Amazing Lunch
Posted by Stuart at 12:50 PM on April 13, 2003This morning, while it was still (surprisingly) cool, Nat and I walked out behind his house. After about 50 meters, past the duck pen and around a small pond we came to the rice fields. In a few months these fields will be full of water and growing rice, but for now cattle graze on the dry grass.
The air quickly heated up, and we spent time sitting under a his sister's house next door. The house, copied a thousand times throughout SE Asia is a simple wooden affair raised off the ground on stilts. Underneath the house is the "living area" where people rest and sit and chat and eat and play games. So we sat shoeless with his family on a straw mat on a wooden platform about one foot off the ground. Nat's family (as well as everyone in the village) actually speaks Lao instead of Thai, so of course I didn't understand any of the conversation, but I listened anyway.
Then all of a sudden out of nowhere it seemed, breakfast appeared. Or was it lunch? I lost all track of time in the village and the fact that every meal is the same didn't help me keep track of the hours. The menu was three pork dishes: mu tod (fried pork), mu graprow (pork with basil and green beans) and mu nam man hoy (pork with oyster sauce and vegetables). Again, words can not describe how good this food tasted. It probably cost less than 100 baht (US$2.50) to feed 3 children and Nat and myself, but in a Thai restaurant in the US the exact same dishes would have been at least 1200 baht (US$30). In any case, whatever the price, the food was absolutely amazing.
