“Be careful of roadside food stalls,” my Thai teacher told me on the day we learned the Thai word for “diarrhea”. “The exhaust from all the cars driving by can make the food dirty.” This was what was going through my mind as we pulled up to the roadside milk stall on the first day of my trip.
It was almost 1 am, I’d just completed the grueling 24 hours of travel required to get to Chiang Mai from Wisconsin, and my friends had kindly waited for me at the airport for several hours while I navigated customs. I had offered to buy a round of drinks to celebrate my return to Thailand, but when they suggested “nom rawn” (hot milk), I said “excuse me, it’s been a long plane ride, I must have misunderstood you.” But I did not, and off we went into the hot, muggy, 90 degree night to get hot milk. Right off the plane. As with most of my adventures in Thailand, I might not always understand what’s going on, but I’m happy to be included.
My goal was to be able to read Thai by my second trip to the country, and although I really doubted after 24 hours of travel I could read in any language, I successfully read my first menu in Thai. It was also the easiest menu I could have read, basically just milk.
Anticlimactically, the milk was just okay and it didn’t make me sick. Was it what I would have chosen given the time of day, the plane ride, and the current heat index? No. But it was fine.
Another odd food that I wasn’t expecting to be offered was fried larvae. I didn’t get a picture, but they looked exactly like big old larvae that had fallen into a deep fryer. Crunchy, absolutely fried to blazes. As I hesitated over them, my friend thought I wasn’t sure what they were, so she told me in English, “Those are worms!” That was when I decided that my vegetarian diet (today) does not include fried insects.