June 6, 2010
Emily and I explored Nan on our own for the first time, without Aj. Prakop as our local tour guide/translator/cultural ambassador. On our way to the "mall" to buy go-phones, we stopped at a noodle stand for breakfast... only to realize that we had no idea what Thai people eat for breakfast, how to say any food words in Thai, and that since the vendors had not put any dishes out yet, we couldn't even point to things. After a solid 2 minutes of "Uhhh.. Um.. Uh.. Noodles?" a Thai man came up and asked in broken English if we wanted "something-something-something-chicken-something." We nodded and smiled (our go-to reply) and a few minutes later we were brought some kind of broth mixture with thick slippery noodles and a chicken drumstick plopped in the middle. Emily immediately started pushing the dark-brown tofu-looking blocks to the side of her bowl, saying she thought she knew what they were and didn't want to eat them.... I said "What are they?!" and feeling adventurous, took a big bite.
...Definitely NOT tofu. Definitely the food-like substance Emily saw on the Travel Channel. I've asked her to never describe it in detail.
After buying our phones and sim cards, we biked over to 7-11 to buy minutes. We spent about 20 minutes embracing our status as "farang," snapping pictures of Smirnoff Ice (BROS ICING BROS in Thai!), and funny looking Red Bull bottles. Next we explored a street market, but amidst the weird looking fruits and pungent smell of fish we didn't make any purchases.
We returned to the apartment to find that BOTH of us had managed to lock ourselves out of our air-conditioned bedrooms (this happened twice more that day... these doors are trickier than they appear). We sweltered in the heat for about an hour entertaining ourselves by reading "Culture Shock! Thailand" and the "Romance" section of Useful Thai Phrases... Prakop eventually stopped by to check on us and, in typical-Prakop fashion, came to our rescue. A little later we were out to lunch with her... we had delicious "chaa minnow" (something like sweet-chai iced tea), rice and noodles for about 80 cents. Seriously, foooooood is cheeeeeeap.
A few hours later, Anna and Nicole arrived! We helped them get settled before Prakop and her husband picked us up for dinner. Prakop's husband is a very sweet man of few words, and it's clear that Prakop wears the pants in the relationship. I still wonder if Prakop has kids of her own (if she does, she doesn't talk about them... but since she's in her 50s it's possible that they are grown and moved out...). We all went out to another hot pot style dinner, followed by a trip to Tesco Lotus (the European-Asian version of Costco, and my new best friend). We loaded up on floor mats, water bottles, yogurts, shower shoes...
hey! It's kinda like college all over again.
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