Just an addendum to Sarah’s last post really.
Details on the crab: It was fantasitic. I ordered it knowing pretty much only that it was crab and that it was prepared with curry.
I got a splendid whole crab cooked in curry sauce with vegies soaking around it in yet more curry sauce. And a side of rice.
It was amazingly good. I cannot tell you what kind of crab it was. It was much pointier than say dungeoness, it had much longer claws but was about the same size. It looked like it maked a living reaching into tiny bedrooms and stealing children.
I ate it with much gusto and mess (no little fork provided). I’m not sure if the thai stares I recieved where due to them being impressed with my west-coast technique or the horror of the carnage. Probably the latter.
A note on the food. Lonely planet apparently did a massive pole that found Thailand has the 4th best percieved food in the world. That seems high from what I’ve been eating, but not unreasonable. I don’t know if it’s the provincial nature of our island or what but I find very little blows my mind with goodness quite like I was expecting. Although if you stick to curries it seems you will get a very good meal every time. My theory that, accounting for variety, Victoria has the best food in the world stands.
The bike: I find it very… nice. I don’t find it entertaining. I must continually remind myself of that. Obviously if I found it entertaining it would become a source of entertainment and we all know how Laurence of Arabia died.
Never-the-less I find it very freeing to know that we can move about the island in a much less fettered fasion. And yes, Aunts and Mothers, I am religiously wearing a helmet. It’s actually an amusing conversation to have with people: “Yeah I wear one. I have a fair number of nurses in my family so I am constantly and vividly being made aware of the helmet’s value.”
A funny story that involves me not wearing my helmet (now that I have assured you all that this never happens): The houses here don’t have house numbers. I don’t know how or why but the idea of street signs and house numbers is a foreign one in this land. You would think something so simple and effective would have been taken up but it hasn’t. I am tempted to mail-order a huge stock of house numbers and just start affixing them to houses.
But anyway, because there are no house numbers the only way the guy who’s going to instal our statalite dish (mabey monday?) could know where we lived was to give one of us a ride out here and wait for us to point at a house. Craziness. It was very interesting being on the back of a thai-driven motor-scooter though. Very interesting.
I also got a new favorite shirt today. The art scene on the island is surprisingly vibrant! And not in a victoria colonial ‘aren’t my water-colours of the empress so pretty’ kind of way but in an energetic non-representational art kind of way.
So we’re walking down one of the more interesting un-named streets of Thongsala and there’s this artist selling t-shirt with his stuff on them. Quite a variety. Many bhudist themed works. I got this fantastic zen-inspired looking painting of a dragon contemplating the moon, or the sun. With a bunch of charaters down the side I can’t read. I picked it because I really liked the painting and it was the only non-black shirt he was selling. Tempting to start just buying art and hanging it about the house. Very tempting.
In other Sarah-broached news I have an appointment to meet up with some kite-boarding guys tomorrow. I’m sure I have instilled in them a sense of my keeness by constantly badgering them. Hopefully the wind will be servicable.
The fridge: Has less pineapple in it (pineapple is very good fresh it turns out) and has aquired some leftovers from yesterday’s lunch as well as some more fried fish things from the girl two doors down (actually now Sarah is eating the delicious smelling leftovers). There is also more bottled drinking water.
