Fried Fish and Bats

Its all about the food. Baguettes smeared with Laughing Cow cheese, grilled chicken, tiny tomatoes, long slices of cucumber and carrot, chilis, topped with Dipping for Chicken. Searching for real "Cafe Lao" and trying to explain that we want the kind with real sweetened condensed milk in the bottom. Why is this so difficult? It never was this difficult before. Is it just that there are so many falang now that we just get what they think we should have? It is preverse logic. The night food market is down a grimy alley lined with long tables, precarious benches that kill your knees, and portable barbeques with smoke from slabs of organ meats, chicken and fish. We point to a crispy fish that the woman puts back on the grill to heat up and eat it with a side of khao niaw, fresh spring rolls, and a bottle of Beer Lao. Yesterday it was pho at a table across the way from our guesthouse. A big bowl of fresh noodles on top of chopped veggies, cilantro and mint, peanuts and hot broth. We eat with chopsticks and spoons looking across the table at a bowl of congealed blood squares, an option to add that we decline. I finally found a fruit shake without added sugar and salt. Now I know to ask them to leave these out.



This morning we walked through the local morning vegetable market. Fresh long beans, water cress, mustard greens, unfamiliar herbs and suddenly it turns sinister; bowls of small crawling crickets, individual servings of worms on their own banana leaf, ready for packaging, and then there is a cat stretched out that looks vaguely like a regular housecatbut is really a small ocelot. It is an expensive item that draws interest but no buyers. Rounding the corner there are shallow pans of slithering live eel, gasping fish neatly laid in rows on a table next to one huge grouper-like behemoth, a cluster of live bats are struggling to get away, and the cooked bodies of small birds and rats finish out the bizzare foods section. We hurry by, on our way to coffee, clutching our can of condensed milk and trying not to linger except to buy 2 limes and a bunch of the tiny bananas that taste like heaven.



Its been one of those Traveller Tummy days.