Eating yummy food and chilling with monks
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
1
119
166
Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Chiang Mai,
Thailand
Monday, February 11, 2008
After buying some veggies, herbs, noodles, and tofu at the market, we walked back to the restaurant, took off our shoes, sat down on a bamboo mat on the floor and started chopping vegetables. Once everything was chopped we heated up the woks and started cooking. Most of the dishes we made used the same basic stir-frying techniques, with minor changes in the ingredients of the sauces, sometimes the only difference being the addition of coconut milk at the end. Fish sauce is a major ingredients in Thai cooking, but is obviously not so vegetarian, but I learned that a decent substitute for it is mushroom sauce. I also learned that a massalam curry includes massala in addition to curry paste and panang curry includes cumin. In about 3 hours (including chopping time), we managed to make 12 different dishes. It was soooo much food! And it was all really, really good. Even with the help of the Canadian guy's Spanish friend, we weren't able to eat all of the goodies we made (though we made a valiant effort).
Another highlight in Chiang Mai was Monk Chat. A couple of the more progressive monasteries in the city set up time each afternoon for the monks to meet with tourists. Since monks take a vow of celibacy, most are so strict that they won't even talk to women to whom they are not related. These monks are able to talk to women, but can't touch any women or even take a pen passed by a woman. When I went to pass a pen to the monk Bronwyn and I were talking to, he had to remind me to set it on the table for him to pick up. Most of the monks at monk chat were in their early to mid-20s and had been monks since around 12 or 13. They're all very interested in improving their English and are happy to talk to people each day (though they did say that they don't all come every day and take a break from it some times). It was really interesting hearing about life in the monastery and learning a bit about Buddhism. These monks actually have a decently cushy life - they're each issued monastery-owned laptops and cell phones and sleep in pretty comfortable rooms instead of on bamboo mats on the floor as in some monasteries. Though the monks did get a bit bored when Bronwyn and I started talking to Paige, an American teaching English in Chiang Mai who spends every afternoon hanging out at monk chat and helping the guys with their English, and complained that we turned monk chat into farang (foreigner) chat. We ended up spending 2 hours there chatting with a few different monks.
Other than the cooking class and monk chat, most of my time in Chiang Mai was spent relaxing and hanging around town. The German girls and I went for cheap pedicures and facials one afternoon. I also visited the huge night market a couple of times, but wasn't interested in buying souvenirs so I wasn't too interested in hanging out in the throngs of tourists for too long.
Comments
I am drooling
This cooking class and food sounds wonderfull. I do hope that I will be able to sample some that you prepare back here in the USA. Perhaps you could even share some of what you learned.
Stewart