Waiter! There’s an ant in my soup!
May my hair sweep the floor as I bow low in apology for the above bad post title.
While I was in Kalasin province, we went out to what my hosts described as the “Temple on the Mountain”. The temple is a massive Buddhist complex near the Laotian border, with a mountaintop spire that’s Statue of Liberty tall. We were there on a holiday, and the place was packed. The most interesting visitors? Thai and Laotian teenagers on either mod style Vespas or chromed out choppers looking every bit Anarchy in the U.K. and paying their respects to the temple. No matter how much of a rebel you are in Thailand, you don’t rebel against either the King or Buddha.
More on my trip to the temple in another post, as I still haven’t edited all the images from that visit. This is about the post-temple meal, which we ate on a little raised platform at a restaurant on the road to the temple. Just like Disneyland in Anaheim, there’s a road of businesses that have sprung up to catch the temple traffic. There were two different open air markets at the temple itself, in the parking lot, with vendors selling food, but it was not good food - also just like Disneyland. The whole time we ate our meal, an adorable little pig was wandering around the platform, hoping for scraps.
above - that’s us all enjoying the meal. The meal consisted of sticky rice, two green papaya salads, a deliciously sweet barbecued chicken and a fish and ant soup that I’m going to go on a bit about. The rice we ate was brought from home - it’s normal practice to bring your own rice with you, especially if you’re going out for the day. The little baskets that people carry rice in often have shoulder straps, or an attachment for shoulder straps.
First order of business - way in the back, behind Danoi’s (the fellow in the yellow shirt) knee is a little dispenser for toilet paper, which here is mainly used as disposable napkins - few bathrooms in Thailand have toilet paper in them at all, but it’s commonly found at the dinner table. Second order of business - the chicken. The chicken was really good, and was eaten wrapped in lettuce leaves with either a hot or a sweet-hot sauce. The taco is a universal concept, I tell you.
above - Ole hoists his whiskey high. Everybody loves this stuff. There were little stands on the road to the temple that sold another locally brewed brand, but the boys brought their own from Kalasin. I got the impression that the local stuff was brewed out of people’s home, unlike the Kalasin stuff, which comes from a factory somewhere.
above - the highlight of the meal, the fish and ant soup. Imagine the best Thai fish soup you’ve ever had in the states, add 50% more savoriness to it, add fresh river fish and then top the whole thing off with spicy ants and larvae that pop in your mouth like salmon roe. The ants were all white and had little red dots for eyes. Totally different fellows than the annoying and tiny bastards who are always waging war on my kitchen at home. I got lucky and got half the head of the fish and the tail, the meat was just amazingly tender and delicious. I must have eaten a half dozen little bowls of this stuff and I felt like a bit of a glutton.
