The girls and I bid goodbye to the island of Koh Chang (aka, dreamy paradise land) and boarded the bus to Bangkok which would drive through the night and drop us all off where my sister had called home for the past 4 month; the itty bitty town of Phichit. It didn't look like much around 3 AM but the sunrise quickly brought me to my senses. Consensus? It's adorable. Day one was spent recuperating from my travels while the girls taught - but of course I bolted upstairs to see a classroom of cuties during their "milk bread" the second I got the text. Um...imagine dozens of little Thai kids just hanging out, drinking cartons of milk. Dy....ing. It was so adorable. After class was over, it was really time to crack down and see the highlight reel of Phichit. The girls would all be leaving for America at the end of the week and needed to hit their favorite spots just one more time and we had a lot of cram in. I was only so happy to agree.
So that's what happened that week. I wandered around the grassy grounds of the school, peeking into banana laden wheelbarrows while the girls taught, then we would snag the rusty bikes parked under the trees and wave at all the locals as we rode into town, determined to eat as much food as possible. We stopped at roadside stands and slurped up "yellow noodles", finishing them off with scoops of ice cream before shopping for dozens and dozens of socks (my favorite pair I purchased is adorned with dragonfruits. I adore dragonfruits). There were several 7-11 runs made (purchasing 5 Baht candies, these ice cream cones I was infatuated with in China and to snag bottles of chocolate milk and containers of the microwaveable lava cake. Sevey is life). Restaurants serving plates of cashew chicken and lemon chicken encircled by fried kale were devoured. We peeked into shops and stalls, searched through flea markets and wandered our way through vendors selling piles of old sweat shirts, mingled with stalls laden with fried bananas, next to creaking tables piled high with mysterious to me soups sold in bags. I love it here.
The bike ride into town was both cute and a bit rough in the heat, though I'm told December is the nicest month to visit Thailand - we whizzed past the little roundabout, chatting about life in Thailand while pointing out favorite haunts while locals shouted out "hellos". Just cute, cute, cute. The real obsession though for me was the cocoa and the Pad Thai. And the roti. And just all the food in Thailand, but I digress. I'd heard about the magic of cocoa from Laura for months and was just itching to get my hands on a bag of the stuff. I drank my weight of that stuff in a very short amount of time. Embarrassing? Nope. I even made the mistake/excellent life choice to start the day off with both a bag of cocoa AND a bag of Thai tea. It must have amounted to about a full can and a half worth of sweetened condensed milk and I downed both. Ah...and I digress again Onto cocoa: It's rich - a velvety chocolate that's bitter and biting, mellowed out by the silky and sweet condensed milk that is stacked in pyramids at every reputable establishment. There's a splash of evaporated milk too that adds a creaminess, all poured over ice. It's yummmm.
And to make things even better, the best cocoa place is right across the street from *the best* Pad Thai in Thailand. I didn't even need to take a bite before falling in love. Someday I'll speak as fondly about a person than I do about this Pad Thai. Possibly.
It's the classic Asian situation where rickety plastic chairs surround rickety plastic tables and you walk in, and the cute lady at the wok just smiles and nods before cracking eggs expertly into the fired steel rim. Rice noodles are tossed in along with a range of other ingredients, all quickly stirred together into a steaming mass and divided up onto plates. Top liberally with crunchy and fresh bean sprouts, douse in a squeeze of lime and sprinkle with crushed peanuts. Unreal. Wash it down with a chilled Thai Tea and be sad that nothing else you could ever purchase or make will be as good as the Pad Thai here. Needless to say, we went many times before hitting up the 7-11 on the way home again, before stopping off to get roti.
Trust me, there was more things going on besides eating...but not much. The girls and I would stay up late in the evenings, talking and laughing and attempting to put off the inevitable task of packing. Oh and the kidsssssssss. I loved them oh so much after only one week and watching the teachers say goodbye only brought memories of the sob-fest which happened after a semester in China. But who wants to read about that? (If you do, check out this post and get tissues) but we are all here to hear about more food. So onto the roti. Again, a favorite I'd been hearing about and I wasn't shy about ordering. Round 1 and I got 4 of these beauties and ate myself sick. It's a thin dough, slapped and rounded out till paper thin before sizzling in a liberal pool of bubbling fat on a flattop — the start of something good. The edges get folded in, crisping up in the fat before it is flipped and drizzled liberally with sweetened and condensed milk. Fold up in a wrapper that starts to bleed a lovely oil sheen before you can even get your hands on it, then take a bite. It's crunchy, sweet, toasty warm and leaves a lip-gloss shine behind and I obviously was too infatuated to take a proper picture of it. Oh well.
It's a good thing there was a lot of biking involved this week, because there sure was a lot of eating.
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