Search and you will find.
No need, in fact, to search. Just take a walk in Thailand and chances are you’ll find a market.
Fresh and local. The equivalent but down-home and just-how-it’s-always-been version of the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Saturday farmer’s market.
I walked today, along the beach, then up a road down which we must have traveled from the airport last night. No clues that I would find:
A market setting up. Food and “stuff.”
Different sections, like different farmers or local areas set up in separate places, but all forming one big whole. A very clean market, if muddy from the intermittent rain squalls.
As always, you chat about food and even with the language barrier, there is communication.
I learn the yellow chickens are actually from a certain hen and a certain egg and have thick and tougher skins. That’s what I think I heard, at least.
For lunch eat five hard-boiled quail eggs deep fried in fish batter: 20Bht.
Followed by yellow fish curry wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf: 20Bht.
Then some little “sweets,” recommended by a young woman customer. They looked like marzipan fruit but seemed to have gelatin round them and inside, she said, soy paste: 20Bht.
Bought a little plastic package of salad for 30Bht that I may eat this evening. Did she say banana or paw-paw flowers in it? Not sure. (I did eat it for dinner. Thinly sliced limes. Nuts of sorts giving crunch. Gentle spicing. Don’t know what banana or paw-paw flowers taste like, so none the wiser.)
Time to thank Qatar Air for the canceled flight, I reckon, for this added taste or Thailand, literal and figurative.
The market, so much nicer to eat at than brekker this morning at this Nai Yang Resort hotel where little on the buffet appealed and I had the first fruit in Thailand that I didn’t bother to eat after the initial taste told me it wasn’t fresh and seasonal or ripe when picked.
Good to have time to spend processing, taking notes at my computer. Things get lost so quickly. Good things. From the memory bank. Nice to record what one feels of value to make a note of.
© Wanda Hennig 2016, story and photos.
