Wat pad thai -- Thailand II

Somehow, Karen and I got wrangled into chartering a tuk-tuk to take us around Bangkok. We saw Buddha after Buddha, and wat after wat. By mid afternoon, I had seen enough Thai temples and Buddha statues to last me an eternity. I was also hungry.

As we walked though one of the temples, passing through rows of what looked like monks' housing where the walls were painted a turqoise blue and saffron robes hung to dry, we came across the ubiquitous food carts and Thai folks on their lunch break eating in the sahde of a large tree.

The carts had noodles, chicken, more meats on sticks. I wondered how what the food was and how much English these people would know, and opted for something we knew: pad thai.

The noodles were delicious, probably the best pad thai I'd ever eaten. The rice noodles were chewy but tender. The sauce wasn't too sweet. And the salty bits of dried shrimp and crispy fried pork fat were quite tasty additions that I'd never seen in any pad thai in the States.

As we sat eating our noodles outside under a tree surrounded by only Thai, I was reminded of growing up in LA and eating our meals in the driveway behind the house when the summer heat made it too oppressively warm to eat indoors and wondered if this was how my parents ate when they lived in Vietnam and China.