I just ate my first mango in Thailand. It's among the foods I was most exited to try upon my arrival but I've been putting it off because it is not yet the prime mango season and I wanted to wait until my first bite would be perfect. There are street vendors all over the place who sell sliced fruit from a cart but I have yet to see one selling mango that isn't still yellow. I like my mango a deep orange in color.
I've been here one week now to the day and my digestive system is beginning to adapt to the food here. On my third day here I got very sick for about 12 hours and it took as long to recover, but I'm making a point not to let that one bad experience scare me away from the food culture here.
A big part of the food culture here is street food. My first time walking down the street I was struck by a number of things. First of all was the heat. It's intense and persistent and I don't know that I'll ever entirely get used to it. Second there were the smells. Some of them good, some of them not so pleasant, but all of them quite strong to my sophomoric nostrils. The comingling of exhaust, pork and chicken being fried or cooked on a grill right on the sidewalk, hot asphault and the occasional addition of some sort of waste product or another all wafting into the air at once creating pockets of sensory experience. Due to the ubiquity of street vendors setting up shop on the sidewalks, along with various other obstacles, walking down the street is a more involved activity than it is back in the States. Many curbs are quite steep and it is necessary to walk back and forth between the sidewalk and the edge of the street where many motorbikes are parked and others are zipping by in order to make headway. Suffice it to say that the streets of Khon Kaen are not handicapped friendly.
Before I ever set foot on the streets of Khon Kaen I was getting a ride from the airport to the apartment that I share with Lindsay (my girlfriend) and I was struck by the look and layout of the city. Old decrepit buildings and modern architecture comingled seemingly at random. Immense banner ads like you'd see on Broadway right next to motorbike parking for a street market. Khon Kaen has the appearance of the unfinished process of worlds colliding. East and West, modern and ancient; developing constantly. In the heart of downtown there are beautiful Buddhist temples and an enormous mall more modern and cosmopolitan than anything in Eugene. A relatively small number of locals speak more than a few words of English, but so far I've found that it's usually possible to communicate simple ideas like the exchange of goods for money even without a shared language. That being said I have begun to pick up some basic phrases in Thai, and I hope and expect to learn more as I go.
