Food for Thought

Mexican or Thai food? When I went to China I decided that Mexicans came from the Chinese. Many similarities. But after being in Thailand I am convinced that Thais and Mexicans are almost one and the same.  Sweet, generous people, with an ingrained resistance to saying no, an almost masochistic penchant for extremely spicy food and many similar tastes. I bought a bag of delicious tamarind balls rolled in salt, sugar and chili, just like the tamarindos we eat in Mexico. I saw women selling quince with chili and salt. What more evidence do you want.  You give up? The picture above is of cochinita pibil, the best I've had so far, at restaurant Azul y Oro at the campus of the National University in Mexico City.

Fried goodness. These little balls are crunchy outside and gummy inside and a little sweet.

Oodles of noodles. Siem Reap market, Cambodia.

Classic Chiang Mai curried noodles. The broth has turmeric and the noodles are both soft and crunchy. Like in Pozole, you can add your condiments: coconut milk, squeeze of lime, fiery chili, banana, shallots, fish sauce and pickled something. Delicious, although I ordered everything not too spicy. Which brings me to the problem of total lack of nuance when a foreigner asks for not too spicy, which a Thai interprets as no spice whatsoever. I could never communicate that I can tolerate a little spice. It was all or nothing.

More fried goodness. I could subsist on spring rolls.

In the market in Siem Reap you could see this gorgeous freshness...

...or fried tarantulas. To this day, I choose to think they are only for show. We also saw humongous fried cicadas, silkworms, and barbecued snake on a skewer, no doubt seasoned to perfection.

At the excellent La Noria in Siem Reap (the town next to Angkor Wat), we had a tasting menu of Cambodian food. The first course was green papaya salad, much milder than the Thai version, summer rolls and banana flower salad. Who knew bananas had flowers and you could eat them? A very delicate taste. By the way, the best bananas I ever had, I had in Cambodia. Incredibly flavorful, sweet and a little tart.

Second course was the two most famous national dishes, Amok, the subtle and elegant fish green curry, steamed in banana leaf, and a delicious beef stew. The third dish was a pedestrian chicken with cashews.

Dessert was passion fruit sorbet, warm coconut, coconut jelly and some other green jelly made of an exotic plant. They like gelatinous deserts. This meal, together with two fresh fruit juices, set us back $15 each.  Super expensive for Cambodia.

I don't know what is worse. This, or this:

 Though the name is genius. Either a blend between a pizza and a quesadilla, or a pesadilla, which is Spanish for nightmare.

In Siam

I'm not going to find out what they actually serve in the restaurant above.

Talk about sensory overload! Just looking at all the Bangkok street food makes your head spin. There is so much food that looks so good, and some that looks so beautiful and strange, and some that just looks strange, that I actually believe I'm going to lose weight because I get sated just by looking at it.

Beautiful and strange food.

Just strange.

There are hordes of people out here, in certain places, less Thais than all kinds of foreigners, most of whom I have nothing to do with except for the fact that we are tourists. There are certain male specimens that exemplify European colonialist degradation to such an extent that someone should embalm them (alive, if possible) and put them in The Museum of the Appalling.  Have you ever seen Diego Rivera's depictions of deformed, depraved, syphilitic Spanish conquerors? Like that, but three dimensional, alive and thoroughly repulsive. Then there are their more enlightened brethren, who come here looking for Nirvana and they seem to be solemnly serious about it (they also seem to be following my diet of looking at food only). Then there are the backpackers. I backpacked back in the Pleistocene period, and it is amazing to me that people still have not figured out it's a royal pain in the ass. But there is an entire street dedicated to backpackers and their cheap ways and it is one of the tackiest streets I have ever seen, so their sense of superiority somehow seems misguided.
Among the backpackers of both sexes are those that distinguish themselves by dreadlocking their hair into massive, impenetrable beehives. They walk around with elongated necks, like Nefertiti, super proud of their updos, which I'm afraid serve as youth hostels for bats and other creatures.
Instead of their pictures, here are some pictures of beautiful places in Bangkok:

There are many Israeli travel agencies that advertise themselves with huge signs in Hebrew, and this somehow feels perfectly at home with the surrounding alphabets: Thai, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese. Latin script is not the be all and end all, you know. As for the Thais, they are mostly very gracious and pleasant, if rather inscrutable.

As in any underdeveloped country, there is no shortage of polite misinformation, taxis whose meters  decide to stop cooperating, in cahoots with the driver, etc. You would have to be a virgin tourist to confuse a tout with a friendly host, but here they take touting to another level. In fact, in the Olympics of touts, Thai touts would be gold medalists because they make the extra effort: they tell elaborate and quite convincing lies. To be honest, if it wasn't for our detestable Lonely Planet guide, I probably would have behaved like a virgin myself. (My gripes with Lonely Planet are legion, but just to name a couple: 1. They send you to places that are not there. 2. I defy anyone to make sense of the way they number their maps. If you find number 24, or number 85, which is right next to number 13, for instance, I'll erect a statue in your honor).
Bangkok is huge and spread out and doesn't make a lot of sense, with incredible temples and humongous shopping malls, but a river runs through it and I keep imagining what it must have been like in the 30s, when there were no eyesores, and you could run into Sam Spade, or Mata Hari, as you shivered from malaria and typhoid, at the veranda of the Hotel Colonial.

Mata Hari would not be caught dead in this modern monstrosity

They did not preserve much of the old buildings, which is a shame.  But what Bangkok lacks on finesse, it makes up with moxie.  What you see on the street can take an almost hallucinatory character, and I mean that as the highest praise.

Amulet market.

Someone else's dentures for sale.

Greetings from Bangkok!

Well, we finally made it after a cancelled flight, that was actually a non ordeal, as Delta rebooked us for the next day on a better, shorter flight and on a Tokyo-Bangkok segment on business class, (which came on really handy after seating for 12 hours on coach). So no kvetching from me on the weather delays. Plenty of kvetching is to be had on the discombobulating effects of a 12 hour time change, though. But were it not for the fact that yesterday night at 3 am I had lunch cravings, I wouldn't have had a very good pad thai and fried rice with seafood on the street. Yes, I admit, I was chicken and did not go for a mysterious boiling clay pot everyone else was eating, but I did not want to court fate so soon into our arrival. The Chang beer, however, tasted like heaven in a bottle.
At first glance, Bangkok seems to me like a crazy amalgam of Acapulco, China, Caracas, Pino Suarez street in Mexico City, and Blade Runner except with whores and little bars on the sidewalk, and taxis in shocking pink hues. Granted, we've only seen the immediacy of our lovely hotel in Sukhumvit, but that's what it looks like. Acapulco in it's heyday never saw these many tourists from really every corner of the globe (that's the Blade Runner part). Lots of the requisite fat, old and ugly Western guys trolling for beautiful Thai women (and they are beautiful, even when they are men).  So today we are venturing out and about and we will keep you posted. 

Cholesterol Blues

 Darlings! I'm in no mood. I have just been informed by my doctor that my cholesterol is through the roof.  243 and the bad one is 170, an increase of 35 points (?) since last year.  I feel strangely proud of these impressive numbers. They sound positively Olympic.
Until recently, I was certain that cholesterol was a malady invented by gringos in order to ruin the pleasures of those of us sybarites who actually live to eat instead of eating to live. As you know, I'm a voluptuous eater, but I don't eat junk food, I barely eat red meat (could that Dumont cheeseburger last weekend have spiked the count?), etc.
But one thing is for sure. I am getting on in years and this is genetic. I'm pretty sure it comes from my mom's side of the family. My mom had heart disease (although not cholesterol driven). My grandpa Samuel had a stroke (big eater of kishka and kreplach and the like), and my Tía Clara, who started doing yoga 50 years ago, when the only yogi anybody knew of was Yogi Bear, and who was supposedly a vegetarian, my poor Tía Clara died of devastating heart disease. At the end of her life, her heart was working at 25% of its capacity, and she hung in there for a long, difficult time. This despite the fact that she taught yoga for about 40 years and she was the most relaxed person in a family of intense people.
These circumstances have led me to revise my conspiracy theories on cholesterol. BUT. The doctor has another thing coming if she thinks I'm gonna go to Mexico in November and eat alfalfa sprouts.
The silver lining is, I need to lose weight anyway. The plan is to eat alfalfa sprouts and the like until November 25 (which nicely coincides with the time that I need to look extra svelte) and then, carnitas del mercado de Medellín, here I come!
The doctor immediately wanted to prescribe drugs to lower the cholesterol. Not so fast, I said. I am extremely wary of drugs that take one thing away and then leave you with a host of other ailments. So I will heroically try to reduce the Olympic numbers without drugs first.
With all due respect, so much for the Mediterranean diet. I spent the entire Summer in that area of the world (Provence, then Israel, then Jordan), and look what happened. Then let me blame Hugo Chavez. The last part of the Summer I spent in Caracas, eating more fried yucca than should be legal.

I'm bummed out.

Lead Me Not Into Temptation

                                               Bagalehs, they call them.

                                                     Bread with Zaatar.

                                                    Halvah Central.

           
                                  Something called Jerusalem Kugel.

Food Fetish

                               Middle Eastern food at Druze village, the Golan Heights.
 

                      Tabouleh and Almond Mint Water at Suzannah, Tel Aviv.

                          Freshest fried calamari ever at Abu Christos, Acco.

Amazing Couscous Complet at Dr. Shakshuka, Jaffa. Here we also had the creamiest, richest, Tahini ever.

              Gooey, sugar coma inducing Baklavas at Carmel Shuk, Tel Aviv.

                                    Te im Nana (mint tea),  Natanya.

               Apple Strudel at the Austrian Hospice, Old City, Jerusalem.