Woo!

I am always on the lookout for new, inexpensive, and delicious places to eat. My guesthouse is located right off a main tourist street, which means I am surrounded by a plethora of very western feeling bars and restaurants. Pretty much any direction I turn, I have to walk for a good 5 minutes to get into more authentic and Thai parts of town. And these bars and restaurants all serve food, the only problem is that it is wayyy too expensive. You sit down, speak to the employees in English and order off an English only menu, only to pay 3 or 4 times what you would pay for pad thai at a stand in the market. (I can't speak to the quality, I've never actually sat down at a place like this.)

Anyways, the basic Thai 'restaurant' is very different than this. It is usually nothing more than a little stand set up on the side of the street, with maybe 6 or 7 folding tables set up around it, surrounded by little plastics stools. It is typically run by a family, only serves maybe 5 or 6 things (if that many), and usually has the menu posted on the side of the stand in Thai. If I am lucky, they might have a grimy, laminated English menu they can fish out of some cabinet for me, but usually I just get by on pointing and my slowly increasing level of basic Thai food vocabulary. They will have a big jug filled with ice water and a basket of plastic cups, feel free to help yourself. Its quick, hot, cheap, and almost always delicious.

So I am surrounded by all these western restaurants serving expensive western food. (To be fair to them, most any western food I have seen here is expensive. But the corresponding Thai food they serve is also way overpriced, so my pocketbook and my 2 month native snobbery help me to bypass these more convenient options.) Because of this, I am always on the lookout for a new stand somewhere near my place that I can try out. A few weeks ago I found one relatively close that serves what has become my favorite meal here, fried garlic pork on rice. I have been there half a dozen times since then, always getting the same thing. I have slowly evolved from pointing at the menu to ordering in Thai ('mu gatiam,' literally 'garlic pork' - only nouns for me, I haven't quite graduated to complete sentences yet), and I was beginning to suspect that the old lady that runs the stand was recognizing me. And finally tonight, it happened! I walked up behind a Thai on a moterbike who was waiting for his food to go. She was busy preparing something, but as she looked up, she saw me, smiled, and said, "Sawadee kaa, mu gatiam?" ('Hello, garlic pork?") I smiled huge back at her, told her yes, thank you and sat down at a table. :)

People ask me all the time how long I plan on staying, and I usually tell them I don't have any idea. A year has always been my standard answer, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I want to stay her long enough so that it feels like I live here, and not just like I'm on vacation. That could be 6 months, a year, 2 years, 10 years - who knows. I just don't want this to feel like a long trip, as even my 4 months in Australia studying abroad did. And though I'm struggling more than I thought I would to find work, and I'm not living where I will be for the majority of my time here, and my life here still seems rather transient, tonight still felt good. It may have been a very small thing, but it still meant a lot. To have enough of a routine, to be enough of a permanent fixture to be recognized by a sweet old street vendor may not be much, but it does allow me to feel like I'm slowing carving out a niche in this country. Or at least to be semi justified in turning my nose up at the tourists I walk past every day who are paying too much to eat food they could find back home. :)

TPWWLT - Lil' Rob - 'Summer Nights'