Psssssst! Friend,

I have started posts for this blog several times over the last several months, but I never finished them...I just couldn't process all that was happening well enough to break it down here, and I ended up walking away. I might still post some Thai-ish / SE Asia related posts here from time to time, but after five months (eak!) of being back in the States and basking in all things America and home, it is time to draw the sades on this window for a while. Occasionally I still have flashes from my Thai life: mornings when I wake-up expecting to see the wat on the peak beyond the lychee farm outside my window; my phone rings and I hope it is P-Aoh about lunch; the sun shines gloriously and I think "What an excellent day for a motorbike ride to Doi Tung". Sometimes I could swear I can smell the pineapples... I miss my friends, I miss my students, I miss the colors and the noise, and the heat and the smells.

I miss them, but I don't dwell on it--there are too many exciting and wonderful things happening here.


Because I am no longer a farang or far away from home, it doesn't feel appropriate to write my daily posts here anymore. I have moved my blogging activities back to my old blog space: Capricious Scrawl. I know at this point I have been on hiatus for so long that you probably don't believe I will blog there either, but keep faith! I have posted several times over the last month or so about random bits of personal news and awesomeness, and I am getting back into the swing of it. Please join me over there!


Thank you to everyone from home who cared enough to check-up on me during my time away, as well as all of the new friends and loved ones I acquired in the process. I can never express how much your presence, prayers, and love made and make all of the difference to me.


Until we meet again, I remain your rammbling, wandering friend...

Sawaat-dee-ka.


Theresa

Burma VJ

 I am interested to see Burma VJ, Anders Østergaardʼs documentary billed as a rare glimpse inside Myanmar (Burma) during the 2007 uprising.  This is the series of protests in which the Burmese Buddhist monks took to the streets with the people to protest the current regime -- something rarely done...as in never.  Foreign news correspondents were banned , the Internet was shut down, and  no one was allowed in or out of the country as the government tried to squelch the protesters ( This was the point where my mom and Dad were going "YOU ARE MOVING WHERE IN NORTHERN THAILAND, which is HOW FAR FROM THE MYANMAR BOARDER?!?" ).  The movie is made of a compilation of underground footage smuggled out of the country and will hopefully raise additional awareness about Burmese life under the current regime.  It will open in DC in Landmark E-Street on July 31.  Who wants to come?

Bring on the Moo! A New Memorial Day Thai Recipe Favorite: Yum Woon Sein (Spicy Noodle Salad)

Raised in a house where the food All-Stars were chicken, salad, whole grain bread, and fresh fruit, adjusting to the rice and pork diet of Thailand was bit of a shock.  I didn't get sick off Thai food (That's right! Never.) but the amount of pig in my Thai diet was a big change because, apart from the occasional tender loin on high feast days, my family never ate pork. Rarely exposed to piggey dishes growing up, I never learned to crave the taste and didn't think I was missing much.  Oh, how much we learn when living abroad.

In Thailand pork ground and sliced, grilled, boiled, stir-fried and deep fried is king of the kitchen.  Unless you go into the Muslim neighborhoods or speak Thai, I promise that you are going to eat pork and you will like it.  I ordered chicken (gai) for a while, but the Thais aren't always big on removing bones from the chicken dishes.  Call me a priss, but I am not huge on gnawing or choking on bones while eating and the pork dishes are usually de-boned.  Nice.  I was sold and started to compile a list of pork favorites like pork fried rice (pad cow moo), pan fried egg noodles with pork (pad se yuu moo), pork waterfall (is the literal translation for nam tok moo, this cold spicy dish made with cilantro, lime juice, and fish sauce. My favorite!), pork curry soup with egg noodles (calsoy moo) ,  fried pork (moo toadd), spicy noodle salad (yum woon sein), etc.

Whenever we would Yum Woon Sein P-Ao would remind me that it is a preferred Thai diet food due to the great taste, high amount of fresh herbs, and "low fat"of the dish (and maybe a gentle hint to lay off the imported M&M's?). I always wondered about the "low fat" of Thai pork or really most cooked foods.  Can something be low fat when fried or sauteed with oil, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and doused in nam prik (a combination of chili sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce)? My questions usually got me some silly farang looks, and after a while I stopped asked questions because:

1. It was always delicious and I wanted my Thai friends to continue to feed me.
2. I was losing weight eating only Thai food.  Why question the Thai diet when it was obviously working and making me feel sue-oy (pretty) ier than ever?

Pork it is!  Anyway. Why the ramble about pork?

Today was the first day that I had any real appetite since falling ill on the 17th (Welcome home to NOVA Theresa! Care for some plague?), and there was only one thing I wanted to eat: Yum Woon Sein.  Nothing else looked or sounded remotely appetizing.  

The problem was that I wasn't exactly sure how to make it. In Thailand food is so cheap that I would go down the street, plop myself in a shop, order whatever I wanted, and watch some fabulous Thai Mae make it to perfection for the bargain cost of 35-70 THB ($1-2USD).  It was convenient but lazy of me, and consequently I never learned how to make a number of my favorite dishes.  Ao is the only person I ever observed make this dish and I never exactly got around to asking her to teach me.   Soy mi? (Unlucky?) Yes, but no reason to despair.   A quick search for "Cold spicy pork noodle salad, Thai" on Google gave me a large listing of results to sort through.  Many of them were  American-Thai infusion (translation: crap with directions like "Blend in peanut butter".  Seriously?) which I quickly ignored, but after rooting around I found a recipe that sounded familiar.  I used this as a template to recreate Ao's  Yum Woon Sein.  I think that the ingredients from the original recipe are OK, but the quantities looked off so I tasted everything as I made it.  The end result was a bowl of Yum Woon Sein that looked and tasted close to the real deal. I think even P-Ao would give me a thumbs up for deliciousness if not authenticity.  I will be making this again for sure.  In case you are feeling adventurous the recipe is below.  Everything is ala franag cooking style measurements.

Ahroy! Gin cow! (Delicious! Eat!)

Enjoy!

Sorry for the crappy picture.  My poor Power Shot SD is had a melt down once I reached the US.  I am pretty sure it has to do with culture shock.  Anyway, all of the shots are blurred no matter the setting....sigh.

Yum Woon Sein

Yum Woon Sein or spicy noodle salad (with pork) is a colorful and easy dish that can be served warm, at room temperature or chilled.  If made with the authentic amount of spice, this is one of those dishes that you can usually count on to clear your sinuses; however, if you are unused to spicy food you can easily reserve the chili as a side garnish. 

Ingredients:

¼ bag soaked glass noodles broken into 3-inch pieces

3 cups water

¼ -½ pound minced pork depending on your taste (I have also had this with shrimp)

1-4 wood ear mushroom chopped into small chunks or other varieties of mushroom thinly sliced.

3 stalks of sliced shallot

2 cloves of sliced garlic

Two large handfuls of chopped cilantro (one for boiling & one for garnish)

1/2 sliced tomato

1 fresh juiced lime or 1 1/2 tbs from concentrate

½ tbs fish sauce

1 tsp sugar

1-3 chopped small green chili, bird's eye or 1 Tbs dried red chili flakes (to taste)

 

Directions:

1.    Set noodles to soak in cold water for 15 minutes.

2.    Slice mushrooms and set aside.

3.    Slice and combine shallots and tomato.  Set aside.

4.    Chop well and combine garlic and 1 handful of cilantro. Mix with ground pork.

5.    Bring water to a boil in a small pot.  Add prepared pork mixture and mushrooms. Simmer for about 3 minutes, until pork is cooked and the broth is fragrant.

6.    Add noodles into the mixture and cook 6-8 minutes.

7.    Remove pot from the heat.  Reserve 4 tbs of broth from the pot and set aside.

8.    Strain and transfer pork, mushroom, and glass noodle mixture into a large bowl.

9.    Combine reserved broth, fish sauce, lime juice, shallots, tomatoes, chilies and sugar, and add to noodle mixture.

10. Garnish with remaining cilantro.

Nam Tok + Nok Yai ...sanook Mai? Chi! Chi!

We hired our old pal the sungtow driver (same guy who drove Ao & me to Puh Chee Fah) to take us everywhere. This was very exciting.

First stop was the ostrich farm!

To ride the ostriches!

Only Ane could make this look adorable.

Khun Kon waterfall is usually deserted. I have never hiked up to the falls and passed more than one or two other people, but with the week declared a national holiday (read all schools/work places closed due to violence in Bangkok) the park was flooded with Thai families enjoying the weather.
I warned Ane that once we got north she would get the OMG there is a farang! stare. Don't you just love these faces?

Songkran on Wheels with the Wee Ones

One of the most enjoyable ways to play Songkran is to douse friends and strangers from the back of a truck at 50mph. People load up their trucks with gallons and gallons of water, buckets for flinging, and as many family and friends as you can squish in. Many people go all day. 6 hours of perpetual water in the face is great fun, but it is a bit too much for the really small children. Most wee ones stay at home and play Songkran in their neighborhoods, but they don't like to see their older brothers and sisters drive off without them. On the third day of the festival we loaded up the truck and took the little kids, ages 4 - 6, through some of the back roads. They were so freaking excited.

Sunni & May watch the truck as the truck is loaded up with water

All of these bins were filled to the brim with water

Narwah was cracking us up with his bucket hat

May, Sunni, and "P-Annah" ready to go

Rachel has no tolerence for water in the eyes

1 minute into our trucking adventure

Happy exhausted little girl

Songkran in Chiang Mai

Every year in mid April the entire country celebrates their traditional new year. Songkran has all of the things westerners would associate with a new year celebration: drinking, no work, family, drunken things you would rather forget...and then the Thai take it up a notch in awesomeness. Instead of a concentrated night of merriment in the form of a countdown or private parties, the Thais take to the streets and go a merry kind of bananas in every city, town, and village of the the kingdom and fling water on each other...for three days and three nights (more is they choose to)! Songkran becomes the mother of all water fights and it is impressive...most impressive.

Water is a very important element in Thai culture due to agriculture and...human existence, but it is also a symbol of Buddhist cleansing and renewal. If you go into the wats or the homes of Buddhist Thai during Songkran you will probably witness some of the Songkran rituals: cleansing of the Buddha, gentle sprinkling of water on elders as a tribute of respect and blessing, tying of strings, application of white paste to ward off evil, and offerings at the temples.

Thais will tell you that the best place to "play Songkran" is in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city. What makes Chiang Mai such a fantastic place for the festival is that the center of the old city center is surrounded by a mote filled with.....WATER! With a constant source of water to douse your neighbor with, there is no need to play anywhere else. The streets are filled with cars, people, and water flying in every direction. There is no way to avoid the water and excitement, and you shouldn't try. I wasn't in Thailand for the festival in '08 and wanted to experience Chiang Mai first hand, so after a nice neighborhood warm up with the kids (which I don't have the pictures from. BLAST!) Aneliz and I hopped a bus to CM to check out the festival for ourselves. When we asked a local where the best place to join the celebration was and she told us to walk one block over to "the madness".

Ane's first tuk-tuk ride

Even though my Thai friends assured me that the government cleaned the mote right before the festival, Aneliz and I did not find the gasoline shine, trash, and dead fish particularly reassuring. While we discussed whether or not we felt OK about dumping filthy water on complete strangers, a group of Thai men came over and nailed us in the face. We were much less restrained after that...

You can see the craziness on the left bank of the mote. See the people hauling water out of the mote with sand buckets attached to twine? Ane and I each bough a bucket...we also each dropped them into the mote; luckily several young Thai guys jumped in and retrieved them for us (after they stopped laughing) so that we could keep playing. The right bank and bridges are rimmed with food vendors and people watching "the madness".

The streets were packed with people, cars, motorbikes, musicians, and dancers.

Too much fun!

After a few hours we took a break for some lunch on the right bank.

I hooked Ane up with some kai-geow moo sop and we made friends with a little boy who had a fish ( read minnow) in his bucket.

And then he screamed at the fish in the bucket.

It looks like it poured, but that is all water that people dumped on others. The entire city looked like this.

We dipped out in the late afternoon to celebrate the rest of the festival with my Thailand family & friends in Chiang Rai.

Wan Pascha gap Wat gap Suah Sea Deng. Oh my!

I am so behind in my final Thailand recaps/posts that you have probably stopped checking my blog. I would have. I'm so sorry! If you are still curious about what I was doing in April read on...

Tickets to Thailand don't come cheap in the best of financial times. When you take the cost of a R/T ticket and throw in the fact that the 12 hour time difference between Thailand and the US will mean a whole day of vacay zapped in transit, 18 hours on an airplane, at least a week of jet lag on each end, and...damn, I'm not sure I would want to visit me. So I was over the moon when Ane emailed me her flight confirmation saying she would join me for Easter/my last full week in Thailand/Somgkran. Since she was only going to be in country for 7 days we didn't have time to go all over. I suppose we could have zoomed, but rushing is counter to most Thai actions and probably would have been thwarted by various transportation/infomation/monitary mishaps. Everything shuts down for the three days of Songkran, so we (I mean Ane) needed to pick a location for the festival and stick to it: north or south? Mountains or beaches? We settled on a loose itinerary between Bangkok and Chiang Rai.

The best way to kick a 12-hour jump forward is to crash early and get going early so after a lovely breakfast at our fantastic hotel, I took Ane to Mo Chit and the JJ Market. JJ is a maze of shops which is only open on the weekends. It is the shopping destination of choice for farang and Thai alike on the weekend because they sell anything you could want (and a lot of what you never knew you wanted) for super low prices: ceramics, art work, clothing, pets, jewelry, electronics, shoes, light fixtures, furniture....on and on. We had been there about an hour when the skies opened; luckily we had made friends with a vendor and he got us a sweet discount on a lovely umbrella.

Whoah, scary hair McGee.

We took the time under our umbrella to 1) take this loooooovely photo 2) agree that we were hungry 3) set our sites on some street noodles and somtom for lunch and 4) confirm plans with Thai Sarah for the evening at The Dome, a super ritzy restaurant/bar located on the 64th floor of State Tower. There is a dress code the prices rival pricier spots in Washington D.C., but it is well worth the expense and ear pops. Trust me, the views offered by The Dome unrivaled by any other skyscraper bar in the city. My non panorama photos don't do the view justice. There are some nicer pics on their website.

Nice, yes?

Thai Sarah and I met on a palace tour in Seoul while I was visiting Gracie for New Year. Sarah works in Bangkok and I was luck enough to spend a couple evening with her when I passed through Bangkok.

The next day was Easter (Rejoice! He has risen!). We had tickets home to Chiang Rai that night, so after a beautiful English mass at the Assumption Cathedral (side note: we leaned that "Easter" in Thai is "wan Pascha"), we made the obligatory visits to the royal palace (complete with creepy guide) and Wat Po. I had been to both the palace and Wat Po several times (luckily they are fascinating and never get old) and they are always busy, but with Thai New Year only one day away they were positively hopping.

Ane did her best to keep the evil spirits away from the palace gates.

Wat Pho was gearing up for Songkran.

I still haven't figured out what the sand towers represent exactly, but they are some sort of offering for the New Year.

Wiped out from the heat and jet lag, we headed back to our hotel via Siam Square, and were just in time to catch the beginnings of the 3-day Red Shirt riot.

Yes, that would be a TANK in the middle of Bangkok's shopping district. Picture one rolling into the middle of Time Square "just in case"...freaky? Yes.

So what was happening? Oh, just that wonderful mess called politics that I am not at all qualified to review or summarize, so of course I am going to give it a shot:

The Red Shirts, also called the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, are supporters of the former Prime Minister Thaksin. Thaksin was accused of various corrupt acts and removed from office in the bloodless coupe of 2006. The Supreme Court (yes bigot, they have one) sentenced him to 2 years in prison, but Thaksin did not return to Thailand for his trail and is currently living in exile. The country remains deeply divided between those who support or condemn him. This division became internationally visible in the most recent series of violent anti-government protests where from self-imposed exile, Thaksin rallied his supporters and spurred the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (Red Shirt) protests of April 2009.

Like I said...messy. The Bangkok transit, police, and army were jumping to action just as we arrived by shutting down the Sky Train (BTS), surrounding streets, rolling in the tanks, and clearing pedestrians from the area. Unsure where to go except for away from the action, we dipped into Siam Square, bought some lunch, and followed the Thai through the back streets to our hotel. It was a bit unnerving to maneuver though throngs of angry, confused, and cheering protesters, tourists, police and locals, but we got out of there quickly (dripping with sweat) but no worse for the wear. We even had a Thai officer ask us if we were OK and apologise for the "embarrassing inconvenience" of his country.

With all that extra time spent making our way through/around the protest we had just enough time to grab a quick bite and our bags before beginning our migration north for Songkran...