Miss:  Fresh, Delicious “Street Food”.  I mentioned a lot of food when I was writing about the people I will miss.  It may seem that all I do is eat.  However, I have actually been able to LOSE more than 20 pounds in my time living in this country.   This is a combination of hitting the gym regularly for 3 years and also avoiding western foods (except for the occasional cheat).  When I first got here, I started drinking a lot of Coke and Fanta and eating Snickers (familiar foods).  I also had no bike and didn’t really know how or what to order, so I ate mostly Pad See Ew (saucy fried noodles) from the lady in the restaurant downstairs (in Songkhla) or Mu Ping (pork on a stick) from the man I passed on my way home.  When I moved to Hat Yai, I bought a hot plate and started making pasta at home a lot.  Then I made the change.  I was wasting money on terrible food.  Time to start eating like the Thais (sort of).

I’m not an adventurous eater.   I find dishes I like in particular restaurants and then go to those places for that specific food.  I am certainly going to miss the perfectly sized portions of food here (that I strongly feel have assisted in my weight loss) and being able to eat cheaply and well.  A meal that has been prepared just for me (like in a sit-down restaurant back home) but more quickly than fast food and at a mere fraction of the price.  Chicken and rice, sweet and sour pork, crispy chicken with lime sauce,  chicken with garlic and vegetables,  pad see ew with yellow noodles….  And every now and then I treat myself to some kanom krok for dessert.  A delicious and perfectly sweet coconut and rice milk pudding that is baked in a cast iron pan with half-dollar sized divots.   Look it up.

I am actually somewhat fearful of going back to the land of obesity and stacking and so much processed food.  I just hope that being aware of it and having that mentality at the forefront  of my mind will help prevent me from falling back into old habits.  Although… I am still likely to eat my body weight in cheese when I get home.

 

Won’t Miss: Weird snacks/food and smells.  Thailand is always a melange of odors.  However, there are a couple that rise above all others.  Durian is an obvious one, for anyone who is familiar with this pungent fruit.  It is banned in most hotels and on minivans and such.  It smells like hot, wet garbage.  Apparently, it tastes good, but I really couldn’t taste anything over the smell when I tried it.  The other scent is dried fish/squid.  This has to be the worst thing I have ever smelled.  And, unfortunately, it is a popular snack here.  They wheel around carts of dried squid hanging like clothes on a laundry line.  You can smell them coming from a block away, and the odor lingers long after they depart.  I also have a woman who lives behind me who dries fish in the sun pretty much daily.  So, at some point every day, I have to contend with it wafting up into my room…

As for other bizarre (or, I guess, different) snack preferences, things tend to lean toward seafood (everywhere, very popular pizza topping), seaweed, hot dog (but referred to as “sausage”), salad cream, spicy everything and… corn.  Back home, it is an ingredient. Or even a standalone vegetable.  Here, it is a flavor, like, in milk. Or something you can buy on the side of the road, on the cob or as “sweet corn” which means they put it in a cup and drown it in butter and sweetened condensed milk.  And the funny thing is that I have never even seen corn growing in this country.

Side Note:  I haven’t ever had to eat anything strange here.  If I don’t like the look of it, I politely decline (or feign a food allergy).  I know a lot of people seek out the weird stuff, like scorpions and grubs and snake blood.  But, I don’t feel that not ingesting those things is something I am ever going to look back on and regret.  I did voluntarily eat fried frog legs.  Tasted like chicken.  But I couldn’t get past the fact that it was still on the bone and most definitely a frog leg and NOT chicken.  Maybe if it had been off the bone or cooked into something…