Pronounced: z�i ji�n
Means: Good-bye! :(

One month after my birthday, I got the best birthday present ever…a chance to attend a one-day cooking class at the “Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School.” This was the first cookery school of its kind to open in Chiang Mai…and I’d have a hard time understanding how any of the schools that have opened since could compete. Sompon Nabnian (and his British wife) are the owners of the school…he’s a world renowned celebrity chef who has even done cooking shows for BBC and National Geographic. He has eight assistants, some of whom have already attended cooking school before coming to work for him, and all of whom undergo a special training course (over a year) under his supervision. The school offer five days of courses (with five different menus to prepare), but our schedule for the week only left one day open for me to attend.

The price of the class includes transportation, teaching, all ingredients, meals (you eat what you prepare), beverages, and a cookbook (with pretty colored pictures) including the recipes from all five days of courses. It also has detailed lists of what you can substitute when ingredients aren’t available in your neck of the woods. For example, if you can’t find any palm sugar in Canada – you can simply substitute some maple syrup or brown sugar.

The menu for my course included:
(morning)
Chicken in Coconut Milk Soup (Tom Kha Gai) – one of our favorites!
Red Curry with Fish (Gaeng Phed Plaa)
Fried Mixed Mushrooms with Baby Corn (Phad Hed Ruam Khao Pod Om)
Fried Big Noodles with Thick Sauce and Pork (Raad Nah Muu)

(afternoon)
Papaya Salad (Som Tam)
Steamed Banana Cake (Khanom Kluay)

We started off the morning with a market tour led by the assistant chefs – An and Piim. They showed us the most essential ingredients for Thai cooking, explaining for us the differences between coconut cream and coconut milk, the different types of basil, different kinds of rice, and lots of other stuff. Then we took about a 20 minute drive into the countryside to Sompon’s home, where he has a special area set up for the cooking classes. They also have classes at his restaurant in town, The Wok, but I thought it would be more fun to go out of town and see a little bit of the countryside.

The flow of the class was like this. We would go into an air conditioned demonstration room, where the assistants (and later Sompon) would show us how to make the dish. Then we’d head out to our individual cooking stations and prepare it ourselves. I was surprised at how quickly most of the dishes were cooked! Of course, it helped that most of the ingredients were already prepped for us – fish was sliced, papaya was grated, etc. After we finished cooking each dish, we’d take it over to the dining area and eat our results. It was awesome! For our third and fourth dishes (the red curry and the mushroom stirfry), Sompon himself was on hand to do the teaching.

All of the teachers were great – very professional, relaxed, and seemed to be having a great time. Each of them had their own style for the demonstrations and made lots of jokes throughout. One of my favorites was that every time we used garlic or chilis, they would use the flat side their giant knives (like a cleaver) to smash the ingredient on the cutting board. They’d say something like…”Now for the garlic…Kill it!” SMACK…down went the flat side of the knife. “No Mercy!” BAM BAM…then they’d pound a fist onto the flat of the knife to smash the ingredient even more. I guess you kind of had to be there, but it was really funny.

They were also always joking around about the garnishes added to the food after preparation. One teacher said, “How much you pay for this bowl of Tom Kha Gai? 10 Baht?” Then he stuck the garnish on it and said, “Ah…there we go. Beautiful…Now, you can charge more. 300 Baht!” Sompon also had this great bit about curry that illustrated perfectly why Joel and I love Thai food so much:
…so many curries, so little time!!!

Class went from 10 am – 4 pm…and it felt like we did far more eating than cooking, though I’ve definitely picked up lots of tips to improve my own Thai experimentation. I can’t wait till I locate a wet market in Tianjin and see if I can find the ingredients there so that I can try out my new cooking skills on Joel. I wish my sister Shauna, friend Kelly, and Joel’s mom could’ve joined me for the day, since they all like to cook Thai food too. I was SO full after the class that I couldn’t even eat dinner. I took lots of photos, so everyone can see what it was like…including photos of my own personal creations. Well, all except for the banana cake. It was so yummy that I finished it off before I even remembered that I should take a picture…oops. :D So much good cooking, eating, and laughing made for a great experience and wonderful day…one I’d highly recommend for anyone else passing through Chiang Mai. I wish I could take all five days of classes…and if we ever make it back to Chiang Mai again, maybe I’ll get the chance!

This one’s for mom. It was an epic battle between mind and stomach. The mind won, but just barely.

We met a wonderful lady named Maya who works at the hotel. She has a beautiful daughter and lots of free time, so she enjoys talking with us in the lobby. I asked her about the bugs, and if they are just a gimmick for dumb tourists. She said the big bugs are from western Thailand, and people in the north don’t eat those very much. Northern Thais prefer the bamboo worms, and she especially likes ant eggs, which are in season right now.

This market was way better than the first night. The “night bazaar” was almost entirely tourists. This market had some tourists, but was mostly Thais, and it was several blocks packed. It had way more variety and interesting stuff, bigger crowds, better prices, better food, more buskers (not sure that they were better)… it was the “Sunday Market.”

Also, the Thailand photo gallery is up! We’ll update it as we go.

This place is crawling with mzungus. We saw more white people in our first hour here than in our last 6 months in Taiwan.

I can see why this is such a tourist friendly place. Our hotel is really nice, and cheaper than that dingy motel we stayed at one night in Nowhere, Texas when our ’77 Nova broke down. We spent all day yesterday walking around Chiang Mai and basically doing the tourist thing. It seems more relaxing here – not as crowded, things seem to move a bit slower (relative to Yonghe). We’ll get some photos up when we get a better internet connection.

The tourist thing is honestly kind of boring. Street markets designed for tourists for some reason turn me off a bit, I don’t know why. It seems like it’s “not as real” or something… I don’t know what that means, or if it’s even fair… oh well. But since we’re here early to do some visa stuff, no one else from the conference is here that we know of and we’re sort of on our own, at the mercy of the tourist industry… which is pretty big here. It’s easy to get around and find stuff, but not half as interesting when you don’t have local friends.

Jessica is off at a Thai cooking class today, I’m getting some work done (visas, etc.) and reading. Next time we’ll have some photos up that we took yesterday and today.

Well, we made it to Chiang Mai. We found curry, asap. But we’re really tired after pulling an all-nighter packing so we’re going to bed early.

Leaving is no fun – it’s always rushed: the packing and getting everything in order, but also the last moments with friends and all the things you want to say and moments you want to savour. I’m beginning to wonder if this will be a recurring theme in our lives… though I sure hope we get the packing part down before we have kids!

Mingdaw, Yang Mama, Zhi-ling, Wang Ge, Mu Shi and Gong-zhu (‘Princess’) came with us to the airport at 5am to see us off. We’re really going to miss them! We already do.

We’re in the mall at an internet cafe. When we figure out where the wireless connections are we’ll put up pictures, as we have a few small Thailand adventures planned. But tonight it’s just showers and bed.

ps – Chou-chou and Fire Chicken are now Mingdaw’s… I’m sure Doo-doo is thrilled.

Lǎo Zhào took us out tonight for dinner at a friend’s restaurant. His family’s restaurant is halfway between our apartment and work, so over the year we had some fun hanging out, exchanging gifts, learning má jiàng, sharing food, and stuff. In this video clip we were talking about going to China where the national standard Mandarin is the “common speech” (普通话) a.k.a. Beijing Mandarin (北京话). Taiwan’s “National Language” (國語) has a different accent, and our Taiwan friends sometimes like to poke fun at the Beijing accent, which drowns the end of every word in an “r” sound. The sentence Lǎo Zhào uses as an example near the end is 你是美女, which means “You are a beautiful woman.”

The restaurant was noisy, so you have to lean in to hear him, but mostly we put this video up because it’s a nice example of what Lǎo Zhào is like. We’ll miss this guy.
 

After vaccinations in the morning and teaching in the afternoon, Mingdaw took us out on a long planned night market trip. This particular night market – 迪化街夜市 – is called a 年貨大街 right now (I hope I got that right; don’t know how to translate it though) because it majors in Chinese New Year stuff – it’s where everyone goes to get their supplies, and it was probably the liveliest and funnest night market we’ve visited. One big bonus was that almost all the vendors offer free samples of whatever it is they’re selling. It was completely packed with people. I was having so much fun inflicting Mingdaw with my horrible Chinglish while sampling everything in sight that I forgot to take pictures of all of us together (argh!). But we had a great time. The picture of the lady on the left is for mom… she’s selling pi pa fruit, the stuff in that black Chinese cough syrup. I’m not sure what everything was that we ate, but it included jerky, dried fruit, cookies, hot sauce, dried minnows, various drinks (herbal, ginger, wine), dried squid, a special stuffed fried thing whose name is only in Taiwanese, wine sausage, candied strawberries on a stick, and dinner included some really tasty “thick ox tail soup.”

We had to cut our time short because 公主 got lost and left a voice mail saying she was returning to the parking lot early. Since Mingdaw had to pick up Shannon from work, we got out at the CKS Memorial Park and had a nice romantic walk before taking the MRT (subway) home. There are three buildings (National Concert Hall, National Theatre, and the CKS Memorial Hall), surrounded by a park with trees and ponds with big colourful fish, which we couldn’t really see because it was dark. But the paths are lit nicely for a walk after dark. Below are the Memorial Hall (with the moon, the streaky airplane, and Taipei 101) and the Concert Hall. I took these photos with a hand-held point-and-shoot camera on “Indoor” setting.
See a short 13 second video clip from the night market entrance here.
 

Saying goodbye sucks. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time doing it.

Today we had to have two different goodbye sessions. The first was with the church where we taught the adult English class during most of 2006. I was glad they gave us minute to speak (with a translator) because they really have been like a big family to us this year, with all kinds of people going out of their way to make us feel welcome in Taiwan and seeing that we were taken care of. It was good to get to thank everyone, and enjoyable to search the crowd and deliberately make eye contact with specific people at the right time. Maybe I just liked being able to look over a crowd and see so many faces that are no longer strangers, people we can greet warmly by name and with whom we have some great shared memories. Cé-méi even made us goodbye card!

Then tonight some friends came over, most of whom were on that New Year’s trip to Wulai hot springs. Jessica cooked enchiladas for everyone, and then we played má jiàng. Surely we must be the first people ever in Taiwan to combine má jiàng with Mexican food. I was surprised at how they seemed to like it. I have yet to see Mexican anything here (according to one of our students: “Oh, Taiwan has Mexican food! T.G.I.Friday’s!”).

They ended the evening with a dinosaur picture (their suggestion), which I’ll post as soon as Wén-dí e-mails it to me. Here’s the first one.

It’s hard to say goodbye, and weird. We just got here a year ago. Now it’s like, “See you ‘later.’ We’re off to some place we’ve never been and don’t have specific plans beyond the immediate future. Good thing there’s Skype. Maybe next time we talk we won’t have to use any English!” Ugh. It’s too bad we can’t celebrate time together without having to end it. Maybe it’s a shadow and sunshine kind of thing.

Before I can tell you, our Western friends and family, about how and why I ended up in a giant walk-in refrigerator at 1:00 am tonight digging through mountains of garbage bags and sifting through cat litter, you need to know some basics about garbage collection in Taipei.

If that hook is just too good for you to pass up, click the truck.

 

We always have fun hanging out with the young adults. And it often involves great food, too. They took us out tonight to a hot pot restaurant that specializes in mutton, but of course has all the usual hot pot stuff, from seafood (shrimp, crab, squid) to dofu and tempura, vegetables, beef, and pork. And you get to mix your own sauces (big bonus for me)! And it’s all you can eat, and we were there for I think over three hours.

On the right is a picture of Kě-xīn and Jessica, who’s sucking the marrow out of a leg bone with a straw. We also had squid heads for the first time… I’m not sure if I was supposed to eat those. I thought it was a little octopus with really big eyes, until someone passed me a couple headless bodies. Oh well – tasted good.

In addition to having a blast with a really fun crowd, we also get to try as much Mandarin as we can (more opportunity than we get at work, where the pressures of running the school don’t make time for many impromptu Mandarin lessons). And our friends seem to enjoy playing Mandarin teacher. We’re so thankful they tolerate our constant stream of, “[new word] 是什麼?” We’re going to miss these guys – and fun, warm, and caring bunch.