weeks in Thailand. I'll have more of these in future posts.

• In every Thai town or city, you will come across some of the thousands of soi dogs, which were abandoned at some point and are free to roam the streets. Nearly all of them are filthy, scarred by fights, thin and disease ridden. But overall they're all right. They wander around and are largely not dangerous because they aren't hounded, so to speak, by people. At night, though, you never know how a dog will react to you as you approach it. Best to change sides of the street.
  

• Got a chicken fried rice from a stall the other night and the lady preparing it reached deep into her wide-open mouth with a finger and scratched out something from her throat  and then went back to making my stir fry without wiping her finger on something.

• I've taken intercity and city buses. I learned early on that there is no such thing as we in the west would call, personal space. Forget about it. It's too crowded. I've been on an intercity milk run bus in which three school girls shared the seat beside me, or on top of me.

• On escalators, no one walks down one, even if it's largely empty. Everyone will stand placidly until the belt delivers the rider. And all staircases will be empty, even if people have to line up for the escalator at a choked Skytrain station.

• I just don't get how they design fabulous malls and department stores with no definable shop/hall pattern, never mind navigation aids. You can't tell where the heck you are at many points in a mall. Although Central Lat Prao at Pahon Yotin works rather well, as does The Mall in Korat. At most complexes, you can be following a hallway and suddenly bump into a shop wall, with an entrance around the corner where you think the hallway continues but doesn't. I can't explain what I mean because I'm still lost.

• At a bar just this week, I had one beer to come on a pre-order and decided to hand my last fresh beer over to a friend and told the waitress so. She comes back with two beers. Now we have an extra beer. I didn't want it. But another friend said he'd take it and to put it on his bill. I explain this inside the bar -- we were out smoking -- and went back outside. The waitress brings a third beer. Now we have two beers we don't want. My first friend says, "is that a free beer?" She puts it on the table and walks away. The first waitress has pretty good English, the second, not bad. The third was free. I had to drink it. (Image of some of my friends who hail from Thailand, U.S., Denmark, Canada, England, Germany, in smoking area at Londoner.)

• Speaking of bars . . . with the recent Bangkok governor's election, bars cannot serve alcohol and the law is specific in terms of timing. "So when we can drink?" we ask, the day before. "We don't know yet." Day of election: "When can we drink?" "We don't know yet" Another time before a Buddhist holiday. "You guys open tomorrow?" "We don't know."

• This one always amuses us. Go to a fast-food restaurant, or any resto really by yourself and you order a  meal. The server will put up a one-finger question and ask you to confirm that it is one order. This happens all the time. I can imagine going to buy a washing machine and being asked if I want one.

• In a country with more than its fair share of beautiful women with warm, rich brown, practically flawless skin, the business of skin whitening products is massive. Go along any street and you will see specialist shops ready to promise lighter skin. Go to the Watsons or Boots drug stores and the first products you see are shelves and shelves of skin whitening lotions and creams. You also notice how any girl with a lot of makeup will have lighter facial skin than her arms or legs. Appalling, really. Apparently, Thai men prefer girls with white skin. In fact, there are a lot of naturally white-skin Thai girls, but the dark brown skin of Isaan girls sends foreigners into ecstasy. Me too.

• The 3G Apple iPhone has just gone up in price at MBK electronics supermall, by about 2500 to 3000 baht to an astronomical 25,000 to 27,000 baht ($860 to $930 Cdn) for an 8 gig. Last May I saw them for 22,000 to 24,000. Also worth noting is the fact that the phone can be broken by a software fix now (as of New Year's), as opposed to the troublesome double SIM, which unlocked the phone. The mobile provider's regular SIM fits over a film-like wafer with embedded circuitry and the pair is inserted into the SIM slot, or tray, in the Apple's case. Now you can just slide any GSM SIM into the tray and presto. Unlocked and ready to SMS.

Insect world keeps you hopping in Southeast Asia

I was watching dozens of ants devour a wrapped sweet. Guess somehow the wrapping got busted and the ants, never missing a chance at sugar, invaded. Only it was on the shelf of a major grocery store. You can't escape the animal kingdom in the tropics.

It reminded me of this topic I've been meaning to write.  My first experience of the burgeoning tropical insect world was in Siem Reap, Cambodia, home of the fabulous Angkor Wat set of temples. It was my first time in Southeast Asia, in 2004.  I was sitting in an open-air restaurant and enjoying a rather wonderful pasta meal in the evening. I remember having to intercept numerous insect dive bombers. OK, this was Cambodia and we're not far from the jungle so the area is teeming with life. But the incident did teach me that we -- humans and animals -- are in a competition for food.

Back to the practical . . . Do you wonder why Thai people have outdoor kitchens? As you will have noted in my earlier post on my apartment with its balcony kitchen, the sink and garbage pail are outside, where you want to keep the vermin.

Inside, you must clean up thoroughly and make sure you don't drop any food bits, especially sweet bits. Keep as much as possible in the fridge. Any juice or soft drink bottles really need to be rinsed. I also rinse empty packages. Clean refuse goes in the container on the balcony and any late-night food containers go in the main garbage pail down the hallway.

One day I spotted a couple of ant scouts on my small kitchen counter, indoors, and remembered that I forgot to wipe down the table of an inadvertent minor spill. No problem but you can't be, shall we say, a slob because you are going to have all kinds of visitors in the kitchen. So there's no point in sealing up the kitchen indoors; it won't keep out the critters. So this stuff is kept outside.

If you are in a hotel room and bring back food, do not leave half-eaten food or any scraps on the night table. Always take the refuse to the hall garbage container. I learned this lesson  once when I left a half eaten sweet on the room writing table. In the morning it was swarming with red ants, which also got into my laptop computer because there were food bits within the keyboard keys. What a mess. I opened the computer, sprayed it with insecticide, got a bag from the cleaning lady and put the computer in it and sprayed inside the bag and sealed it. I was leaving that day and put the bagged computer in another bag and carried it that way to the next city. Ants were dead at the end of the trip.

An equally interesting experience is eating outdoors in the markets, street stalls and food courts. I'll keep this to a minimal description . . . it's nothing to see a  cockroach crawling along a bar top, or a giant one skittering along the street at night, or rats at the street curb darting out for food scraps in the middle of the day. You just watch for a moment or step aside and carry on.