Adventures in Cheese

Homemade dairy products can be a lot of fun (and tasty) as well as provide for some interesting learning experiences. Take for instance, this page from one of my chapters in living in Thailand. My roomie, Michael, and I stand over the results from my latest batch of homemade yogurt, which has yielded something quite unexpected.

“What is it dude?” He asks.

“I dunno. Smell it.” I respond.

“Smells ok.”

“Yea, smells ok.”

“I dunno. It could be the start of some really awesome cheese or some really funky yogurt.”

“I guess we should taste it.”

“Ok, you first.”
(tasting)

“Tastes like cheese. Here.”

(tasting)

“That’s some pretty good cheese. It tastes like it’d be really good on pasta.”

Now, I should explain that these are Mongolian-style dairy products. Michael had spent a month living and learning on a dairy farm in Mongolia, and he taught me all he knows about making homemade yogurt and cheese, etc. Well, in Mongolia, they don’t have refrigerators and they don’t have the same appreciation for the appearance / presentation of food as we Westerners do. I’m sure the process of making Western dairy is quite different than what we do in our Thai kitchen. So be forewarned, the pictures you are about to view aren’t as appealing as a nice, tasty block of European cheese.

I should also explain that I go to great lengths to find and buy only organic dairy in Thailand. There is only one brand available, and it is quite good. So I can proudly say that the cheese I make is organic cheese!

So since my pictures of cheese may not be all that appealing or appetizing, then feast your eyes on this! Here is another creation from my Thai kitchen: stuffed french toast. Since maple syrup is hard to come by, I've had to resort to other options to french up my toast.

Option #1: blueberry yogurt, slices of banana, and drizzle with honey (banana not pictured - the photographer was hungry!)

Option #2: Gourmet raspberry jelly, topped with a handful of chocolate chips

I'll open the discussion board to my readers now: what looks and sounds more delicious? Blueberry/banana french toast or chocolate raspberry french toast? Think about it, and I invite you to try the recipes at home!

Finding Nemo

Can you find Nemo in the photo...?

I took advantage of my ‘new Friday’ on a Tuesday routine and left work at 10:30am on a van bound for Bangkok. For lunch: a delicious tomato soup with vegetables at a nice western café. Errand for the day: stop at a bank for some transactions. I filled in my ticket with the date 8/22/2554 (Thai Buddhist calendar year is 2554) and was surprised when the teller changed the date to 8/23/2554. Huh, I thought, I’ve been living in the past! So I quickly made a mental note to write my parents that night to wish them a belated happy anniversary! Happy anniversary mom and dad! I’ll go ahead and dedicate this blog to many more happy and healthy years!

Next on my Tuesday agenda, a real treat: Ocean World at Siam Paragon.

Siam Paragon is a large and very ritzy mall in Bangkok. It is a gorgeous mall with lots of great eateries, Thai traditional art galleries, hordes of in-vogue shopping boutiques, and a Lamborghini dealership on the fourth floor! In the basement of the mall-megaplex is Ocean World, the largest aquarium in Thailand.

NOTE for my teacher friends: The price charged to Farang (foreigners) is 1000 Baht, but if you show your work permit, they let you in at the Thai price of 380 Baht.

I was very impressed with the look and feel of this aquarium. I’d have to say it beats the aquarium in Denver, CO, and rivals the aquarium in Melbourne, Australia. The place was massive and the many different tanks were thoughtfully displayed. Each display also featured an informative write-up about the fish or creature with fun facts, etc., in both Thai and English. The aquarium was divided into three main zones: Deep Reef, Rainforest, and Open Ocean. The open ocean is where you want to go if you want to see sharks up close and personal!

At many of the exhibits, a staff member was equipped with a microphone and was explaining the exhibit in Thai, followed by an English translation. The English spoken was actually very good! I was impressed.

My favorite fish was the paraya. These small guys have some wicked looking teeth. All the better to eat their source of food: piranhas. You gotta be tough to hunt piranha! And yet, the paraya are harmless to humans.

Also in the mix, I got to see the water rats and sea otter feedings. Both were very cute. The sea otters have been trained to play fetch with balls tossed into the water before they earn their dinner! Very entertaining!

Then, the main attraction: I got to see two divers enter the Open Ocean tanks with a cage full of food. Piece by piece, they retrieved portions of meat to feed directly to the sharks! Is it bravery or foolishness? I’m not sure, but it was fun to watch! (and no one got hurt!) Oh- it was also pretty neat to hear the Jaws theme music played over the PA system throughout the shark feeding. That movie and the composer will forever live in association with sharks, the world over!

Returning to my town, about 45 minutes away on the van ride again, the evening was capped with wonderful food and camaraderie at a teacher party. This was held at the nicest seafood restaurant in town, which is situated right above the banks of the town river, providing for a very nice view of the sunset over the water. The Thai teachers all sang karaoke (they love their karaoke here!), and myself and my foreign co-teachers all enjoyed the evening. Nothing like seafood after spending most of the day staring at fish swimming around! You look at the fish in tanks long enough, and they sort of start to look like food. These "pineapple fish" (that's the real name too) were just begging me to eat them!

Elephants and Tigers and Crocs, oh my!

My school delivered a nice surprise circa de Wednesday this week: there would be no school on Friday due to a district meeting for the teachers. I was invited to attend the meeting, provided I could understand the discussions solely in Thai, with no translation. So three day weekend!

First thing Friday morning, I was picked up by one of my Thai besties, Amonrat (Aom). I cooked us some breakfast burritos (black beans, guacamole, salsa, eggs, rice, homemade cheese, tortilla! Leftovers from home cooked burritos week). Aom took a few bites and handed me the leftovers, deciding it was not tasty. I’ve gotten used to the Thai’s we cook for just politely trying a few bites. I am pretty sure they are just used to Thai food and don’t like other tastes, but maybe I really am just a bad cook!

We drove about three hours to the beach in Chonburi province and met with my other Thai bestie Thanawat (Sam). Sam and Aom both work for the private hospital near my home. Sam had a training seminar at a nice hotel near the beach in Chonburi. We arrived in time to join him for the complimentary buffet lunch provided to attendees. I think they may have noticed me, the one white person at the buffet, but everyone was OK with it! After lunch, we traveled up to the Sriracha Tiger Zoo. The owner of the private hospital also owns the Tiger Zoo, among other businesses, and so had given Aom four VIP tickets for the weekend.

Our first stop in the Zoo was the elephant show. Man, those elephants sure do seem to have fun and enjoy performing! They danced, performed tricks, and even gave two brave volunteers an elephant massage! After the show, the elephants posed for pictures. If you walked by with a banana, they stole it right out of your hand!

Next was the crocodile show. Truly amazing and deadly creatures, we got to see their scary jaws open and snap shut more times than I’d like to remember. A muscular Thai man was the main trainer and he wrestled several crocs on the stage for performance. They actually don’t so much as wrestle them as they ‘hypnotize’ them. By rubbing the crocs snout with a stick, they were able to make the reptiles open their mouths and keep them open for several minutes. Long enough for the trainer’s to safely put their heads in the mouths! The other trainer was a small Thai girl, but she bravely and effectively battled those crocs. You know, just another day at work!

This part of the zoo was saddening, however, because the animals really seemed to be “living without souls.” They had been in captivity for so long that they had forgotten their dangerous nature. The stage was a big factor: it was a very slippery tile, preventing the crocs from easily running, much less walking across. If they moved, they would almost always automatically lose their footing and fall over themselves. Safe for the trainers of course, but we still felt for the crocs. Half of the reptiles did not even put up a fight or protest when the trainers dragged them around by their tails.

The next show, my favorite: tigers!

They were so much fun to watch. I wish I could post a video! They danced, jumped through hoops, rolled on the ground, and more.

Afterwards, we went to another area of the zoo and observed the young tiger cubs playing in their cages and then I took this picture with a baby cub! That is one cute cat! And the tiger cub is cute too :-)

Day Two: I volunteered to go on a school field trip to Ayutthaya for the day, and I really wasn’t sure what to expect. Ayutthaya is the old capitol of Thailand, before it was destroyed by Burmese invaders centuries ago, so I knew I could appreciate the historical sites. But students on a weekend day?!? Well the trip turned out to be great fun. All the teachers and students were loaded into double decker, air-conditioned buses: a comfortable way to ride! The students were well-behaved throughout and gave us teachers plenty of space! I got to see one of the royal palaces (outside and inside), a European-style temple, and a museum for one of the Royal Projects. Also took a ‘ski-lift’ ride across the river. Perhaps the best part of the trip was seeing my co-teachers dressed in normal clothes, outside of school, being silly and having normal people fun :-) It was a very nice trip and time well-spent.

Day Three: As I write, I am planning on heading to my favorite restaurant cafe in Bangkok for a pancake lunch and to type, type, type on my computer. Then home to clean house a bit and get ready for another week of classes.

Another great weekend!

Kanchanaburi

This is the name of a city and province near the Thai-Myanmar (Burma) border. The province has jungle mountains (ok, more like hills, but mountains for Thailand), a very nice town, and a famous national park. The highlight of the national park is a gorgeous seven stage waterfall. But I digress, let me start at the beginning…

We did not have any school on Friday because it was the Queen’s Birthday, which is also the day that the Thai people celebrate Mother’s Day. I sent my mother a nice email (if I don’t say so myself!) that describes the culture’s practice of giving a white flower garland to their mother’s on the special day. Earlier that week, some of my students asked what mother’s day was like in America: I described the importance of letting mother’s sleep in, then making them breakfast, and then letting them relax as much as possible!

My American friend, Nick, whom I’d met in Phuket for teacher training, came down to my town on Friday. Saturday morning, he and I met with my Thai friends, Thanawat and Amonrat, and drove with them up to Kanchanaburi province. The drive totaled about 4 hours, including about an hour of negotiating the famous Bangkok traffic.

The first sight to see is the “Death Railway,” which stretches across the River Kwai. I wish we did more investigation as to how it got its name...From there, we drove another 30 minutes to get into the national park. Some of my other English teacher friends were in the park as well, but they did not have use of a vehicle. Their trip from the town to the park took 2 hours by bus, so I was very happy to have my Thai friend’s with us when I heard about their long bus ride just to go what took us 30 minutes!

We spent some time taking pictures of the jungle covered hills as well as a large, scenic dam sight. This was where we paused to rest and gather some information from the tourist center. We briefly contemplated camping in the park, decided against it, and then drove back down the hills. Halfway down, we pulled over to swim in the River Kwai.

Back in the town, we had dinner with some of my English teacher friends then checked into the River Kwai Mansion. It was more of an apartment complex than a Mansion, but I was there on vacation and not to correct the mistaken translations to English, and the rooms were halfway decent. The next morning, we had Massaman curry, which was recently rated by CNN as the #1 food in the world. See here for the top 50 foods.

We returned to the national park and enjoyed a two hour hike up the seven stages of the waterfall. Each stage was a small waterfall drop-off that was spaced out by about 10 or 15 minutes hike before the next stage. The scenery was breath-taking. A dense, lush jungle with bird sounds, occasional monkey sightings, pretty water and sculpture-esque waterfalls. Another benefit: the majority of tourists where Thais enjoying the holiday. It’s nice not to see the country being enjoyed by just the white folk!

We swam and slid down a smooth boulder slide at stage number five, then had a “fish” foot massage at stage number six. What is a fish foot massage, you ask? Simply stick your feet in the water and find out! There is an interesting variety of fish that will come up to your feet and eat off the dead skin cells! Sounds gross and, ok, it is pretty gross. They bite only enough to take the top layer and do not ever break the skin to draw blood. It’s an all-natural exfoliation. And a very tingly one too boot! The massage is actually so popular that many spas in Bangkok have foot tank baths full of the fish and charge about six U.S. dollars for the service. Mine was free!

After hiking back down, we loaded into the car again and drove back to Samutsakhon. The drive, both there and back, consisted of jamming American pop music, discussing American rock music we didn’t like, and then swapping English words and sentence usage lessons for the same in Thai with our Thai friends. We all agreed that the road trip experience was as fun as the time in the park, but probably not as pretty after four hours sitting together in a little car!

Rescue at the Pool

I spent a summer in Thailand and, on fateful Sunday morning, I woke up with a goal to go for a swim. I headed to Bangkok with a devious plan to sneak into the swimming pool of an international hotel. The only thing better than swimming in an international hotel’s pool in the heat of summer, is not having to pay for it. Little did I know that my devious plan would become a miraculous case of: right place at the right time…

I cooled off in the water and began to swim laps, grateful that I had the entire pool to myself. About halfway through my swim routine, I noticed two Asian children come out in their swimsuits and goggles.

“Great,” I thought to myself. “Kids and no parents in site.” 

Their playing began to intensify and drift a little towards the deeper end of the pool. The pool actually does not get very deep, about 4 feet is all, but deeper than the kids are tall, and the slope has a very steep, sudden slope. I watch as the playing becomes a little rough and the boy climbs on top of his sister and she goes under.

“Wait a minute,” I think to myself, “are they still playing?”

The girl springs back up and gulps some air. Instinctively, my feet begin to carry me across the floor of the pool towards the scene.

“Looks playful, right?” my internal dialogue, continues. “She’s probably about to shove him off and maybe dunk him in return.”

The girl slips under water again. Her brother is talking in an Asian language and it’s difficult to judge if it’s a call for help. 

At this point I begin to move faster through the water towards them. I had been about fifteen feet away, and cross the distance quickly. I pause briefly, within reach, when the sister comes back up for air.

The girl goes back underwater without so much as an attempt to remove her brother. She comes up again and her open mouth takes in more water than air before her brother weighs her down. Time to act! I move again and grab both bodies, lifting them clear out of the water. I move towards the ladder in the shallow end where the girl can touch her feet back to the floor. She is gulping the fresh air, but the brother has his arms locked around her neck: not in a ‘death grip’ but in a ‘fight for life grip.’ I pry his arms open and lift him to sit on the pool edge. He must have taken in a lot of water too, because he starts to vomit.

The two siblings pull more air into their lungs and take some time to recover from what was certainly a horrific experience. I pat the sister’s back to help her cough. I’m actually still a little bit in shock and not certain the kids are happy with my action. The sister looks up finally and says, in a very cute accent: “thank you very much.” This confirms my earlier suspicions and the reality sets in.

“Yea,” I manage a reply. 

I ask them if they are OK and they nod. They are back to breathing normally and look to be recovered. I ask them where they are from and tell them to be careful. They are from Japan, they say. They thank me again and I get out of the pool to sit with my thoughts.

A few minutes later, the parents arrive on the scene. The kids tell mom and dad what has happened—in Japanese, but the body language says it all. Dad tells them to swim only in the short end from side to side, not across towards the deeper end. Mom comes over to me, smiling, and says “thank you, thank you!” We try to talk, but their English is not great. Dad goes into the pool with kids and begins an overdue swimming lesson.

The mom comes back later with an interpreter from the hotel. We talk and she again expresses her thanks. I tell them it was no problem and I was happy to help. She offers to buy me a beer or an orange juice but I tell her it’s not necessary. She says that her children are students in an international school in Japan and are taking English lessons. I joke and ask if they are taking swim lessons.

Word spreads fast and some more of the hotel staff arrive. They ask me to explain what happened and I oblige. Then the big question: “sir, may I ask what room you are staying in?”
“Actually, I just came here to swim today. But it’s a good thing I did!” I reply.

They smile and agree, and then the guest services manager asks if I will please enjoy a complimentary buffet lunch. Having seen the delicious food options before, that is an offer I can’t refuse!

The rest of the day I kept thinking about the situation. The parents were a few minutes away when the kids began to get into trouble. It was a very, very close call for the kids today, and I’m happy the winds blew me where I needed to be, sneaking into a hotel pool when I did. It’s a good thing that my plans for the weekend had already been blown off-course somewhat: I wanted to sneak into the international hotel on Saturday, but plans got shifted that Saturday morning. Had I already made my pool visit Saturday, I would not have been at the pool on Sunday! The world sometimes does work in mysterious ways, and sometimes directs us to the right place at the exact right time. 

As strange as it seems, I had a strong feeling on Saturday that something important would take place that weekend. When I began to make plans to swim on Saturday, I received several calls from a few friends inviting me to join them for the day. After I received the third call, I distinctly remember thinking: “maybe something important needs to happen today, that I go to another place rather than go swimming. I better go.” My trip to the Floating Market on Saturday ended up being a wonderful experience, but the true direction I had been pulled in, if we can believe it, was to arrange a more precise arrival at the pool on Sunday. I had been thinking the universe was trying to get me somewhere on Saturday, when it seems actually that the fateful push was more to get me somewhere else on Sunday.

To the hotel’s defense, there were several warning signs posted around the pool. Furthermore, No parent should EVER let children go to a pool unattended, at the very least, not to new pools where the children are not familiar with the depths and slope of the pool floor, and especially not in a foreign country with language barriers. The parents thought to let the children run ahead by a couple minutes would be OK, but look what can happen in a few minutes! The hotel brought out ice cream for the kids to make them feel better and shake the shock, which was a nice gesture. I told the hotel staff: “chocolate always makes me feel better,” and I proceeded to then eat a healthy amount of chocolate at the dessert bar of the buffet.